Category: San Diego
Brent Wilkes, enough is enough
Brent "The Enigma" Wilkes
Defense contractor Brent “the Enigma” Wilkes was convicted in 2007 and sentenced to 12 years in prison for bribing former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham with hookers, lavish vacations and the like, but his court-appointed lawyers have done a phenomenal job of keeping the guy out of prison so he can play poker and fart around.
He’s due for a hearing in a few days and the government calls his bluff in this footnote to a motion:
The government tips its hat to defense counsel who have adopted clever stratagems designed to prolong Wilkes’ day of reckoning almost five years since his 2007 conviction. Nevertheless, this latest attempt to prolong and confuse what should be a rather simple conclusion to this lengthy end-game should not be countenanced by this Court. Enough is enough.
Who is Christopher Rusch?
Christopher Rusch
On his website, former San Diego attorney Christopher Rusch offers help to those who find themselves accused of tax evasion crimes by the U.S. government. “A criminal tax investigation is different than an audit,” Mr. Rusch writes. “In an audit, the IRS is attempting to collect money from you. In a criminal tax investigation, the government is preparing a case so they can can PROSECUTE you and put you in JAIL.”
These days, Rusch himself is the one federal prosecutors are trying to put in jail. Rusch and two of his clients, Stephen M. Kerr and Michael Quiel, are being prosecuted in Phoenix, Arizona in a scheme to hide millions of dollars in assets from U.S. tax authorities, including a Colorado golf course purchased with offshore funds. Rusch, 41, was arrested in January in Miami after he was kicked out of Panama at the request of the United States.
The University of San Diego School of Law graduate may not be making headlines in San Diego, but Rusch is getting a lot of attention from the Swiss banking community. Rusch is accused of maintaining secret offshore accounts at a bank identified in the indictment only as “Swiss Bank A” — revealed earlier this month to be one of Switzerland’s largest private banks, Pictet & Cie.
Pictet & Ciet, which is in the process of trying to get its North American business up and running, swiftly issued a statement saying the U.S. government had not accused it of wrongdoing.
According to these court documents, Rusch charged his clients $45,000 for what he described as “international business planning, to include international joint ventures in Europe and general corporate services.”
The indictment lays out in detail how the money got transferred to Switzerland and back tax-free through Swiss banks, Panamanian banks and Rusch’s own Interest on Lawyers Trust Account. Wikipedia defines these accounts as “a method of raising money for charitable purposes, primarily the provision of civil legal services to poor persons, through the use of interest earned on certain lawyer trust accounts.
About $2 million of this repatriated money was used to buy the Colorado National Golf Course in Erie, Colorado, the home course for CU Boulder’s men’s and women’s golf teams.
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Randy Duke Cunningham: I plan to live in a cabin in the Ozarks, hunt and write books
Yes it’s true: Randy “Duke” Cunningham has written another sad, revealing jailhouse letter to the judge who sentenced him to 100 months in federal prison for low behavior in high office.
The Vietnam war hero and disgraced ex-Congressman, who is now 70, writes that he’s set to leave prison as his sentence comes to an end later this year. He says he plans to live in a cabin near Greer’s Lake in the Ozarks and write books. He will be “away from the (San Diego) Union-Tribune,” the newspaper that exposed his corruption in 2005, and there won’t be many people around to bother him, “but they do have a lot of black bears, cougars, and history of rabies.”
In his letter, Cunningham is at turns whining, boastful and self-pitying as he asks Judge Burns to restore his second amendment rights. “I flew aircraft that could disintegrate your building with a half-second burst and now can’t carry a .22-cal,” he writes.
The Duke says he needs a gun “to earn a little money so he can eat.” He’s poor now and homeless — thanks to the government, he writes. “Don’t guess we can do to (sic) much for our veterans after all,” Cunningham whines.
He says he will use the gun for hunting and competition and then adds in a handwritten postscript, “I will also hunt to supliment (sic) my food.”
To this mess of a letter, this mess of a man, Judge Burns’ response is understated elegance. Burns says he has no authority to restore Duke’s gun rights; that authority with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms:
You should be aware, however, that every year since 1992, Congress has refused to provide funding to the ATF to review applications from the federal firearm ban. And the United States Supreme Court has ruled that inaction by the ATF does not amount to “denial” of the application within the meaning of section 925(c) United States v. Bean 537 US 71, 75 (2002). So unless Congress changes course and decides to fund ATF’s review of applications for relief, it appears you are stuck.
Duke’s letter:
Randy "Duke" Cunningham May 16 letter to judge// < 
Not Having a Good Day
CalPERS tried to forestall this airing of its dirty laundry, but a federal judge blocked the pension’s request to stop the deposition from taking place.
Villalobos was paid more than $47 million in commissions by private equity and real estate investment managers to help them win CalPERS contracts to manage about $4.8 billion worth of the fund’s securities from 2005 to 2009, according to a lawsuit filed by the California Attorney General’s office.
One of those private equity firms was Aurora Capital Group of Los Angeles, which hired Villalobos in 2008. Parsky is Aurora’s chairman. He’s also a former assistant Treasury secretary, a UC regent and was George W. Bush’s major doom in California.
So politically connected is Parsky that ARVCO allegedly intervened with CalPERS staff to obtain investment money for Aurora, pointing out the political juice that Parsky brought with him, according to an independent law firm investigation of the matter. CalPERS coughed up $400 million for Aurora Resurgence in 2008, earning Villalobos and his firm, ARVCO, a $4 million fee. Another $150 million CalPERS investment in a different Aurora fund, netted nearly $2 million for ARVCO.
Today, Parsky is being deposed in Los Angeles. Tomorrow, Aurora’s general counsel, Timothy Hart, will get his turn.
The Ben Stein-Ray Lucia Mutual Admiration Society
Actor and corporate pitchman Ben Stein charges more than $50,000 for a single speech, according to his page at the Keppler Speakers Bureau.
If that’s the case, I would love to know how much he charges Ray “Buckets of Money” Lucia for making numerous appearances each year at Lucia’s free seminars and lauding him in The New York Times as a “guru.”
Let’s face it: it’s Stein, not Lucia, who is the big draw at the seminars. Stein has made a career out of being a bow-tied smartypants ever since he famously played a dull economics teacher in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. He even sued over his signature look in this lawsuit in which he describes himself as “the most famous economics teacher in the world.” In the public’s mind, Ben Stein is what an economist looks like.
The public doesn’t know or care that Stein is a securities lawyer by trade whose credentials as an economist amount to a famous economist for a father and a bachelor’s degree in economics. Never mind that to the folks I know in the finance world think Lucia and his buckets are a joke. Never mind that anyone at Goldman Sachs who starts blabbing about buckets of money will be shot at dawn.
I doubt that Stein truly believes that the “genius” of Ray Lucia is his bucket strategy. His genius such as it is lies in his salesmanship. Lucia understands that regular people don’t want to read financial reports and SEC filings. They want to see a man who plays an economist on TV. They want to hear jokes get some free advice about what to do with their retirement nest eggs. They want a show.
So they come for a show and they leave with a new money manager, Lucia’s son, Ray Jr. It will take a while before these unsuspecting investors realize that Lucia Jr. has drilled holes in their buckets with his company’s high fees and questionable investments such as non-tradeable REITs that earn Lucia huge commissions.
Stein provides his pal Lucia an additional, equally valuable service — repeatedly dropping Lucia’s name in his business columns in The New York Times and elsewhere. Stein’s shilling got him canned from the Times, so now he name drops Lucia in his American Spectator diary.
Stein will say almost anything if you pay him. He served as an expert witness for lawyers at Milberg Weiss until the firm went down under federal indictment for bribery and fraud. He has pitched Comcast, eye drops, cars, office equipment. So it’s no surprise that Stein praises Lucia as a “guru” or a “genius” in the same breath as Warren Buffet.
But this is a particularly insidious form of advertising. If you repeat something enough times, goes the old saw, it becomes truth. Especially when you can repeat it in The New York Times.
I happened to be sitting at Morton’s restaurant in Beverly Hills a few days ago with Mr. [Phil] DeMuth and with another financial adviser for whom I have high esteem, Raymond J. Lucia (for whom – full disclosure – I am about to give a speech or two urging people to save for retirement).
Ray and Phil said something like this to me: “You know there are not a lot of shows on TV that actually teach the viewer how to be a better investor. There is a lot of stock picking and predicting what can’t be predicted, but there is not a lot that tells the ordinary Joe or Jane how to save for retirement.”
Ray and Phil were right. And they will keep being right.
~ The New York Times, Feb. 27, 2005
I was recently on a panel with the stock guru Ray Lucia, who offered overwhelming data about how impossible it was to pick stocks, trade in and out of them and fare as well as the market. His data was terrifying.
~ The New York Times, Oct. 14, 2007
I checked with my investment gurus, Phil DeMuth, Raymond J. Lucia and Kevin Hanley. None of us could see how Mr. Madoff could do what his friends said he could do.
~ The New York Times, Dec. 26, 2008
I am to give a speech at a huge gathering hosted by my pal Ray Lucia. It is about investing. He has an immense crowd of well over 1,000 people today and my job is not really to sell them anything, but to give them a general overview of the economy.
~The American Spectator, May 2010.
Now, to pack and prepare to go see my pal Ray Lucia. Ray is simply the best wealth manager I know of. He knows more about personal finance than any other person I have ever met. His advice — lots of liquidity and very wide diversification — is so sensible it has saved me from suicide many a night. This guy is a lifesaver where managing money is concerned. We are colleagues, so I am not disinterested, but even before we were colleagues, I was learning from him and being guided by him.
~The American Spectator, June 1, 2010.
I have done the best I can, with the help of some true geniuses of finance like Phil DeMuth, Chris DeMuth, Ray Lucia, Anil Vazirani, J.W. Roth and, supreme above all of them, John Bogle and Warren Buffett, to invest wisely.
~The American Spectator, Aug. 12, 2011
Trump / Russia 