Planet Ponzi

Product Information

Carpoff’s invention could help the entertainment industry “lead the world in making ‘sustainable’ the standard,” declared the actor Hart Bochner, who promoted the devices. (Bochner is best known for playing a coked-up businessman in Die Hard. ) They were the perfect replacement for the diesel generators that powered on-location trailers for actors and makeup artists. The base camps of a few major movies— Inception (starring Leonardo DiCaprio), Valentine’s Day (Julia Roberts), Bad Words (Jason Bateman)—were willing to give them a shot. DiCaprio, an environmentalist, posted photos on Facebook. Which of the four it will be depends on choices that are being made right now, not always wisely, by politicians, technocrats and bankers.

Planet Ponzi: How Politicians and Bankers Stole Your Future Planet Ponzi: How Politicians and Bankers Stole Your Future

When the shop owner showed him the finished bike at the end of the episode, Carpoff, all smiles and high fives, was beside himself. “It just looks—how do I say this?—‘politically correct,’ ” he said, sending everyone there into hysterics. The plan had many of the hallmarks of a classic Ponzi scheme, but with a twist. DC Solar wouldn’t just defraud new buyers to pay earlier ones. By holding itself out as a legitimate solar company, it would give all of them—new and old—cover to drain millions of dollars of tax credits from the U.S. Treasury. The American taxpayer, that is, would subsidize the scam.

Retailers:

The financial system will never be trustworthy as long as any institution is 'Too Big To Fail” Heads I win, tails you bail me out: that's not capitalism, it's extortion. ” Jeff, you have rows and rows of unfinished generators you’re presenting as finished,” Caffrey recalled telling Carpoff. The lawyer for Milder and Nixon Peabody wrote to me that neither Milder nor the firm were aware of or complicit in any criminal fraud. Nixon Peabody, the lawyer said, served solely as tax counsel, providing opinions based on “an assumed set of facts” that were only later exposed as false or fraudulent. The lawyer added that the investors had access to at least as much information about the company’s performance. Though they deny any wrongdoing, Milder and Nixon Peabody agreed last year to pay the plaintiffs what court filings describe as a “substantial” undisclosed sum, a settlement larger than those paid, to date, by any of DC Solar’s other advisers. In Italy, we saw how Silvio Berlusconi, one of the political world’s greatest idiots, presented an ‘austerity budget’ to Italy’s Parliament which made him personally €750 million richer. If talking about cars and motorcycles came easy to Carpoff, talking about climate change did not. He often wore a pained expression as his marketing staff asked him to recite scripted lines for promotional videos.

Mitch Feierstein - Wikipedia Mitch Feierstein - Wikipedia

NFTs are one of the signature fads of this deeply odd late-pandemic moment. At the centre of all the buzz surrounding them is something exceedingly curious: a digital token, generated using a cryptographic protocol of the same sort that underwrites currencies such as bitcoin, certifying the uniqueness of some image or other digital file. Again, what’s being bought and sold on the NFT market isn’t the artwork itself, just a kind of pointer to it, with the buyer’s name inscribed upon it.

We are now partners of the United States,” Dan Briggs, an executive with DC Solar’s charitable arm, who’d once run for a Nevada-state-assembly seat, boasted in an interview for a company holiday video. “We are recognized by the top people in government as being a go-to operator to help them get things done. At DC Solar’s 2017 holiday party, an executive named Mark Hughes lionized Carpoff as an epoch-making inventor. “The Thomas Edison of the West Coast,” Hughes said from the ballroom stage. A DC Solar lawyer—who court documents indicate is Ari Lauer—deflected by claiming that most lease information was confidential. But Howard refused to be put off. So Ronald Roach, the DC Solar accountant, leaned on a colleague named Rob Karmann. It’s like investing in a start-up,” one of the firm’s tax-credits partners said of this push to lead clients, rather than to follow them. “One in 10 hits, but if it hits, it’s a big deal.” (A lawyer for Milder and Nixon Peabody said that Milder’s decision to represent DC Solar was unrelated to the innovation initiative, and that Milder’s pay was not “materially impacted” by his work for the company.) Carpoff had lived almost his whole life in the small city of Martinez, on Northern California’s industrial Carquinez Strait—“the place,” he liked to joke, “where the sewer meets the sea.” His childhood home, about a mile from the city’s Shell Oil refinery, overlooked a biker bar, which Carpoff described as a hangout for marauding Hell’s Angels. “We seen things as a kid that a kid just shouldn’t see,” he recalled in footage that DC Solar’s videographer, Steve Beal, played for me. “Fights, stabbings, shootings, prostitution—all kinds of just really crazy stuff.” Jeff’s mother, Rosalie, remembered the bar as at worst a little noisy. But her son was always a storyteller, she told me, prone to embellishment “to make people feel sorry for him or laugh.”

Mitch Feierstein | Substack

Carpoff’s machine—a solar generator on wheels—was a sun-fueled alternative. He called it the Solar Eclipse. The design was so simple that it was a wonder no one seemed to have thought of it before. Caffrey angrily quit, but Carpoff had bigger problems: Almost no one, it turned out, had any real use for his generators.John Miranda, a film and TV producer, joined the company as communications director because he believed in its potential to fight global warming. He began having doubts on his first day at headquarters. He’d driven into the lot to find one of Carpoff’s new muscle cars parked in a handicapped space, with a DC Solar employee changing the oil. It was a damning allegation, but audit reports are confidential, leaving other investors in the dark. Yeah, we know. Food’s expensive. Gas is expensive. You can’t even remember when you last had a wage rise. The job market is dire. But Planet Ponzi is all about taking positive action to help yourself, no matter what conditions are like. On Tuesday, December 18, 2018 , some 175 federal agents, supervised by the FBI’s Sacramento office, began streaming in unmarked cars toward Benicia and Martinez. Joining the bureau were agents with IRS Criminal Investigation and the U.S. Marshals Service. Most people in Silicon Valley have likely never heard of Martinez, even those who speed past it on I-680 en route to Lake Tahoe. But the world’s tech capital is just an hour’s drive to the south, and the myth of it, even closer: In every Bay Area garage is a tinkerer, and behind every tinkerer’s billion-dollar idea are the discerning investors who get in first, for pennies.