The federation last weekend voted to eject two board members, sometime women's chess champion Susan Polgar and her husband, Paul Truong, according to an overview of the fracas in the New York Times. Polgar's lawyer has promised to try and block the decision, via the same court hearings where his client stands accused by the federation of stealing board members' email messages.

Those messages, in turn, concerned another court case alleging computer fraud by Polgar, in which she and her husband allegedly impersonated former board member Samuel Sloan on internet chess newsgroups. The federation has also sued to remove Polgar and Truong from its board; the couple in turn has sued the federation for libel, slander and business disparagement.

Sloan has presented evidence in his New York suit that Polgar and Truong created messages in his name and in the names of others, designed to undermine his bid to get re-elected to the federation board. Their purported motive was to consolidate their power over the federation and its $3.3 million annual budget.

Low stakes indeed, but the online campaign was ruthless. Again, Sam Sloan has said he did not write these posts, drawn from his lawsuit in New York and the federation suit in Illinois:

Polgar and Truong are also accused of posting under the names of other federation members:

`

(Top pic via Cayusa on Flickr, not involved in any of this)

Reports the Wall Street Journal:

The congressional investigation appears to focus on whether internal communications, such as email, show bankers had private doubts about whether mortgage-related securities they were putting together were as financially sound as their public pronouncements suggested.

According to people familiar with the matter, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations also has issued a subpoena to Washington Mutual Inc., a Seattle thrift that was seized by regulators in last year's financial crisis and is now largely owned by J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

It looks like welfare-queening your way to $11.4 billion in bonuses has its disadvantages, doesn't it? Typically sympathetic politicians are eager to put on their sheriff's hats for such things, apparently.

Senate Probes Banks for Meltdown Fraud [WSJ]

Stanford has consistently denied that he would ever, ever do something bad, like run a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. He even cried about it on the news. Regulators say he sold CDs that paid unusually high rates of return to investors around the world, telling them that their assets were in conservative, liquid investments—when they were actually in real estate and other risky ventures, which crashed and brought down the whole scam. It's all false though. Not only because Christians are involved, but because his lawyer says so:

The lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, said that he and Mr. Stanford had not yet read the indictment but that his client was innocent.

Maybe read it first?
[NYT, WSJ. Allen Stanford sure does love cricket.]

Over the last two years, an FBI affidavit claims, Pang and his assistants made 38 separate cash withdrawals below the $10,000 limit which triggers a report to the authorities; the rule is meant to track money-laundering activity. Evading the reporting requirement by making multiple transactions below the limit carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.

But that's a small crime compared to the one SEC officials are alleging: that Pang lied to investors about his background, falsely claiming he had an MBA degree and worked at Morgan Stanley, and that he ran part of PEMGroup's $4 billion money-management business as a Ponzi scheme.

The SEC is charging Pang, a colorful Taiwanese immigrant who led a glittering L.A. lifestyle, with defrauding investors by falsifying his credentials and misrepresenting how his $4 billion money-management firm, PEMGroup, made money. A judge has frozen the firm's assets.

If even some of those accusations prove true, the picture that will inevitably emerge is that of a gambler and a liar — one who bets his inventions will never catch up with him.

Pang has been under the microscope since the Wall Street Journal aired charges similar to the ones the SEC is now making two weeks ago: that he'd never earned an MBA and never worked at Morgan Stanley. An ex-employee, Nasar Aboubakare, told the newspaper that Pang had called his money-management business, PEMGroup, a "Ponzi scheme" and offered him $500,000 on the condition that he not talk to the Journal. According to Aboubakare, a scheme to purchase life-insurance policies at a discount and pay investors with the proceeds went sour, and Pang instead paid his investors their promised returns with new money raised to invest in time shares.

Pang has denied the charges. But it's telling who he's hired as his spokesman: Mike Sitrick, the crisis PR guy whom Paris Hilton has on speed-dial.

New York has a complete timeline of Pang's career. He's had his share of financial shenanigans before the current ones. But three anecdotes seem to tell the story of his life:

Education. School records show Pang only attended one summer term at the University of California at Irvine, in 1986. Yet in the 1988-1989 term, he got elected chairman of the university's Asian Pacific Student & Staff Association. A university spokeswoman explained that anyone could have walked up and won the post.

Love. One would think a former stripper would marry for her husband's money, rather than the other way around. But Janie Louise Pang, Danny Pang's murdered wife, told police that her husband had been abusive and forced her to withdraw $70,000 from the bank to spend on gambling. The Journal reported on the mysterious circumstances of her death:

In May 1997, Ms. Pang hired an investigative agency, which, according to court records, observed her husband holding hands with another woman. The next day, Ms. Pang was scheduled to meet with the investigator at noon. Shortly before that, the doorbell rang at the Pangs' home. According to court records, the family's maid heard Ms. Pang, her 5-year-old at her side, answer the door and begin talking to the visitor, who asked if she was "Miss Pang."

She then began screaming. The maid saw her run through the house, chased by an elegantly dressed man carrying a briefcase and holding a gun. As Ms. Pang cowered in a closet, he shot her dead.

Money. Among the allegations against Pang is the claim that he used investors' money, raised to purchase time-share real estate, to buy a private jet in 2007. He then took PEMGroup employees on the jet to Las Vegas, where he won a large amount of cash and handed out stacks of bills to his workers.

Before the WSJ and the SEC closed in on him, Pang seemed to have been pursuing one last big bet: that an investment in a Chinese mining firm would pay off and allow him to make good on his soured life-insurance scheme. With commodity prices collapsed, that seems like a long shot. But up until a few weeks ago, Pang had been betting that no one would call to check on whether he'd actually gotten an MBA; that no one would make inquiries about his dead wife; that no one would ask how he managed to buy a private jet and support a gambling habit. For Danny Pang, all bets are off now.

At least you can surmise that, by the fact that a couple of them have already asked about signing up for a course for white-collar criminals about how to survive on the inside. Madoff's niece Shana is the one named, and it's probably a smart move for her, since she was the "compliance" officer. The worst compliance officer ever.

"Shana was a compliance officer and signed a lot of documents, saying they were correct," the source said. "She may have a problem."

Levine said, "Another male member of Madoff's family also contacted me, independently" on the same subject.

So from this we may guess that Bernie's guilty plea will have a limited ability to protect his family members, and also that a thousand bucks is a small price to pay to learn valuable skills like:

Prevent Being RAPED
Avoiding and Spotting Informants
Dealing With Gang Members
Defusing A Confrontation
Prison Slang & Lingo
Avoiding Bad Prison Jobs
Getting A Lower Bunk Pass
Getting A Soft Shoe Permit
Microwave Cooking Techniques

[NYP, Wall St. Prison Consultants]

Her name is Sonja Kohn, and her story is told in the NYT today. I'm just ripping it off. She's a 60-year-old Austrian ultra-Orthodox Jew who made most of her money recently by steering international clients into the winning funds of—ta da—Bernie Madoff. Now her clients have lost everything, and Kohn—once known as "Austria's woman on Wall Street"—has gone into hiding. Like a spy novel! She's not at her New York home, or her Vienna apartment, or her Zurich villa. Why? The Russians:

But another theory widely repeated by those who know Mrs. Kohn is that she may be afraid of some particularly displeased investors: Russian oligarchs whose money made up a chunk of the $2.1 billion that Bank Medici invested with Mr. Madoff.

“With Russian oligarchs as clients,” said a Viennese banker who knew Mrs. Kohn and her husband socially, “she might have reason to be afraid.”

I see Julia Roberts as Kohn, Daniel Craig as her dashing husband, and that dude from Transporter as the Russian assassin. And Samuel L. Jackson as the streetwise homeless man with a heart of gold who gets swept up in the adventure! [NYT]

Thierry de la Villehuchet, CEO of Access International Advisors, a money-management operation who placed investors' funds in Madoff vehicles, stabbed himself to death with a box cutter after taking sleeping pills, according to New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who spoke to Bloomberg.

De La Villehuchet was found “with his feet propped up on his desk, a trash pail nearby to collect blood,” and no sign of a second person, Kelly said in the interview.

The money manager had “multiple stab wounds” to his arms and wrists, and a box-cutter and pills were found nearby, Kelly said at a news conference. No suicide note was found.

The Huffington Post has found what it believes is a photo of Villehuchet at a 2007 Hermès store opening. He is neatly put together. How fitting then, that the scene of his death suggests he wanted to keep things clean at his death. Left with a mess he couldn't clean up, Villehuchet didn't want to leave someone scrubbing blood stains out of the carpet.

(Photo by Patrick McMullan via Huffington Post)

Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, founder of Access International Advisors, had just confessed the investment and probable billion-dollar loss to clients, and had spent days frantically trying to figure out ways to recover his losses.

Police were called to Access International's office early today, and found one dead victim, reported by French newspaper La Tribune to be Villehuchet.

[A friend] told AFP Villehuchet was "devastated" and feared his clients would turn against him in the courts.

"Access was his whole life, and Madoff was a manager in whom he had complete trust. I lunched with him two weeks ago and he said, how lucky it was that Madoff was the only manager still doing well at the moment."

Villehuchet was married, without children.

Yesterday an executive with HSBC, which similarly lost billions due to Madoff, hanged himself in a London hotel room.

Prosecutors just struck a deal allowing Madoff to have home arrest, rather than jail, until his trial. Um. That will certainly be applauded by the thousands and thousands of Americans incarcerated for years on minor drug violations! Hey, it's not like he stole a T-shirt from Wal-Mart or anything! But the judge did set these strenuous terms:

Madoff and his luxury apartment on Manhattan's upper east side will be fitted with an electronic monitoring device by the court's pre-trial services and Madoff will be under a curfew of between 7 p.m. through 9 a.m.

You monsters. A humorous legal side issue was the fact that Bernie couldn't find four people to sign to guarantee his bail bond, because his own sons refused. No shit, dude! So the judge graciously said he only needed two people to sign, instead. The presiding judge in this case is Ned Flanders.

Yeah right, Mr. Berman! Very clever!

There are a million more names listed so we'll just "crowdsource" this and ask you to send us anything interesting, like the fact that Edgar Bronfman Jr. donated, as well as Vint "I Invented The Internet" Cerf.

This "organization representing the intersection of young people, politics and popular culture" was started in 1992 by some sleazy Hollywood entertainment industry types and they'd been trying to swing elections ever since with nihilistic "grunge music" and godless celebrities. The group lets would- be election defrauders print out unlimited voter registration forms they access from their "Xboxes" and "iPhones." Then Rock the Vote helpfully sends all the forms to the wrong place and no one is registered. Democracy! [Update: Rock the Vote says the New York Board of Elections screwed up! No Times correction yet!]

Anne Hathaway got tied up in this modern-day Tammany Hall, of course:

About 10 days ago, when the actress Anne Hathaway was recording a public service announcement for Rock the Vote, she told Ms. Smith that she had used the group’s on-line form but didn’t find her name on the rolls. In verifying her registration – Ms. Hathaway’s voter identification number was ultimately tracked down — Ms. Smith said she learned that about 40,000 applications had not been processed.

She is so trusting and naive, that one. And so adorable!

VOTE-ROCKING UPDATE: Rock the Vote says New York gave them the correct addresses for mailing in voter registrations. We're... not sure how accurate that is? The New York State board of elections seems to have told them to tell voters to mail the forms to the main State Board of Elections, and not local precinct boards. Some of the registrations should still count, but this explains the massive delays in processing the forms. The New York State Board of Elections doesn't care about Vote-Rocking people.

The problem, of course, is the decentralized and massively complicated opt-in voting system of the United States as a whole. They'd like a correction from the Times, but the Times hasn't updated anything and we're not sure they have anything to correct. They do note in a City Room entry, today:

Ms. Smith said that Rock the Vote printed the state board’s address on its application because it was on a list of central addresses for each state provided by the federal Elections Assistance Commission, and because her group got written confirmation twice from New York State officials that they could receive the applications in Albany. All the groups doing registration drives, including Rock the Vote, may have lost time by following the federal instructions.

So. The Feds told Rock the Vote to ask NY State which gave them an incorrect address, twice. Voting in America is a big embarrassing mess, again, as usual.

Another reason many say it's unlikely the misspelling was just an honest mistake: the letters S and B are nowehere near each other on the keyboard.

And even if it was, former Board of Elections commissioner Thomas Wade says he had implemented a system that includes six people to look over those ballots before they go to print to prevent mistakes like this.

The BOE's current Democratic Commissioner Edward McDonough told CBS 6 Tuesday evening his office will begin mailing out new ballots Tuesday — 302 of them. He said if any of the "Osama" ballots return with marks next to Obama's misspelled name, they will count as a vote for Obama. He said if voters send in both ballots, the board of elections will destroy one of them.

McDonough said the worker who typed the "s" instead of the "b" submitted her resignation today but he refused to let her go. Although McDonough and GOP Election Commissioner Larry Bugbee put out a joint statement saying the matter involves a "typographical" error, McDonough told CBS 6 News it is possible it was not a typo but rather a mental error, where the typist mistakenly wrote one name where it should have been another.

[CBS6]

• Last December, someone using the name “Test Person,” from “Some Place, UT,” made a series of contributions, the largest being $764, to Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign totaling $2,410.07.
• Someone identifying himself as “Jockim Alberton,” from 1581 Leroy Avenue in Wilmington, Del., began giving to Mr. Obama last November, contributing $10 and $25 at a time for a total of $445 through the end of February. The only problem? There is no Leroy Avenue in Wilmington. And Jockim Alberton, who listed his employer and occupation as “Fdsa Fdsa,” does not show up in a search of public records.
• But even a contributor who used the name “Jgtj Jfggjjfgj,” and listed an address of “thjtrj” in “gjtjtjtjtjtjr, AP,” was able to contribute $370 in a series of $10 donations in August.
• A pair of donors named “Derty West” and “Derty Poiiuy,” who listed “rewq, ME” as their addresses and “Qwertyyy” or “Qwerttyyu” as either their employer or occupation, contributed a combined $1,110 in July.
• The complaint followed an article on the conservative Web site Newsmax.com that highlighted thousands of dollars in contributions, made in increments of $25 dating back to March, from “Good Will” in Austin, Tex., who listed his employer as “Loving” and his occupation as “You,” as well as thousands in small contributions that started last November from a “Doodad Pro” in Nunda, N.Y., with the same employer and occupation.
• Another donor apparently connected to Good Will and Doodad Pro, “Fornari Usa,” listed the same “Loving” and “You” under employer and occupation, and made a series of $25 donations to Mr. Obama in May, totaling $1,050.

Ha ha ha! Obama's campaign has been giving this money back, but, you know, at their own pace. Also these mysterious donations make up like $40,000 of Obama's ten gazillion dollars raised so far, but still, FRAUD. ILLEGAL FRAUD. (Also the Times is STILL IN THE TANK.)

Dressed in navy blue corrections department clothing, Mr. Follieri appeared unshaven and in need of a haircut. His sentencing was initially scheduled for Dec. 12, but his lawyer, Flora Edwards, asked the judge for an earlier date, saying that Mr. Follieri was having “a very difficult time” in the Metropolitan Detention Center...

“The game he played was not unique. It’s been done before,” Ms. Grubman said. “Planes, trains and automobiles are very sexy to anyone who is young.”

Follieri will be sentenced in October, and he's getting several years, at least. Let this be a lesson: don't fuck with the Pope.

[NYT]

Joanna is, of course, disputing the claim.

The video is still up, but now Viacom gets access to her video statistics. The worst part is the fear Joanna has that something she slaved and sweat over could be taken away from her. "I'm just a scared that my little film will be lost in the shadow of the hulking monolith...," she wrote on her blog. Also on her blog is a comment by another filmmaker indicating Joanna isn't the only filmmaker Viacom has fraudulently targeted in this manner.

YouTube used to be cool but the site allowing actions like this show how much it's become just another co-opted drek-hole... all because they're too cheap to hire enough people to vet either the uploads or the corporate takedowns.

Below, a screenshot of the creepy and baseless stake-claiming.

Viacom Wants To Steal My Film [Channel Federator Raw]
Juxtaposer [YouTube]

Or you can just bypass the foundation and get a special, philanthropic Follieri Capital Visa card!

If you act now, Follieri may still find time to name a girlfriend to the foundation's board of directors, as he did with actress/Follieri ex Anne Hathaway, before he's convicted of anything. WON'T YOU PLEASE MAKE A DIFFERENCE FOR SOMEONE IN NEED??

[Follieri Foundation, Follieri Capital]

After Follieri defrauded investors out of millions, what did he do with the money?

Private doctors! $30,000 housecalls! Vacations are nice, too.

How did he pull it off? Payoffs, and a little help from a crooked reporter.

[via TSG]

"In his first interviews since the disclosure of the tribe's existence, Meirelles described how he found the group, detailed how they lived and how he planned the publicity to protect them and other tribes in similar danger of losing the habitat in which they have flourished for hundreds of years.

"Meirelles admitted that the tribe was first known about almost a century ago and that the apparently chance encounter that produced the now famous images was no accident. 'When we think we might have found an isolated tribe,' he told al-Jazeera, 'a sertanista like me walks in the forest for two or three years to gather evidence and we mark it in our [global positioning system]. We then map the territory the Indians occupy and we draw that protected territory without making contact with them. And finally we set up a small outpost where we can monitor their protection.' [...]

"What he was looking for was not only proof of life, but firm evidence that the tribes in this area were flourishing—proof in his view that the policy of no contact and protection was working. On the last day, with only a couple hours of flight time remaining, Meirelles spotted a large community.

"'When I saw them painted red, I was satisfied, I was happy,' he said. 'Because painted red means they are ready for war, which to me says they are happy and healthy defending their territory.'" [Guardian via Dana]

Meanwhile, undiscovered or not, they're still humans, and Rush Limbaugh still called them savages.