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Webster Griffin Tarpley is an author, journalist, lecturer, and critic of US foreign and domestic policy. Tarpley maintains that the September 11 attacks were engineered by a rogue network of the military industrial complex and intelligence agencies. His writings and speeches describe a model of false flag terror operations by a rogue network in the military/intelligence sector working with moles in the private sector and in corporate media, and locates such contemporary false flag operations in a historical context stretching back in the English speaking world to at least the "gunpowder plot" in England in 1605. He also maintains that "The notion of anthropogenic global warming is a fraud."

Education

Tarpley earned a BA at Princeton University in 1966 in English and Italian, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Fulbright Scholar at University of Turin, Italy. Master of Arts in humanities from Skidmore College. He was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1946.

Career

Tarpley was on the editorial board of the National Caucus of Labor Committees' journal, The Campaigner, in 1971, according to its masthead.

As a journalist living in Europe in the 1980s, Tarpley wrote a study commissioned by a committee of the Italian Parliament on the assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro. The study claimed that the assassination was a false flag operation orchestrated by the masonic lodge Propaganda Due with the cooperation of senior members of Italian government secret services but blamed on the Red Brigades.

Tarpley was president of the Schiller Institute of the United States in the 1980s and in 1993. In 1986 Tarpley attempted to run on Lyndon LaRouche's U.S. Labor Party platform in the New York State Democratic Party primary for the U.S. Senate, but was ruled off the ballot because of a defect in his nominating petitions. He was a frequent host of "The LaRouche Connection" which its producer LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review News Service describes as "a news and information cable television program."

Tarpley first gained attention for co-authoring, with Anton Chaitkin, ("history editor of Executive Intelligence Review") a 1992 book on George H. W. Bush, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, which was published by Executive Intelligence Review, run by Lyndon LaRouche. He has expounded the "Versailles Thesis" laying the blame for the great wars of the 20th century on intrigues by Britain to retain her dominance. He gained experience as a political operative during his years with the LaRouche movement but broke away sometime after 1995.

In 2005, Tarpley published 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA. He speaks at length about the themes in the book during an interview in the film Oil, Smoke, Mirrors.

Since March, 2006, Tarpley has had a weekly online talk radio show called World Crisis Radio, currently hosted on GCNLive.com. Tarpley is a member of the "world anti-imperialist conference" Axis for Peace, of Scholars for 9/11 Truth and of a research Netzwerk of German 9/11 authors founded in September 2006. He is featured in the film, Zero: an investigation into 9/11 (2007–2008).

Tarpley is a critic of the Dalai Lama; in 2010 he told the state-funded Russia Today that "pre-1959 Tibet ... was probably the closest thing to hell on earth that you had ... social reform was impossible." In the interview he criticizes US funding of pro-Dalai Lama organizations, which he says amounts to US$2 million per year, saying "this is a bad deal for the American taxpayers."

Bibliography

Chi ha ucciso Aldo Moro? (Who Killed Aldo Moro?), a study commissioned by a member of the Italian government and published in Rome in 1978 The Larouchian, Partito Operaio Europeo http://www.movisol.org/moro.htm, which broke open the affiliation of the Red Brigades with the neofascist lodge P2.

(1992) (co-authored with Anton Chaitkin, son of the lawyer who indicted Prescott Bush under the Trading with the Enemy Act for collaboration with Nazi Germany.) Reprinted 2004, ISBN 0-930852-92-3.

Against Oligarchy (1996)

Surviving the Cataclysm: Your Guide through the Worst Financial Crisis in Human History (1999); updated edition, 2009.

9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA - Myth of the 21st Century (2005), Foreword by Thierry Meyssan, ISBN 0-930852-31-1, Fourth edition ISBN 0-930852-37-0 (April 2007).

Version française: La Terreur Fabriquée, Made in USA : 11 Septembre, le mythe du XXIe siècle (Sept. 2006). ISBN 2952557144

In Italiano: La Fabbrica del Terrore (Sept. 2007). ISBN 978-88-87307-36-6

En Español: 11-S, El Falso Terrorismo Jan. 2008 ISBN 0-930852-98-2.

Obama - The Postmodern Coup: Making of a Manchurian Candidate (Apr. 2008) ISBN 0-930852-88-5.

Deutsche Fassung: Barack Obama: Wie ein US-Präsident gemacht wird (Aug. 2008) ISBN 978-3-938516-74-4.

Japanese Edition: Obama: Dangerous Geometry (Nov. 2008) ISBN 4880862398

Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography (Aug. 2008) ISBN 0930852818; Japanese edition, March 2009.

References

External links

Tarpley's Website

Tarpley's Show on the Genesis Network

Ground Zero Grassy Knoll - Feature article in New York Magazine (March 20, 2006)

Publisher's web site

Amazon.com's Webster Griffin Tarpley page

Audio and Video Links:

Webster Tarpley lecture and interview videos

Category:LaRouche movement Category:Conspiracy theorists Category:Year of birth missing (living people) Category:Living people Category:U.S. Labor Party politicians

Paul Craig (born 27 September 1951) is currently Professor of English Law at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St John's College. Craig is a specialist in Administrative and EU Law.

He was educated at Worcester College, Oxford, where he took his BA, MA and BCL. He stayed at Worcester, and was made a Fellow in 1976. He remained a Fellow until his move to St John's in 1998.

He is the author of a number of legal textbooks.

He currently teaches 5 week courses in Administrative Law and European Union Law at the Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington.

External links

Paul Craig at Oxford Law.

Paul Craig at St John's College.

Category:1951 births Category:Living people Category:Fellows of Worcester College, Oxford Category:Fellows of St John's College, Oxford Category:Alumni of Worcester College, Oxford

Name	Bernard Lawrence Madoff
Image name	BernardMadoff.jpg
Birth name	Bernard Lawrence Madoff
Birth date	April 29, 1938
Birth place	Queens, New York, US
Place of residence	Manhattan, New York, United States
Education	Hofstra University (1960)
Employer	Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities
Known for	Ponzi scheme, Chairman of NASDAQ (prior)
Nationality	American
Spouse	Ruth Alpern Madoff(1959–present)
Occupation	Former stock broker,financial adviser, andChairman of NASDAQ
Conviction status	Incarcerated at Butner Federal Correctional Institution; born April 29, 1938) is an incarcerated American felon, former stock broker, investment advisor, non-executive chairman of the NASDAQ stock market, and the admitted operator of what has been described as the largest Ponzi scheme in history.

in current dollar terms) that Madoff earned from working as a lifeguard and sprinkler installer. Initially, the firm made markets (quoted bid and ask prices) via the National Quotation Bureau's Pink Sheets. In order to compete with firms that were members of the New York Stock Exchange trading on the stock exchange's floor, his firm began using innovative computer information technology to disseminate its quotes. After a trial run, the technology that the firm helped develop became the NASDAQ.

The firm functioned as a third-market provider, which bypassed exchange specialist firms, by directly executing orders over the counter from retail brokers.

Madoff was "the first prominent practitioner" of payment for order flow, in which a dealer pays a broker for the right to execute a customer's order. This has been called a "legal kickback." Some academics have questioned the ethics of these payments. Madoff has argued that these payments did not alter the price that the customer received.

Madoff was active in the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), a self-regulatory securities industry organization and has served as the Chairman of the Board of Directors and on the Board of Governors of the NASD.

Government access

Since 1991, Madoff and his wife have contributed about $240,000 to federal candidates, parties and committees, including $25,000 a year from 2005 through 2008 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The Committee has returned $100,000 of the Madoffs' contributions to Irving Picard, the bankruptcy trustee who oversees all claims. Senator Charles E. Schumer returned almost $30,000 received from Madoff and his relatives to the trustee, and Senator Christopher J. Dodd donated $1,500 to the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, a Madoff victim.

The Madoff family gained access to Washington's lawmakers and regulators through the industry's top trade group. The Madoff family has long-standing, high-level ties to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), the primary securities industry organization. Bernard Madoff sat on the Board of Directors of the Securities Industry Association, which merged with the Bond Market Association in 2006 to form SIFMA.

Madoff's brother Peter then served two terms as a member of SIFMA’s Board of Directors. He stepped down from the Board of Directors of SIFMA in December 2008, as news of the Ponzi scheme broke. Bernard Madoff's niece Shana Madoff was active on the Executive Committee of SIFMA's Compliance & Legal Division, but resigned her SIFMA position shortly after her uncle's arrest.

In 2004 Genevievette Walker-Lightfoot, a lawyer in the SEC's Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations, informed her supervisor branch chief Mark Donohue that her review of Madoff found numerous inconsistencies and recommended further questioning. However, because of agency pressure to investigate the mutual fund industry, she had to conclude work on the probe. Donohue's boss, Eric Swanson, an assistant director of the department, married Shana Madoff, after the investigation concluded in 2005. A spokesman for Swanson, who has left the SEC, said he "did not participate in any inquiry of Bernard Madoff Securities or its affiliates while involved in a relationship" with Shana Madoff.

While awaiting sentencing, Madoff met with the SEC's Inspector General, H. David Kotz, who is conducting an investigation into how regulators failed to detect the fraud despite numerous red flags.

Since Madoff's arrest, the SEC has been criticized for its lack of financial expertise and lack of due diligence, despite having received complaints from Harry Markopolos and others for almost a decade. The SEC's Inspector General, H. David Kotz, found that since 1992, there were six botched investigations of Madoff by the SEC, either through incompetent staff work or neglecting allegations of financial experts and whistle-blowers.

Investment scandal

Concerns about Madoff's business surfaced as early as 1999, when financial analyst Harry Markopolos informed the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that he believed it was legally and mathematically impossible to achieve the gains Madoff claimed to deliver. He was ignored by the Boston SEC in 2000 and 2001, as well as by Meaghan Cheung at the New York SEC in 2005 and 2007 when he presented further evidence. He has since published a book, , about the frustrating efforts he and his team made over a ten-year period to alert the government, the industry, and the press about the Madoff fraud.

Others also contended it was inconceivable that the growing volume of Madoff accounts could be competently and legitimately serviced by his documented accounting/auditing firm, a three-person firm with only one active accountant.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation complaint says that during the first week of December 2008, Madoff confided to a senior employee, identified by Bloomberg News as one of his sons, that he said he was struggling to meet $7 billion in redemptions. Madoff said that “he had recently made profits through business operations, and that now was a good time to distribute it." On March 20, 2009, an appellate court denied Madoff's request to be released from jail and returned to home confinement until his June 29, 2009, sentencing. On June 22, 2009, Sorkin hand-delivered a customary pre-sentencing letter to the judge requesting a sentence of 12 years, because of tables cited from the Social Security Administration that his life span is predicted to be 13 years.

On June 26, 2009, Chin ordered Madoff to forfeit $170 million in assets. Prosecutors asked Chin to sentence Madoff to the maximum 150 years in prison. Irving Picard indicated that "Mr. Madoff has not provided meaningful cooperation or assistance."

In settlement with federal prosecutors, Madoff's wife Ruth agreed to forfeit her claim to US$85 million in assets, leaving her with $2.5 million in cash. The order allowed the SEC and Court appointed trustee Irving Picard to pursue Ruth Madoff's funds.

In February 2009, Madoff reached an agreement with the SEC, banning him from the securities industry for life.

Picard has sued Madoff's sons, Mark and Andrew, his brother Peter, and Peter's daughter, Shana, for negligence and breach of fiduciary duty, for $198 million. The defendants had received over $80 million in compensation since 2001 and "used the bank account at BLMIS like a personal piggy bank." The trustee believes they knew about the fraud because of their personal investments in the scheme, the longevity of the fraud, and because of their work at the company including roles as corporate and compliance officers. Since 1995, Peter Madoff had invested only $14, but withdrew over $16 million. Mark and Andrew Madoff withdrew more than $35 million from a small original investment.

Mechanics of the fraud

According to the Securities and Exchange Commission indictment against Annette Bongiorno and Joann Crupi, two back office workers who worked for Madoff, they created false trading reports based on the returns that Madoff ordered for each customer. For example, once Madoff determined a customer's return, one of the back office workers would enter a false trade from a previous date and then enter a false closing trade in the amount of the required profit, according to the indictment. Prosecutors allege that Bongiorno used a computer program specially designed to backdate trades and manipulate account statements. They quote her as writing to a manager in the early 1990s "I need the ability to give any settlement date I want."

Affinity fraud

Affected institutions include Yeshiva University, the Women's Zionist Organization of America, the Elie Wiesel Foundation and Steven Spielberg's Wunderkinder Foundation. Jewish federations and hospitals have lost millions of dollars, forcing some organizations to close. The Lappin Foundation, for instance, was temporarily forced to halt operations because it had invested its entire $8 million endowment with Madoff. Affected institutions also include Stony Brook University Foundation and the James Harris Simons family foundation.

Size of loss to investors

David Sheehan, chief counsel to trustee Picard, stated on September 27, 2009, that about $36 billion was invested into the scam, returning $18 billion to investors, with $18 billion missing. About half of Madoff's investors were "net winners," earning more than their investment. The withdrawal amounts in the final six years are subject to "clawback" (return of money) lawsuits.

Former SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt has estimated the actual net fraud to be between $10 and $17 billion. Erin Arvedlund, who publicly questioned Madoff's reported investment performance in 2001, stated that the actual amount of the fraud will never be known, but is likely between $12 and $20 billion. As of September 2010 approximately $1.5 billion have been recovered for distribution to the net losers that were invested in BLMIS directly. Mr. Picard currently has approved approximately $5.6 billion in claims.

Plea, sentencing, and prison life

On March 12, 2009, Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 federal offenses, including securities fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering, making false statements, perjury, theft from an employee benefit plan, and making false filings with the SEC. The plea was the response to a criminal complaint filed two days earlier, which stated Madoff had defrauded his clients of almost $65 billion in the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Madoff insisted he was solely responsible for the fraud.

On November 3, 2009, David Friehling, Madoff's accounting front man plead guilty to securities fraud, investment adviser fraud, making false filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and obstructing the IRS. Madoff's right hand man, Frank DiPascali pleaded guilty in August, 2009, and is awaiting bail.

Madoff's plea allocution stated he began his Ponzi scheme in 1991. He admitted he had never made any legitimate investments with his clients' money during this time; instead, he deposited the money into his business account at Chase Manhattan Bank. Chase and its successor, JPMorgan Chase, may have earned as much as $483 million from his bank account. He was committed to satisfying his clients' expectations of high returns, despite an economic recession. He admitted to false trading activities masked by foreign transfers and false SEC filings. He told the Court his intention had always been to resume legitimate trading activity, but it proved "difficult, and ultimately impossible" to reconcile his client accounts. In the end, Madoff said, he realized that his scam would eventually be exposed.

On June 29, 2009, Chin sentenced Madoff to the maximum sentence of 150 years in federal prison. Madoff's lawyers originally asked the judge to impose a sentence of 7 years because of Madoff's old age.

Madoff apologized to his victims, saying, "I have left a legacy of shame, as some of my victims have pointed out, to my family and my grandchildren. This is something I will live in for the rest of my life. I'm sorry." He added, "I know that doesn't help you," after his victims recommended to the judge that he receive a life sentence. Chin had not received any mitigating letters from friends or family testifying to Madoff's good deeds. "The absence of such support is telling," he said.

Chin also said that Madoff had not been forthcoming about his crimes. "I have a sense Mr. Madoff has not done all that he could do or told all that he knows," said Chin, calling the fraud "extraordinarily evil," "unprecedented" and "staggering," and that the sentence would deter others from committing similar frauds. Chin also agreed with prosecutors' contention that the fraud began at some point in the 1980s, and also noted that Madoff's crimes were "off the charts" since federal sentencing guidelines for fraud only go up to $400 million in losses.

Ruth did not attend court but issued a statement, saying "I am breaking my silence now because my reluctance to speak has been interpreted as indifference or lack of sympathy for the victims of my husband Bernie's crime, which is exactly the opposite of the truth. I am embarrassed and ashamed. Like everyone else, I feel betrayed and confused. The man who committed this horrible fraud is not the man whom I have known for all these years."

Incarceration

, where Madoff is incarcerated]] Madoff's attorney asked the judge to recommend that the Federal Bureau of Prisons place Madoff in the Federal Correctional Institution, Otisville, which is located from Manhattan. The judge, however, only recommended that Madoff be sent to a facility in the Northeast United States. Madoff was transferred to the Federal Correctional Institution Butner Medium near Butner, North Carolina, about northwest of Raleigh; he is Bureau of Prisons Register #61727-054. Jeff Gammage of the Philadelphia Inquirer said "Madoff's heavy sentence likely determined his fate." On October 13, 2009, it was reported that Madoff experienced his first prison yard fight with another senior citizen inmate. When he began his sentence, Madoff's stress levels were so severe that he broke out in hives and other skin maladies soon after.

On December 18, 2009, Madoff was moved to Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, and was treated for several facial injuries. A former inmate later claimed that the injuries were received during an alleged altercation with another inmate. Other news reports described Madoff's injuries as more serious and including "facial fractures, broken ribs, and a collapsed lung". The Federal Bureau of Prisons said Madoff signed an affidavit on December 24, 2009, which indicated that he had not been assaulted and that he had been admitted to the hospital for hypertension.

See also

Affinity fraud

FBI

Financial crisis of 2007–2010

K1 fund, a German ponzi-scheme

Participants in the Madoff investment scandal‎

Ponzi scheme

Recovery of funds from the Madoff investment scandal‎

White-collar crime

References

External links

United States Department of Justice">Criminal complaint, transcripts of hearings and other documents from the United States Department of Justice

Archive of the Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities website

Madoff's current location within the Bureau of Prisons system

Category:1938 births Category:Living people Category:2008 in economics Category:21st-century American criminals Category:American businesspeople Category:American fraudsters Category:American Jews Category:American money managers Category:American money launderers Category:American people of Austrian descent Category:American people of Romanian descent Category:American perjurors Category:American philanthropists Category:American prisoners and detainees Category:American white-collar criminals Category:Brooklyn Law School alumni Category:Confidence tricksters Category:Far Rockaway High School alumni Category:Fraudsters Category:Hofstra University alumni Category:Jewish philanthropists Category:Madoff investment scandal Category:NASDAQ Category:People from Far Rockaway, Queens Category:People from Manhattan Category:Prisoners and detainees of the United States federal government Category:Pyramid and Ponzi schemes