Planet Ponzi

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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. When Carpoff started talking about new marketing plans for solar generators with video screens and facial-recognition software, Judge Mendez cut him off. “You were selling air,” the judge said. He sentenced Carpoff to 30 years in prison. Seven months later, Paulette, deemed less culpable, would be sentenced to 11 years and three months. Feierstein was born in New York City, and educated at Hamden Hall Country Day School in Hamden, Connecticut. [1] Feierstein studied economics at Vassar College and was on the Vassar College President's International Advisory Committee 2009 until it was disbanded in 2018. [2] [ bettersourceneeded] Feierstein served on the Council from Jan 9, 2009 to June 30, 2018. [3] Career [ edit ]

Ponzi Scheme That Hooked Wall Street The Billion-Dollar Ponzi Scheme That Hooked Wall Street

One of the professionals in the room, a financial modeler named Gary Knapp, helped introduce Carpoff to the law firm Nixon Peabody, which had a well-known tax-credits practice. It was an arcane legal specialty centered on the special tax perks for industries, such as renewable power, whose growth served broader national interests. Chancellor builds his policies on a Ponzi homes plan". Independent. 6 September 2013. Archived from the original on 2022-05-15 . Retrieved 24 November 2014. He claimed that he’d never had the brains for a tax-credit deal. He’d trusted the wrong people. He would have quit long ago had buyers cared about anything but their tax credits. “The bigger the deal, the easier they were to close,” Carpoff said. “It was the most bizarre thing.” When Carpoff got to the lectern, he assessed himself differently. “I’m kind of entrepreneur,” he joked. “More manure than entre.” Berger, Hugo (16 March 2012). "Planet Ponzi: Gloomy economic predictions". The National . Retrieved 28 January 2014.When … the bankers come in,” Carpoff explained to a visitor, in a conversation captured by Steve Beal, DC Solar’s videographer, “they see this, and it’s automatically a great first impression.” Three decades later, the story still resonated enough for him to want to share it with a banquet hall full of investors and employees. During that glorious ride, in that exhilarating stretch before anyone realized how many laws he was breaking, “I said, ‘Man, I got away with this,’ ” he reminisced. “I’m like, ‘Man, look at me.’ ”

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But they spent much more on themselves: cars; couture; homes in Cabo San Lucas and Las Vegas; a luxury box at the Raiders’ new NFL stadium; extravagant Christmas parties at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel, where DC Solar’s workers—just 100 or so at the company’s peak—were treated to private performances by the pop band Sugar Ray, the rapper Pitbull, and the country duo Big & Rich. 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.” 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.Inspired by the shop floors at Chip Ganassi Racing, a prestigious racing organization whose NASCAR drivers DC Solar sponsored, Carpoff bought a Zamboni to keep his factory floor gleaming. Money didn’t so much change Jeff Carpoff as give him the means to more fully be himself. He credited the American dream. “We are the land of the free,” he told his employees. “We can do anything.” Artists peddling their work as NFTs may or may not care about this brutal calculus. But it makes particular nonsense of art that claims to spur the viewer to some kind of ecological consciousness. Consider, for example, John Gerrard’s recent announcement of an NFT for his video piece Western Flag – according to Gerrard an artwork that, in “flying the flag of our own self-destruction”, asks us “to consider our role in the warming of the planet and simultaneous desertification of once fertile lands”. By choosing to release a Western Flag NFT, though, it’s as if Gerrard and his gallerists have scrawled this statement across the land in letters of crude oil a mile from tip to tip, and then set them on fire … a thousand times over. The “T-Mobile” and ISC leases came together as DC Solar courted a whale. The insurance company Geico was owned by Berkshire Hathaway. Warren Buffett’s conglomerate was a seasoned user of tax credits and the fourth-largest company on the Fortune 500. Enjoying a sense of what an associate called “respectability” for the first time in his life, Karmann obligingly produced fictitious reports of who was leasing the units and for how much. (“This guy gets his shit done” was how Carpoff toasted him at one holiday party.) Karmann’s newfound social status was “probably the biggest reason … I was so willing to go along with stuff I should have walked away from,” he told me this past September, by phone from federal prison.