The scary season of Halloween is rapidly approaching, and all of the little ghouls and goblins are preparing for the event. The decorations are coming out in the neighborhood, with tombstones, and skeletons rising from the front lawns of suburbia.
In other areas of the world, folks are looking at an even scarier scenario. The Belmont Club is a put together a frightening look at what could be in our future.
In 2007 Think Progress happily announced that “a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released today concludes with ‘high confidence’ that ‘in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.’” But in 2009 Barack Obama announced to the world that Iran had been secretly operating a nuclear enrichment plant. What a difference two years makes. Perhaps the better report to read from that vintage year is Anthony Cordesman’s 2007 study for the Center for Strategic and Independent Studies examining the outcomes of a hypothetical nuclear war in the Middle East between Israel and Iran. Cordesman concluded that once a conflict got started it would tend to escalate to where both countries were destroyed.
There are some frighteningly real worst case scenarios that come up. Even with all of the domestic issues that we currently have, our interests and domestic prosperity is tightly coupled to the events in the middle east. This is not a peril that we can blithely ignore.
Where Did the Bernard Madoff Money Go?
In a word: Israel. The money was funneled to the Israeli Nuclear Department and military forces to fend off radical factions in the region.
Israel is the smallest nuclear armed country in the world. It is roughly the size of New Jersey with an annual reported GDP of $129 billion. Even with international aid, Israel has no oil reserves like its Arab neighbors and could not afford nuclear weapons on its own. However, with the help of Bernie Madoff and others like him, Israel became a dominant power in the region. The nuclear materials were purchased in France where Madoff maintained many business contacts and a home on the French Riviera. While Madoff was sending reports of profitable trades to his French counterparts from his investment firm in New York, his well-connected French point men set up purchases of enriched uranium. The enriched uranium might then have been put on board Madoff’s boat, nicknamed Bull, and shipped 1600 nautical miles from Antibes, France to Haifa, Israel. Unfortunately for investigators, all records of these trips have been conveniently lost. Only a Geiger counter could reveal the cargo that boarded that yacht.
Other large quantities of Madoff money was found at the Banque Jacob Safra in Gibraltar. According to the IMF, Gibraltar is a well-known terrorist financier and money laundering center for Israel. Since Israel has had no laws against money laundering since its inception, any money that flows into the country is clean on arrival. This rule was enacted to aid Jews displaced by WWII who had hidden money from the German troops.
Many Palestinian charities were labeled “terrorist organizations” by the US government after they were found to be laundering money to fund terrorist operations. In these cases, money that was donated to the charities was then funneled to the terrorists. However, in the Madoff case, money that was donated to Jewish charities was “invested” with Madoff. It was through this seemingly legitimate intermediary that Jewish charities escaped the accusations of funding a war in the Middle East. Without this money and heavy political influence in the US, the country of Israel would have been invaded a long time ago. World governments have been slow to label any of the Jewish charities that have been funding this conflict in the region.
It should be noted that initially all of the Jewish charities were up in arms about the scandal as they were forced to shut down their operations. But after a closed meeting arranged by a known Israeli supporter, not another word was heard from this group. It is very possible that the group was told that their money has been defending the Jewish cause for at least four decades. At the time of this meeting in January 2009, Israel had just launched a major offensive in the Gaza Strip which crippled Hamas.
Two mysterious deaths occurred during the unwinding of the Madoff case. The first was a French aristocrat, Rene de la Villehuchet, who lost more than $1 billion in client’s money in the scam. The death was ruled a suicide. Maybe it was a suicide but it leaves a dead end in what could have been an important French connection. Another man, Jeffry Picower, was found dead on the bottom of his swimming pool. These two men may have had vital information that could have blown this money laundering nuclear scandal wide open. All there is to be said about these suspicious deaths is that “dead men tell no tales.”
Two other individuals have vital information that they are not sharing. The only problem in getting that information is that they both plead guilty to their crimes. When a defendant pleads guilty and receives a sentence longer than their expected life, they are not obligated to answer any additional questions. These men are of course, Bernie Madoff and his CFO Frank DiPiscali. It is remarkable how these two thieves were able to sell this fraud as a Ponzi Scheme and the media bought it like a fund of funds manager going after consistent high returns.
The Madoff trustee, Irving Picard, has a conflict of interest. So far, he has uncovered only the very obvious stashes of Madoff money. He has already received exorbitant payouts from the victims fund to himself and his law firm, Baker & Hostetler LLP. He is also setting himself up to be a friend of the SEC and Mary Shapiro by doing a great job of limiting the amount of money that actually gets paid back to the Madoff victims. He calls this sadistic maneuver a clawback. He is trying to rewrite the SIPA laws that require SIPC to use the amount on the victims November 30, 2008 statement when determining the account value. This would be done to the delight of the big Wall Street firms that would otherwise be the largest contributors to replenish the SIPC funds. Maybe the SEC will repay this favor by hiring his firm the next time they drop the ball as well. Picard seems more likely to be involved with the cover-up than with following the money trail and holding Israel responsible.
But Picard is not the only one involved in a cover up. It seems peculiar that the FBI and the SEC have been investigating this fraud for over a year but the public still knows nothing more about where the money went than they did three days after Madoff turned himself in to the authorities. The ramifications of Israel’s involvement in accepting money from a Jewish financier would ring loud in the Arab world. Israel may even be held to account by the victims. As long as Israel has control of its printing press and there is an exchange rate between the dollar and the shekel, Israel may be liable to pay back the victims from its own coffers.
Denial is the other option. This approach was used when Israel was accused of harvesting organs from Palestinian prisoners. However, it backfired on them when Dr. Yehuda Hiss, blew the whistle and admitted that the forensic institute he formerly headed did just that. It would be irresponsible for Israel to deny that their military was largely funded with the Madoff funds. But after all, aren’t there are still people that continue to deny the holocaust?
Yours truly,
D.B. Cooper
P.S.: Because of fear of redress from the governments or any of their agencies, no other information is available at this time.