Why Crooks Thrive in the Gray—and Honest People Pay the Price
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Lawyers and crooks love gray. They love gray. What kind of gray? Gray areas. I have alluded to this before. I was thinking about this. saw the story about a deadbeat hedge fund boss and how he’s manipulating the bankruptcy courts. It’s unfortunate. It’s unfortunate that rules and laws are not written in black and white. We like black and white, right?
Three strikes and you’re out. know, six points on a touchdown, one point on an extra point. I mean, there’s no, eh. You know, where we get into trouble, you watch football games and how the refs are not consistent in regards to pass interference calls, whatever it may be, gray areas, gray areas suck. They suck for people who are honest and are trying to do the right thing. Can you take a look? Ten Commandments, pretty black and white there.
Anyway, ever wonder why? Ever wonder why the tax code is 80,000 plus pages long and the federal registry is miles and miles. I don’t even know what they’re up to at this point in time. Gray areas. Lawyers love gray areas because it’s a lot of billable hours. There’s no black. There’s no white. And if you’ve got good attorneys, you can really swim.
in those gray areas, other area where there’s a lot of gray securities rules and regulations. May the best lawyer win. I saw the stories about a hedge fund manager that I knew way back in the day. He used to be a gaming analyst over at Bear Stearns, Jason Adder. And then he made a name for himself. He was on
he used to be was a regular on CNBC, then he became an activist investor. Well, he just he filed for personal bankruptcy recently in Miami, he says he owes roughly $2 million in debts, says he owes money to his wife and his mother, his mother suing him because he defaulted on a $13 million loan he took out against the family’s townhouse on the Upper East Side.
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of Manhattan and I’m going through all of this. owes the IRS over a million dollars. I guess there was some botched takeover play for a casino in the Philippines. And I’m going through all this and he lists his debts, the bankruptcy filing. Oh, don’t take my $10,000 worth of clothing. He’s got a Tesla cyber truck and $50,000 in furniture, a Glock.
pistol and a couple guinea pigs. He actually listed the guinea pigs on his bankruptcy filing. Yet, for some reason, could be me call me crazy. He’s living in a $6 million four bedroom condo in a pretty swanky Miami neighborhood from David Beckham has got a place in that very building.
no, no, no, that’s owned by another one of my companies. And that doesn’t fall underneath the bankruptcy proceedings. I’m looking through all this and the divorce filings and all this stuff, and I’m saying the fix is on.
The fix is on. Yeah, he you know, it’s it’s a show. He just went on multiple European vacations. Nine thousand dollar shopping spree at Christian Dior in Monaco. But he’s bankrupt and he’s getting paid for some Israeli cyber security firm. That doesn’t even have a real address. It’s like a shared space. is. Yeah, I’m calling BS on the entire thing, but.
You got good lawyers. You know how to game the system. You know how to swim in those gray areas. You win. You win. Again, I’ve talked about this ad nauseam for years here on the program, the need for simplicity in rules and regulations in laws. Sometimes I get to I also talk about the great
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Steve Jobs interview when he was making fun of the original word processing software was called WordStar. And in the interview, in the interview, they were asking him about WordStar. He made fun of it. He’s like, nobody’s again, I remember WordStar. No one’s gonna learn the slash cues and all the like the various different commands you had to do. And kids, I’m not kidding you the instruction manual for WordStar.
was it had to be like 400 pages thick. And that was his line. He said, yeah, that’s what people are gonna do. They’re going to read a novel to write a novel, not gonna happen. And Jobs was right. And he’d take a look at his products in the ease of use and the simplicity and it works. Imagine if that was the same thing held true for this country. Yeah, yeah, it’d be difficult on crooks.
wouldn’t be very great for lawyers out there. They would most certainly reduce their billable hours. But man, we’d have a much better country. Watchdogonwallstreet.com.
