There is a great picture of today’s “Great Gatsby” – the Globe called this man, Jaffe, a middle man! I call him a shill. See http://www.boston.com/business…
Now, what is a “shill” – here is a primer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S…
Mr. Elegant Shill [a/k/a Jaffe] attended lovely parties with billionaires, got them access to Madoff and Madoff’s “wonderful investments” and as a result, has a $17 million dollar mansion and billionaire lifestyle.
His modus operandi would be familiar to any beat cop – it was a glorified version of “trust me, I am your friend” – the sales pitch of the penny ante grifter selling bogus stock, hot jewelry, and bad insurance.
Will Jaffe too be on the hook for restitution? Who will replace the funding for diabetes research? Cancer research?
How could such intelligent billionaires not realize that if an investment looks too good to be true…it is a sham, and bogus?
When some member of YOUR church or fraternity tries to sell you something using “trust me” as the pitch, because they re also a member of the same religion, or married to a relative, or from the same fraternity – would you fall for them like the Shapiros, et. al, fell for slick shill Jaffe? Just wondering.
I don’t know about Jaffe but when you think of the money coming in and going out. When you think about how any mall company would have accounts payable, accounts receiving, payroll… and nobody ever saw that investments were losing money… Somebody had to have seen the shell game gong on and someone from the SEC should be fired for doing such a terrible job.
Or these wolves didn’t think you worth fleeching. Given that I am in the $$ league, well…I didn’t enrich Madoff. But still, yes, there were warning signs all over, it seems.
Hey, maybe this will help Obama’s “income redistribution” agenda, albeit in a round about way. 🙂
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p>On legal note, assuming this guy is guilty as sin, what is the worst thing we can to him? I’m surprised nobody has tried to harm him by now. Also, any guesses on where he has stuffed Billions and Billions of greenbacks far from the reach of the Feds?