If the guilty verdict rendered yesterday in the trial of Madoff employees qualifies as full and fair justice in our nation, then we need to rethink our justice system.
Now, do not get me wrong. I do not have any sympathy for the sorry looking lot of defendants found guilty yesterday. In my opinion, they deserve what they get and were likely integral in aiding and abetting the massive fraud perpetrated by the swindler Bernard Madoff.
Are we to think, though, that the decades long scam perpetrated by Bernie and his rag tag team began and ended strictly inside his offices?
Folks, let’s not be so naive.
As The Wall Street Journal reports:
One juror, Craig Parise, said Monday that there was no “smoking gun,†but the totality of the evidence was “just overwhelming.†Mr. Parise, a 39-year-old teacher from Westchester County, N.Y., said that the tens of thousands of documents shown during the trial underscored the depth of the fraud. “I did not realize the enormity of it,†he said.
Tens of thousands of documents? The depth and enormity of the fraud?
So the US attorneys trying this case are able to compile and lay out a mountain of evidence to convict a pack of employees who might be challenged to understand the inverse relationship between price and yield, yet somehow Bernie’s bankers at JP Morgan were not similarly aware of what was going on, and the bank walks away with merely paying a fine for its own failures to “know your customer.â€
If that is not justice misdirected so as to be denied, then I do not know what is.
But there is more.
Ponder once again Mr. Parise’s quote:
. . . the totality of the evidence was “just overwhelming.â€
Yet the SEC and Wall Street’s own self-regulatory organization FINRA did not look at the same evidence in the course of their monitoring this den of thieves? You think that is strictly incompetence? I don’t.
