Tag: Conviction

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Politics

Bernie Madoff earned $710 in jail after Ponzi fraud conviction

Bernie Madoff earned $710 in prison after Ponzi fraud conviction

Bernie Madoff is leaving federal court in New York on March 10, 2009.

Jin Lee | Bloomberg via Getty Images

Some people might argue that Bernie Madoff was massively overpaid even at just 24 cents an hour to work as a jailer.

Madoff, the late king of the Ponzi scheme who ripped off thousands of people for billions of dollars, earned just $ 710 after working nearly 3,000 hours while in a federal prison in North Carolina for 12 years before dying of kidney failure in April, as newly published records show.

And when he died at the age of 82, Madoff didn’t leave much of his personal belongings: eight AAA batteries, four religious paperback books, a Casio calculator, four packets of popcorn, a packet of ramen soup, a box of filtered fish, and not much more.

Bureau of Prison records, first reported by online publication The City, also show that while Madoff received generally positive reviews for his performance as a carer, at some point a supervisor stated that he was “more closely monitored than most of the others need “and” not “very reliably.”

This was certainly the case when Madoff ran Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities in New York, where for decades he led a luxurious lifestyle and satisfied clients with constant investment returns on their portfolios.

These returns turned out to be a deception.

In 2008, federal prosecutors accused Madoff of running the largest Ponzi scheme in history, using money from some investors to distribute alleged profits to others.

Madoff’s sons, Mark and Andrew, had told authorities that he had confessed to them that his business was an outright fraud.

Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 crimes in Manhattan federal court in 2009 and was sentenced to 150 years in prison.

Mark Madoff killed himself in 2010 at the age of 46, two years from the day this father was arrested. Andrew Madoff died of lymphoma four years later at the age of 48.

While in custody in Butner, North Carolina, Madoff served as the first vigilante in a section of the detention center dedicated to educational programs. He later asked to be transferred to work in the chapel area, The City noted in its report.

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Last year, Madoff’s attorney revealed in court records that the sociopathic con man was terminally ill with kidney disease when he asked a judge to release Madoff early on compassionate grounds.

Manhattan federal judge Denny Chin dismissed the motion in June 2020, ruling that Madoff had “committed one of the most egregious financial times of all time” and that “many people are still suffering from it.”

About 500 victims wrote to oppose Madoff’s release.

One of Madoff’s victims had written to Chin, “I wholeheartedly believe that my husband would be alive today if he did not deal with the stress and emotional distress that the loss of almost all of our money has meant to our family. “

In December, the Justice Department announced that the Madoff Victim Fund had distributed a total of $ 3.2 billion to nearly 37,000 people betrayed by Madoff. This dollar amount represents more than 80% of the total casualty losses.

The fund’s money comes from recovering assets associated with Madoff. The fund predicts that it will ultimately return more than $ 4 billion in total assets.

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Politics

Derek Chauvin sentencing date set for June after homicide conviction

Derek Chauvin sentencing date set for June after murder conviction

Former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin is shown in a combination of police booking photos after a jury found him guilty on all counts in his trial for second degree murder, third degree murder and second degree manslaughter in the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis , Minnesota, April 20, 2021.

Minnesota Department of Corrections | via Reuters

Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, died after Chauvin kneeled on his neck for more than nine minutes. The video of the incident sparked a nationwide protest movement against police brutality and systemic racism.

The most serious charges against Chauvin have a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison, although the guidelines for the conviction often call for much less prison than the maximum sentence.

Chauvin’s sentencing date is expected to be more than eight weeks after the verdict was pronounced by the anonymous 12-person jury after approximately ten hours of deliberation at the end of the three-week Minnesota trial.

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World News

Harvey Weinstein appeals rape conviction in MeToo case

Harvey Weinstein appeals rape conviction in MeToo case

Harvey Weinstein enters the courthouse on July 11, 2019 in New York City.

Stephanie Keith | Getty Images

Film producer Harvey Weinstein’s lawyers appealed his conviction of rape and another sex crime on Monday.

69-year-old Weinstein was convicted after a trial in the Manhattan Supreme Court in February 2020.

He is serving a 23-year prison sentence on trial two years after Weinstein’s explosion of explosive sexual misconduct allegations that sparked the #MeToo movement that has derailed the careers of other high-profile men to this day.

In a lawsuit, his attorneys set seven grounds for overturning the conviction of the producer of such films as Pulp Fiction, Shakespeare in Love and Gangs of New York.

These include allegations that Weinstein was denied the right to be tried by an impartial jury when the trial judge denied his challenge to banning a potential juror who wrote an autobiographical book on “The Predators of Older Men Against Younger Women.” and had lied about the substance of the book in the “selection of the jury.

Defense attorneys also argued that Weinstein was denied his right to a fair trial because the jury was allowed to hear allegations of serious sexual misconduct from him that were not the subject of the specific charges he faced and that defense experts were wrongly excluded from testimony became the subject of memories of sexual events.

And, the lawyers argued, Weinstein received “a punishment that was harsh and excessive”.

The complaint is filed with the Appeals Department of the Manhattan Supreme Court.

“We filed a 166-page brief listing some serious errors that were made during the process,” Weinstein’s appellate attorney Barry Kamins said in a statement to CNBC.

“We are confident the Appeals Department will take these issues seriously enough to have the conviction overturned,” said Kamins.

The jury sentenced Weinstein to a first-degree criminal sexual act by forcibly performing oral sex with production assistant Mimi Haleyi in 2006. He was also found guilty of third degree rape for assaulting aspiring actress Jessica Mann in a Manhattan hotel room in 2013.

During the trial, the jury heard testimony from actress Annabella Sciorra, who said Weinstein raped her in her Manhattan apartment in 1993.

Weinstein was not accused of raping Sciorra, but her testimony, along with that of five other women, was admitted by the judge on trial so that prosecutors could show a pattern of predatory behavior by the film mogul. Numerous other women have accused Weinstein of sexual misconduct.

Another Weinstein attorney, Arthur Aidala, said, “With a year behind and emotions waning, the case record confirms what we have always believed: that Mr. Weinstein did not get a fair trial.”

“We will argue that the trial judge violated well-accepted and fundamental principles of New York law and violated Mr. Weinstein’s constitutional rights,” Aidala said. “We are very confident that the Appeals Department will correct these mistakes and send this case back to another judge.”

In addition to the New York case, Weinstein is also facing pending charges filed by the Los Angeles prosecutor in January 2020. She accused him of raping a woman and sexually assaulting a second woman over a period of two days in 2013.

The Los Angeles attorney has an extradition request pending for Weinstein, who is being held in a New York State prison. Weinstein, who has several health problems, tested positive for the coronavirus in prison in March 2020.

Weinstein founded the entertainment company Miramax with his brother Bob Weinstein.

They later founded The Weinstein Company, another film production company that filed for bankruptcy in early 2018 following the damned Harvey Weinstein charges, which were first published in The New Yorker and The New York Times. The Weinstein Company closed later that year.

– CNBCs Kevin Breuninger contributed to this article.

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Politics

In Uncommon Public Assertion, Congressional Aides Name for Trump’s Conviction

In Rare Public Statement, Congressional Aides Call for Trump’s Conviction

WASHINGTON – More than 370 Democratic congressional assistants will launch an unusual public appeal Wednesday to the Senators – in some cases their own bosses – to condemn former President Donald J. Trump for inciting a violent “assault on our workplace”, the the peaceful transition threatens power.

In a very personal letter, the employees describe how they duck under office desks, barricade themselves in offices or watch as they watch marauding groups of rioters who have “smashed” their way through the Capitol on January 6th. The responsibility, they argue, rests directly with them on Mr. Trump and his “unfounded, months-long attempt to reject legitimately cast votes by the American people.”

“As Congressional officials, we do not have a vote on whether to convict Donald J. Trump for his role in inciting the violent attack on the Capitol, but our senators do,” they wrote. “And for our sake and for the sake of the country, we ask that you vote to condemn the former president and prevent him from ever assuming office again.”

A copy of the letter, including the names of the signatories, was provided to the New York Times prior to its publication on Wednesday, four weeks after the attack and days before the Senate impeachment proceedings.

The letter, while not binding in any way, underlined the remarkable dynamism of the trial of Mr. Trump, in which many of the witnesses and victims of the “incitement to rebellion” he accused are among the closest advisers to lawmakers who will decide his trial political fate. Congressional assistants often advise the elected officials they serve behind closed doors, and many are empowered to speak on behalf of those officials. But extremely rarely do they express their own views in public – let alone press for such a powerful political and constitutional means as impeachment.

Signatories included press officers, planners, committee staff, and advisers to the House and Senate, although relatively few were from the senior level of the committee’s chiefs of staff or directors. These included Drew Hammill, assistant chief of staff to Spokeswoman Nancy Pelosi, as well as communications assistants closely associated with lawmakers involved in Mr Trump’s impeachments, such as Shadawn Reddick-Smith, who works for the Democrats in the House Justice Committee; Gabby Richards, communications director for Representative Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania; Anne Feldman, director of communications for Jason Crow representative of Colorado; and Daniel Gleick, communications director for Val Demings representative of Florida.

The organizers of the letter asked Republican aid workers for assistance and offered to record a language to allay their concerns about boss retaliation or social media harassment. But despite the preliminary interest of some, those familiar with the effort said no Republican aid workers had signed up in the end.

While public attention has focused on the stories of their better-known bosses, congressional assistants who were at the Capitol on Jan. 6 have privately struggled for weeks to make sense of what they saw in the building’s normally silent halls. Unlike their superiors, they usually have few outlets to publicly share these experiences.

In the letter to the Senators, the aides refer to Brian D. Sicknick, a Capitol police officer who died after meeting the mob, as “one of our staff who watches and greets us every day.” The letter also states that in the age of mass shootings at the post-Columbine school, many of the signatories had come of age and had been trained to respond.

“When the mob broke through the barricades of the Capitol Police, broke doors and windows and stormed into the Capitol with body armor and weapons, many of us hid behind chairs and under desks or barricaded ourselves in offices,” they wrote. “Others watched on television, desperately trying to reach bosses and coworkers as they fled for their lives.”