I
never thought I'd live long enough to see the Salami Man being serenaded with a
literary ode; much less serenaded by a former Canadian, now teaching law in
America.
The
boneheaded Canadian is F.H. (nothing to do with Fred Habachi) Buckley who
wrote: “Michael Milken deserved Trump's pardon,” a piece that was published on
February 23, 2020 in The Washington Examiner.
You
guessed it, the salami man is Michael Milken, but you're probably too young to
remember how and why he earned the nickname salami man. Actually, Milken never
worked as a butcher of animals or human beings. But, for two reasons, you can
think of him as having butchered ethical financing.
One
reason is that, working as a hedge fund manager, Michael Milken fleeced the
portfolios of everyone that came within his sight, including his clients. The
other reason is that he invented the diabolic method of stuffing a junk-bond
with few good securities and a whole bunch of worthless papers. He cut-up the
bond into slices like a salami, and sold those slices to unsuspecting clients
who thought they were buying a medley of good securities, unaware of the poison
they were invited to bite into.
While
selling that stuff to others and making big profits, Michael Milken established
connection with traders in brokerage houses, who were in a position to know
what companies will be taken over and when. In an operation called insider
trading, Milken would buy shares in those companies, and make big profits there
too after the companies are taken over. To be sure, insider trading is a crime
for which Martha Stewart was nabbed, tried, convicted and sent to jail.
Michael
Milken also was nabbed, tried, convicted and sent to jail. The difference
between the two is that Martha Stewart did not engage in activities aimed at
fleecing other people or institutions. What she did was act on the information
she received from her broker, and sold a stock she already had. The broker's
tip proved useful when the stock fell the next day, and she avoided losing
about 50,000 dollars. For this, she was sent to jail for 5 months and put under
supervision for two more years.
As
to Michael Milken, he served only a two-year jail sentence, having actively schemed
to steal billions upon billions of dollars from individuals, from pension funds
and from charitable endowments. He stole so much, in fact, that he still has 3
to 4 billion dollars to his name after decades of living the high life. In
addition, he was pardoned and Martha Stewart was not. She continues to be a
convicted felon, but not him. Why? There is only one explanation: He is Jewish
and she is Catholic.
Knowing
that history, look how the shameless F.H. Buckley started his serenade of Michael
Milken: “In 1990, Milken pleaded guilty to a securities offense. He was an
outsider who took on a cozy establishment, beat them at their own game, and
then was chewed up and spit out by a shameful criminal law system. His pardon
was well-deserved … His rise was a great example of the American Dream”.
Instead
of telling the truth about Milken engaging in insider trading, look how Buckley
whitewashed his activities: “As his reputation for picking winners grew, Milken
attracted some of the wealthiest venture capitalists as clients, people such as
T. Boone Pickens and Carl Icahn, and Drexel became known as a firm that could
raise billions of dollars to finance a takeover of a company within a matter of
hours”.
And
that's not all. We can get a sense of how far Buckley has gone to whitewash the
criminal activities of Milken by comparing the way that he described those
activities, and the scurrilous way by which he described the system of justice
that convicted him for those activities.
First,
the whitewash: “None of this won him any friends back east … he wasn't sharing
his profits with Wall Street underwriters. There had been a tradition that lead
underwriters on a deal would pass on part of the securities to be sold to other
underwriters, but Milken wasn't having any of that. Drexel found it could raise
billions of dollars to finance a takeover all by itself, and it did just that”.
Note
that Buckley said not one word to call that situation what it was: A house of
thieves who came upon a big jackpot, got greedy and started stabbing one
another in the back, each trying to grab a big share of the loot and run.
Instead of doing that, Buckley reserved his maligning attacks on the system of
justice. That's what he said about it:
“The
state used pressure to force Milken to plead guilty. It offered lenient plea
bargains to liars in exchange for their promises to implicate Milken. It
threatened to prosecute Milken's brother and sent FBI agents to visit his
grandfather to get Milken to plead guilty. The state also waved the prospect of
a racketeering order at Drexel, securing a guilty plea from it and cooperation
in the prosecution of Milken”.
Martha
Stewart was sent to jail a month for every 10,000 dollars she avoided losing.
If we make it so that every dollar you avoid losing, is the same as stealing a
dollar from an orphan, then justice requires that Michael Milken go to jail for
30,000 years.