Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
Bloomberg is just digging and reporting what they find. I don't know if it is rubbing dirt in a face as much as reporting the history of actions.

One of the reasons it is interesting to me is as a counter to the people who believe a good person can just "snap" and suddenly do horrific things. People don't just snap. There is normally some kind of unsavory history. In this case, maybe two instances of major league fraud and a domestic violence incident. I would be very surprised if there wasn't more.

You can disappear pretty easy if people don't look for you very hard, and a lot don't. But in this case, who knows?
The financial allegations need to be seen in the context of the time. By '98-2000 the stuff mentioned in the charges had become practically standard procedure in US brokerages... it was a quite deranged time in that industry. It wasn't all coming from the brokers, either: clients in those days were pushing for larger and larger returns and more aggressive strategies. You couldn't sell a conservative low-risk financial strategy in 98-99; brokers who tried went out of business... everybody wanted "the next Yahoo" strategies. When the balloon popped in 2000/2001 there were tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of similar cases, which might be one reason why this was never followed up. That doesn't excuse the actions, but I wouldn't look at them as something that was a major deviation from norm either. If everyone involved in shady financial dealings from '97-2000 was a murderer waiting to happen there'd be a whole heap of murders going on.