Scary Tale

[Non Sequitur]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/business/26nocera.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

I'm at a loss for words. Our government is broke.

The film, “Running the Sahara,” was released in the fall of 2008. Eventually, it caught the attention of Robert W. Nordlander, a special agent for the Internal Revenue Service. As Mr. Nordlander later told the grand jury, “Being the special agent that I am, I was wondering, how does a guy train for this because most people have to work from nine to five and it’s very difficult to train for this part-time.” (He also told the grand jurors that sometimes, when he sees somebody driving a Ferrari, he’ll check to see if they make enough money to afford it. When I called Mr. Nordlander and others at the I.R.S. to ask whether this was an appropriate way to choose subjects for criminal tax investigations, my questions were met with a stone wall of silence.)

 

[Calvin the Airedale]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/business/26nocera.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

I'm at a loss for words. Our government is broke.

This is an incredibly scary tale. Thanks for posting it.

 

[jlabauve]

Wow. As always, fry the little guy and let the big wig criminals go on their merry way.

 

[Non Sequitur]

The article reads like a movie script. I'd cast Angelina Jolie as the attractive female agent.

 

[jlabauve]

John Malchovitch (sp) as the sinister IRS agent, and Ryan Gosling as the Charlie Engle. If you don't thing Ryan Gosling can act, watch Half Nelson. He was nominated for an Oscar for that one, and he should have won.

 

[Caligirl]

Word to the wise, just because everyone else is doing it doesn't make it right.

IMO-*all* involved should get the same treatment as the little guy, from the ground up right to the very top.

 

[jlabauve]

I agree, Cali. I'm not giving Engle a free pass, but the guys who made millions on this type of fraud walking free.

 

[Jim Shoe]

Of course, there is a little more to the story...

After acknowledging that he had been speculating in real estate during the bubble to help support his running, he said, according to Mr. Nordlander’s grand jury testimony, “I had a couple of good liar loans out there, you know, which my mortgage broker didn’t mind writing down, you know, that I was making four hundred thousand grand a year when he knew I wasn’t.”

After hearing that, I would have a hard time letting the guy off if I were on the jury.

The most accurate statement in the story is probably...

“I think the prosecution convinced the jury that I was guilty of something but they weren’t sure what,”

 

[Metamorphic]

This guy goes to jail for doing twice what Mozillo did a million times, then he's expected to compensate Mozillo for his "loss", while it is utterly factitious to entertain the notion that Mozillo "lost" anything. Meanwhile the tax payers are expected to pay for this guys' club fed vacation, we're expected to pay the salary and retirement of an IRS agent that cant tell **** from Shinola, we're expected to bail out the bank that stupidly bought the company that everybody knew was happily collecting the fraudulent paperwork from the guy that went to jail, and to pay for the bail out the government will inflate the currency
which effectively sticks it to the middle and lower classes hard, while pretending to "tax the rich" as if the rich would actually sit still for it.

Can anyone point out anything about this situation that vaguely suggests the interests of "We the people" were served?

This is rapidly becoming the kind of government that the 2nd Amendment was written for.

 

[Terrel L. Shields]

The expense of this investigation is undoubtably more than the amount he owes the IRS