S1:E5 – The Pecora files: Those Who Would Have Drained the Swamp

The New Untouchables: The Pecora Files
Episode 5 – Those Who Would Have Drained the Swamp
March 14, 2021

[00:00:00.300] – Steve Grumbine

All right, this is Steve Grumbine with Real Progressives. This is the conclusion of our mini-series here, our pod series on The New Untouchables, a pathway to the new Pecora hearings, the new Pecora files. We have two gentlemen, including Paul Pelletier was one of the nation’s foremost prosecutors having a career that spanned three decades – working in the Department of Justice, came up in Miami busting crime syndicates, busting money laundering and tax evasion.

He wound up spearheading white-collar prosecutions for DOJ in D.C. and was in charge of DOJ white-collar prosecution department. His specialty was and is accounting control crime. He was third in line at DOJ, behind then Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer. He was forced to resign out of disgust when Holder’s department refused to allow him to press AIG. Now he’s on the side of whistleblowers who know corruption has overrun Washington.

Also Chris Swecker, like Pellletier, has a long and impeccable record of working for the FBI. Like Paul, Swecker came up in Miami, where he spearheaded the nation’s aggressive response to international cocaine market led by none other than La Cosa Nostra. He worked his way up the ladder to become the assistant director of criminal investigations at the FBI, and in 2004 discovered the massive mortgage fraud syndicate. He put together a nationwide dragnet to take it down.

He was blocked by then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales diverted budget from white-collar crackdowns to porn. Roland Arnol, the CEO of Ameriquest that was later nailed on 49 state, $475 million take down, was former President George Bush’s largest contributor. We also have Bill Black joining us again for this episode and of course, Eric Vaughan and Patrick Lovell. I’m going to do what I’ve always done. And I’m going to start with Patrick. Patrick, tell us why this episode matters.

[00:02:12.280] – Patrick Lovell

Well, this is the grand slam. What you’re looking at here is the Bronx Bombers, and these guys are all clean up. I mean, I’m telling you, it doesn’t get more dramatic for The Untouchables than this team right here. So as we started this conversation earlier today, Steve, remember I had no idea what the hell was happening in this country. I just got buried like so many people, and I just started asking questions. Once I started pulling the thread, it led to a couple of miracles.

The first, of course, being Bill Black, and then after that, it was basically, you know, my colleague Eric Vaughan finding Addie Polk, which just was able to lead us to the white collar task force and the RICO convictions in Ohio. Now, growing up in this country, I mean, like all of us, right, I celebrated the good guys. I believed in the League of Justice. I believed in Superman. I believed in life, liberty and justice for all. But above all, because of my family, I believed in integrity.

And, so I didn’t understand how in the world as a guy in my middle age, I was coming to the situation where nothing made sense. Nothing made sense from the media, nothing made sense from attorneys that I talked to after the great financial crisis of my personal matter. Nothing made sense in terms of the policy that was surrounding me. I knew enough just to be dangerous, I suppose. So instead of just going away and disappearing, we forged ahead.

And we eventually found this incredible team of guys that answered every question that Eric and I had from the very beginning.  And to that point, and I’ll just toss this to Eric. One of the greatest moments in this journey for me was I started to hear about Chris Swecker. Chris Swecker from the FBI director of investigations of the FBI, who put together a nationwide dragnet.

And I started doing some investigation and I found out Chris Swecker was one of the top guys that was blowing up the Cosa Nostra in Miami. Drug deals, you know, we’re talking criminal, major international drug dealing and laundering and all of the rest of these complicated crimes. And here’s this guy at the Federal Bureau of Investigations trying to end, before it ever got me engulfed in this situation, what we found out later was mortgage fraud.

So when I picked up the phone and I called Chris Swecker, I’ll never forget it. I remember he said, “I’ve been waiting for this phone call for six years.” And what did that mean? Well, it ultimately meant that the media in this country who could have easily done what we did, we didn’t have the resources of The New York Times. We didn’t have the resources of The Washington Post. We didn’t have the resources of the FBI or the DOJ.

What we had was the leadership of Bill Black, and Bill Black took us on a journey we just got more determined than ever to find the truth. And with these remaining final three pieces, what you will have is the full picture of what could have happened and what didn’t. And I believe it’s these gentlemen with the professional everything to be able to set this country in the right direction.

[00:05:17.820] – Bill Black

You’d like to have effective regulation so that you never have the crime wave, right? Prosecution is not what we want to happen. And so we started with Art Wilmarth, one of the world’s experts on Glass-Steagall and the SEC and the Pecora Commission, and showing how effective that was. And just 15 seconds with my economics hat, we knew how effective it was as economists because American stocks traded at a premium globally.

Why? Because you could trust them much more than in any other place. So law really works. It really makes honest business people able to prevail. But we also need the ability, when regulation breaks down, to be able to prosecute because otherwise, again, economics, criminology, common life, it’s the Gresham’s dynamic. When cheaters gain a competitive advantage, they drive honest people out of business.

They drive bad ethics, bad ethics drives good ethics out of the marketplace, and that’s a tragedy for all of us. So it’s not anything anti-market to have effective law enforcement. It’s what allows effective markets is having people like you see before them. Now we’ve emphasized throughout this, you’ve got to get the facts. And when you get the facts, you can’t sit on them. You actually have to issue a warning.

So I introduced The Con team to Chris Swecker now, not because I personally know them, I didn’t do that kind of introduction, but I said, you’ve got to talk to this man. He issued one of the three great warnings about the great financial crisis – any one of which, if it had been listened to, would have prevented the great financial crisis.

The first one, and we had Lori Noble on, was the appraisers where that warning actually starts in 1998. And by 2000, it’s a public petition that goes to all the top federal regulatory agencies warning of an epidemic of appraisal fraud. And from my days as a savings and loan regulator, when we made criminal referrals, and when I trained FBI agents and AUSAs, and served as an expert witness, I’m free as a government employee as an expert witness, right?

I knew how effective appraisal fraud is. I would explain it to a jury. You know, it’s the great protection against loss. No honest banker would ever inflate an appraisal, and I could watch the jurors within 15 seconds nodding to each other, you know, and going, yeah, of course, that makes sense. And that’s what we want in cases. We don’t want complicated economic theories.

We’re telling a story that human beings can understand, that they can relate to. That’s how you get effective prosecutions and ultimately it’s how you get effective pleas because we don’t want to prosecute, in fact, most cases because of our limited resources. Right? And so the appraisal fraud is itself a fraud, it’s a federal felony in almost all cases. No action was taken. None.

Not a single federal regulatory agency operated and we had seen in the savings and loan debacle that appraisal fraud was one of the key drivers of the fraud epidemic that caused that scandal. Chris comes and Chris is not some random special agent in the FBI, he was a senior position with responsibility, formal responsibility assigned to him to deal with mortgage fraud. So when he testified in front of Congress, again, it wasn’t like they picked some random person.

They picked one of the world’s experts. And, Chris, I could tell because I had done these kinds of things myself years earlier, was deliberately and I mean this as a positive thing, trying to get as much publicity as possible. He wanted the public to know this. He wanted the regulators to know this because he wanted them to take action. And so he spoke in plain English. He wasn’t a bureaucrat. He used the word crisis in his testimony.

And in his media appearances, he said it was going to produce a financial crisis if an epidemic, his word epidemic, of mortgage fraud was not stopped. And he specifically said, we have to learn the lessons of the savings and loan debacle. Right? He compared and said, we’re going to have a crisis at least as big as the savings and loan debacle if we don’t act.

And the third great warning, public warning, was by the industry, the Mortgage Bankers Association’s own antifraud expert, when they said, “Hey, 90 percent of these liars loans are fraudulent,” and the industry responded by increasing liar’s loans substantially. Right? And then we’ve talked about the internal warnings. Richard Bowen at Citi.

Michael Winston at Countrywide, how if either of them had been listened to, the secondary market would have collapsed, and non-prime loans would have collapsed. They’re the hyperinflation of the housing bubble in 19, 2006, 2007 would have been prevented. So this is the tragedy, the first level tragedy. But then Chris and Paul can tell you about the second level tragedy. Again, what we really wanted to do was stop it.

Chris understood that.  He wasn’t sitting (saying) good look at the resources we could get for prosecuting and investigating. Wow. This will be great for us. He was doing everything possible to prevent the disaster. But of course, we know that we didn’t. We know, in fact, that federal regulators actually worked to preempt state efforts to go after the worst frauds. They actually actively made things worse.

And so we had our last line of defense, which is the criminal justice system. And we have had enormous successes in the criminal justice system against precisely these kinds of cases. The savings and loan debacle, of course, but Paul can tell you about the successes in the Enron era. And the Enron era frauds are by much larger institutions, and in many cases, more sophisticated accounting fraud techniques than we saw in the savings and loan debacle.

In these cases, I think both Paul and Chris will explain what our experience was repeated, which is when you go after the CEO, they will spend money like water to stay out of prison. And they will hire the best criminal defense lawyers in the world; and I will tell you, America has the best criminal defense lawyers in the world. This is no small thing. And then somebody like Paul and Chris in prior life has to actually go into court and prove beyond a reasonable doubt and get unanimous agreement among 12 jurors that that standard has been met.

With the key difficulty typically being proving the intent of the CEO. In those circumstances, CFO, chairman of the board type of thing, which they work with general counsel enormously effectively to make it hard for us to do. The key advantage of an elite white collar criminal is that you get to talk with your lawyer first. In the blue collar sphere, you meet your defendant in jail, after they’ve been arrested and after typically they’ve made incriminating statements.

It’s a little late to be an effective criminal defense lawyer. But as someone who has been a general counsel of a major bank, we can give you all kinds of opinions in advance, CEO, that what you’re going to do is lawful. And we can write for you a whole series of dozens of hundreds of memoranda in which you urge everyone to do the right thing and employ the most moral means possible. You can be an icon of virtue in this incredible written record and such.

Again, they’re very effective. So what we have is a huge advantage. We have a person who gave the second earliest warning in all of America at the highest possible level, the most credible source you can imagine and ask him what the response was. And then Paul can tell you, and Chris can tell you and I can add, we knew how to succeed. We had succeeded despite all these disadvantages that I’ve talked about.

And Paul will tell you why we were not allowed to even try to succeed. And Chris can tell you that as well. So that’s what I  would hope, actually, the two of you would go sort of back and forth and explain how the FBI and the Justice Department and when there were regulators, financial regulators, go about getting successful prosecutions against the most elite folks because this is a team that has done it in practice.

[00:16:58.460] – Grumbine

Chris, tell us, what is your role in this, and what was your experience? Take it from the top, and we’ll get you back and forth with Paul.

[00:17:06.560] – Chris Swecker

Alright. Well, you have to go back to 2002, 2003 to get some perspective on this. I was the head of the FBI in North Carolina and like all SACs, special agents in charge, we were looking at corporate fraud. We had . . .  Paul knows this. He was top level of the Justice Department in the white collar area. We had an epidemic at that time of corporate fraud.

We also were dealing with the post 9/11 era and all kinds of other violations, investment fraud, securities fraud, et cetera. But I started to notice that more and more mortgage fraud cases were popping up on my radar screen. We had two major banks in North Carolina at that time, Wachovia and Nations Bank, which later became Bank of America.

So we had a lot of white collar crime, but we started to see a real influx of mortgage fraud cases, appraisal frauds, mortgage flipping, getting mortgages on loans, on properties that didn’t exist in some cases or develop loans on property that wasn’t developed. And there were all different variations of the mortgage fraud scam. I took that with me when I went to Washington in 2004 as head of the FBI’s criminal investigative division, and there I got to look at all the cases across the country, all criminal cases across the country.

And I notice again that this was not just confined to North Carolina. This was across the country wherever there was red hot, red hot real estate markets, southern California, Georgia, Florida, in the Sunbelt, we saw just rampant mortgage fraud. And as I said, there are so many different variations of it. The banks didn’t help. And the banks, in fact, were the enablers. They were the cause with the exotic products that they had come up with.

We looked at . . .  We said, “What’s going on here? Let’s study up on this. Let’s get some analysts on it.” And they were looking at the very exotic mortgage products that were out there, Countrywide being sort of the poster child for liar loans, you know, no doc loans, no down payment loans, all kinds of different variations of loans that kind of threw out basic banking principles, collateral, ability to repay, etcetera. So we decided to get on our soapbox, and we saw some problems.

We knew there was a secondary market out there where mortgages were being bought and sold in bundles. And I’m oversimplifying that. But the banks had figured out a way to bundle up these mortgages and sell them and slice and dice them in tranches and sell them to investors across the globe. And they had no idea what they were getting.

If the core asset is flawed, no matter how many times you buy it and sell it and slice it up and bundle it, the entire package of mortgages becomes flawed and fraught. And at the very heart of it, it was fraud. So we tried to get out in front of this. We set up task forces across the country. We tasked all the agents in charge to get out in front of this mortgage fraud situation. We talked to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

We talked to some of the banks. What we saw was very little interest in governing themselves, the banks themselves. I mean, I liken it to steroids in baseball. If somebody takes steroids, and hits 60 to 65 home runs that nobody does, and everybody knows what’s going on, and the ones that are supposed to be watching the regulators, whoever they are, let it go, then the honest ones out there are going to either take it on the chin or they’re going to join in.

And, so I sort of call it that ‘steroids dynamic’ that we saw in baseball during the steroids’ era. So we did have several mortgage fraud takedowns at a national level. We used that. We bundled up all these cases across the country, called some press conferences, put them out there and talked about mortgage fraud. And we tried it and we tried to get, alert the public and alert the regulators who were, I’m sorry to say, asleep at the wheel at the time.

They were either outgunned or outclassed or outsmarted because they just, even the ones that were embedded in the banks seemed to not be too concerned about it.  So 2006, we go from 2004, five, six, seven, and it just accelerates. So I retired in 2006 and went to a bank, Bank of America, and oddly enough, I was part of the risk team.

I never once heard anyone discuss the risk of mortgage backed security, which was surprising to me. And now the rest is history. But I’ll pass it off to Paul. And Paul has a lot to say about this. You know, we were the investigators. We were screaming from the rooftops. We were trying to get attention. We ended up, I ended up testifying up on the Hill about this, and we tried to get some attention around it and actually get some resources.

We were not pandering. What we needed, this is the post-9/11 era where criminal agents were scarce, and we had to pass off a lot of our criminal agents over to counter terrorism, to the counterterrorism program. So it came at a bad time. We were undermanned at the time, and we needed more resources, and we asked for more resources.

We went across the street to the Justice Department, asked them to support a budget request or a series of budget requests for at least 150 more agents to work mortgage fraud across the country. Unfortunately, to answer your question, what happened when we asked for it? We heard crickets.

[00:23:07.440] – Black

Can you tell me how many banking regulators called you when the top FBI person said that there was an economic crisis coming because of an epidemic of fraud? You must have been overwhelmed by the calls you got from the regulators?

[00:23:29.780] – Swecker

Nice setup. None, not a one.

[00:23:34.820] – Black

A lot of crickets in this world, apparently.

[00:23:37.310] – Swecker

It’s interesting. I’m not going to name names, but if someone in my neighborhood was the chief regulator for Wachovia Bank at the time and was at the helm when they went down, and he came across, he leaned on the fence one day, and he said, “How do I make a criminal referral?” That was good (laughing) because back in the S and L crisis, they made thousands of them.

[00:24:00.770] – Black

We made over 30,000.

[00:24:02.420] – Swecker

Yeah. So it was apparently a lost art.

[00:24:05.870] – Black

How many criminal referrals did you get from the banking regulatory agencies?

[00:24:09.680] – Swecker

I don’t recall any. There may have been a trickle, but I don’t recall any. They should have been coming in on SARS like a flood, like somebody opened up the spigot, but it didn’t happen, unfortunately.

[00:24:23.830] – Black

Yeah, I think that sets it up for Paul quite nicely.

[00:24:27.940] – Paul Pelletier

Yeah, so I guess you started off in 2004, Chris, and I’d like to start off in 2004, but I’d like to also say that Patrick sort of compared us to the Bronx Bombers. I like more so the comparison to the 2004 Red Sox, who were facing the abyss and hopefully ended up making something from it. But anyway. I’m not a Yankee fan at all, but I just want to back  . . . I do want to back up a little bit.

I’m going to sort of back up to 1984, 1985, because that’s my experience. And I just wanted to walk you through my education about how these complex cases are prosecuted, and what I learned as a prosecutor before I came to Washington. In 1985, I came to Miami and Miami was as, as anybody who reads books or watches the news knows, we’ve been inundated by drug traffickers and drug trafficking.

And as a prosecutor, of course, it was like dying and going to heaven, but at the end of the day, really what was going on is Congress, the FBI, the law enforcers, DOJ, they were all getting together to develop both laws and regulations, but mostly laws in defining how we were going to approach and attack, drug trafficking, so that we could make a difference. And lucky for me, I worked in Miami.

The U.S. attorney’s office has some terrific prosecutors working with the most unbelievable FBI agents I’ve ever worked with. DEA agents, Chris Swecker was one of those where I met Chris Swecker in Miami. And I saw what teamwork could do as it relates to law enforcement and making an impact. And ultimately, Congress gave us money laundering laws and gave us minimum mandatory for these drug crimes, and we were able, I thought, to make a real big impact.

I think ultimately we drove the drug traffickers out of South Florida into Mexico and those type of places. But we were able to use the laws and teamwork and experience to actually make an impact. Now, what else happened during this point in time? Well, in 1988, 89, the financial crisis, excuse me, the savings and loan crisis is going on. And I don’t know Bill Black at the time, but I see these bank fraud task forces and I see what they’re doing out there.

In Miami, we had David Paul, CenTrust Bank, I actually see what in a white collar space, what task forces in concentration of effort and teamwork can do and the impact they make. So that’s just what I’m observing as a prosecutor. I was not a savings and loan bank fraud prosecutor, but ultimately I began to prosecute white collar crimes in Miami. And then in 2002, we fast forward to 2002 and we have the what I call the Enron accounting fraud scams.

I go to Washington, I get invited to Washington to work in the fraud section and participate in an effort to see what we can do to tackle these new accounting frauds that are devastating and damaging our economy. And what do I learn there? I learn the same thing that when you task force agents, when you task force regulators, when you task force Congress to all work together on a particular issue or problem and to train up prosecutors to do that, train up agents to do that, it actually can make an impact.

Well, while we didn’t put as many executives in jail as the savings and loan crisis, we put nearly 1,000 executives in jail. So if I saw actually government working, I saw regulators working. I saw Congress working and I saw the Department of Justice and law enforcers working to actually do their job, make an impact, and make a difference out there.

That seemed to end in 2007 and 2008 when the great economic crisis hit. And I’m going to leave it there for now just because I think there’s probably other places to go. But obviously we didn’t do the job.

[00:28:56.280] – Swecker

Paul, do you remember when this extraordinary meeting was called with all the US attorneys, all the special agents in charge? President Bush came out and addressed us. The attorney general addressed us. And it had to deal with corporate fraud.

[00:29:10.490] – Pelletier

Yes, I do, July 22, 2004. I do remember that.

[00:29:14.310] – Swecker

That’s what an all-out effort looks like. And to your point, you know, this was US attorneys. It was all the other agencies that had anything to do with white collar crime. Some of the regulators, the President of the United States, the attorney general, came together in one place at one time and said, “We’re putting a marker down. We’re going after this. We’re not going to have three-year paper chases. We’re going to have hard hitting, fast moving prosecutions. We’ll roll the middlemen, we’ll make deals. The prosecutors will make the deals. We’ll get to the top, top ranks and we’ll get there quick and we’ll have a visible deterrent for anybody else who wants to engage in this kind of . . .”

[00:29:53.790] – Pelletier

I was there. I was very impressed. And it was sort of what my experience had been in the Department of Justice, what I expected. And I also, just like you said, in Miami, I learned you indict the case, you move, you move, you move, you move. And that’s what we were doing. And I do remember that Jim Comey at the time said, you know, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

[00:30:16.320] – Swecker

I remember that . . .

[00:30:17.280] – Pelletier

These cases have to be made today because the jury’s out there. The people on the juries are the ones being affected by this activity.

[00:30:26.310] – Swecker

Justice delayed, justice denied. Unfortunately, we’re on the tail end of it. We’re the deterrent. If it’s gotten to the FBI and to the courts, then the first two lines or three lines of defense have failed, you know, the lines of defense. This line at the banks or the brokerage house or wherever, the compliance people inside the institution, then you have the regulators, and we’re way down on the other end where if you’ve come to us, you know, we’re trying to put somebody away for a visible deterrent to deter that kind of conduct. Unfortunately, pretty much all of that broke down, right, Bill?

[00:31:01.270] – Black

Yeah, if either or both of you could just briefly mention, explain to an audience who doesn’t know this, the United States is very unusual in its ability to flip witnesses compared to, say, England, for example, where you can’t make the kind of plea deals. So . . . explain how we get to the top.

[00:31:23.140] – Swecker

In any complex case, you need an inside person to give you the playbook, or you can try to do it from the outside. You can try to do wiretaps. You can try to get historical evidence and do a paper chase. We call it a paper chase. If all you do is subpoena, getting using subpoenas to get documents, grand jury subpoenas, they take forever.

The best way to go about it is, if you can’t get a live source in the organization is go after the people who have the playbooks, the sort of in the middle of middle management ranks, if you will, the people that have all the knowledge, the people that are the doers, and they’re the ones that are getting the marching orders from people above them.

You want to basically flip them over to the good side. So, we would make that effort as investigators, and we had to have the consent of the prosecutors and the participation of the prosecutors to do that. So that’s where Paul will come in.

[00:32:19.910] – Pelletier

Yeah. So, Bill, that’s a great point. So in these kinds of cases, as you said earlier, the intent is the big issue, right? So if you’re putting a bunch of papers out in front of a jury, then it’s very difficult to get over that line of reasonable doubt. As Chris said, you need a player. You need an insider that’s going to walk the jury through the criminal activity.

So how do you get that? Well, like you said, well, these defense attorneys sometimes are the first, they’re talking to the executive before law enforcement, but not always. And so what we spent a lot of time doing and conducting training exercises for this corporate fraud task force for this accounting fraud, we would train prosecutors, number one, and agents, by the way, wow important ‘knock and talks’ were in these types of cases where you could actually be the law enforcement agent and you could be the first one on the scene.

So that’s number one. And number two, it’s a different dynamic. When you’re a jury prosecutor, the last person you want to be showing your case to is the defense attorney or the defendant or the target. In a white collar case, particularly accounting fraud or any type of financial crime, what prosecutors do that’s sort of different is that . .  .  I did a lot of these, you do what I call reverse proffers.

In other words, you’re bringing in that mid-level executive that Chris is talking about. And what I’m doing is I’m showing him usually through a PowerPoint presentation how I’m going to convict him. Why am I doing that? I’m doing that because I don’t trust his attorney ever will. But I want to, I need to flip somebody in order to get them to go up the chain, so we can get to the top of the food chain and take out the entire organization, hopefully.

So in a reverse proffer, and we train prosecutors and agents how to do these things, it’s usually prosecutors because there’s always a defense attorney there. The job is to make that target know that you’re going to take this otherwise drab evidence and you’re going to turn it and turn it into a way to convict him, and he’s going to jail. White collar targets don’t want to go to jail.

So my desire, give them one of these reverse proffers was to make that person cry before it was over. And if I did, I knew I had him. But again, as you said, this is how you flip people, because if you’re in a trial and for five days you’re trying a case for 10 days or two weeks and nobody said, “Hey, by the way, we committed a crime and I did it with him, him and him,” then you’ve got a hell of a burden for yourself.

You’re not, you’re probably not going to get a conviction at the end of the day. So in almost all of these cases, it’s vitally important to get someone to say, “I committed a crime and I did it with him.” And that’s what the whole flipping in reverse, proffering thing’s about.

[00:35:19.190] – Black

So a real anecdote out of the savings and loan debacle. Charles Keating was the most notorious fraud. He had a president who was a notoriously tough woman. And two defense counsels we’re talking, you know, for different folks in front of me and saying, oh, one said, “Oh, she’s toward the top. She’ll never flip.” Second one asked, “Does she have children?” And the answer was, “Yes, six and eight,” and then the attorney responded, “15 minutes.”

[00:35:53.020] – Pelletier

Exactly right.

[00:35:53.920] – Black

You have the discussion that says, “I see you . . . this picture of your daughters. They’re really wonderful. You will perhaps be out in time to go to their wedding, but certainly not their prom.” And that has a way of bringing reality to witnesses.

[00:36:12.060] – Pelletier

And remember, a lot of these white collar defendants, even though they’ve committed crimes, they don’t wake up like a lot of fraudsters or like a lot of criminals. They don’t wake up every day and say, “Oh, I can’t wait to go commit that kind of crime of the day. Right? They have convinced themselves to a large degree that what they’ve done is OK. It’s OK. That’s how, that’s their stupid . .  they go to work every day.

[00:36:38.850] – Black

OK, so . . .

[00:36:40.210] – Pelletier

What you do in these reverse proffers is you wack on that. You make them understand how that’s going to be exposed.

[00:36:48.580] – Black

Right. So most of the cases we make by flipping folks when we get the higher level. But let’s briefly tell people the limits of that. What kind of instruction is given when we put that person on the stand?

[00:37:02.560] – Pelletier

Oh, that a person who has pled guilty, that you should critically evaluate their testimony as they have an incentive to not tell the truth. It affects their credibility, all that stuff.

[00:37:12.880] – Black

And because of that, we try to get independent confirmation of events and you do things often in important cases, like even polygraph the person to see what they’re really telling the truth. Right. Not that it’s admissible in court but because you don’t want to sponsor false testimony, right?

[00:37:32.110] – Pelletier

That’s correct. But short of a polygraph, I don’t like polygraphing people. But short of a polygraph, you corroborate the hell . . .

[00:37:38.770] – Black

Exactly

[00:37:39.520] – Pelletier

. . . .what’s going on so that you and again, this is where the FBI comes in, is that they spend a lot of time corroborating the story because first of all, if he’s not telling the truth and you don’t figure that out before you put him on the stand, you’re going to lose the case. Right? So you’ve got to make sure that your witnesses are telling the truth.

[00:37:57.950] – Black

Right. We go back and forth between testimony and documents and we test those kinds of things. But here’s the point. Somebody is much more ideal as a witness and that somebody is one of the major features of the documentary series The Con.

[00:38:15.560] – Pelletier

Whistleblowers

[00:38:16.430] – Black

And whistleblowers come in lots of different flavors, but whistleblowers who were star employees, not disaffected, that got promotion after promotion, who did not take it to the press immediately but did everything internally; and have a documentary record as well as the oral record, and then everything they can testify about makes no sense for an honest bank and bankers. How would you evaluate them as witnesses?

[00:38:51.270] – Pelletier

Well, Enron was that case, right? Enron was started with a whistle blower and nobody believed her. She was that employee that you’re talking about. She was a star employee and she saw what was going on, and she was shunned.

[00:39:06.330] – Swecker

Susan (Sherron) Watkins.

[00:39:08.840] – Pelletier

She ended up being, you know, not only a star witness, she ended up being the truth-teller.

[00:39:15.220] – Black

OK, so what we had in the savings and loan debacle to my memory. I don’t recall a single whistleblower testifying. Zero. Now, I don’t know all the cases because there were over a thousand successful prosecutions, but I know a hell of a lot of them, right? In the great financial crisis, we had thousands of whistleblowers for the first time. Did you have thousands of whistleblowers in the Enron era?

[00:39:46.600] – Pelletier

No. Very few. Very few.

[00:39:50.290] – Black

So what would you, Paul, if you had ever gotten the call, if the bugle had ever sounded to unleash you in effective task forces that we know how to create,

[00:40:03.520] – Pelletier

Yes.

[00:40:03.830] – Black

. . . and how to make them successful, what would you have done? And what, Chris,  if you had still been with the FBI at that point, would you have done in terms of enlisting that army and of the best whistleblowers that you could put on the stand?

[00:40:20.050] – Pelletier

All I can tell you is when I saw that 60 Minutes episode where they expose the whistle blowers in Citibank and I’m like, what, where, what, this is it. This is gold. This is how you make these cases. How who is hiding these whistleblowers? Why weren’t they being brought to the attention of everybody? And I will tell you that I lived it. I know exactly what happened. I know why they weren’t. I know what happened. I know the difference between the savings and loan task force, the Enron task force, and the no task force that effectively handled the great financial crisis.

[00:41:07.160] – Lovell

I wanted to remind everybody that a previous episode featured exactly what Paul is referring to. We just had an hour with Dick Bowen from Citigroup who was that actual guy on 60 Minutes.

[00:41:19.690] – Black

And because I like alliteration, I call it the platinum platter.

[00:41:23.590] – Pelletier

Yeah, yeah.

[00:41:26.240] – Black

So what would you have done with him?

[00:41:29.450] – Pelletier

That’s pretty obvious and pretty simple. The first thing I would have done,

[00:41:33.230] – Black

I’m a country lawyer.

[00:41:35.640] – Pelletier

First of all, I would have said to the FBI why haven’t you brought this guy, you know, what went on, but so so what happened in the, I’m going to call the Enron accounting fraud scandals what we did, as I said, we brought all the prosecutors in. It started with President Bush, right? We brought all the prosecutors, all the agents together and said, “What can we do to make it so you folks know that every day when you get up that your job is to investigate and prosecute these accounting fraud scandals.

And the recipe was fairly simple. Recipe was fairly simple, was, first of all, train prosecutors and agents how to do these accounting fraud cases, alright? It’s about . . . it’s not about accounting standards and not about anything like that. It’s about lying, cheating and deceitin’? How do you prove that people lying, cheating and deceitn’?

[00:42:32.210] – Black

and got rich from it.

[00:42:34.010] – Pelletier

Well, I get it, too. But as you know, at the end of the day, a lot of CEOs, it’s very difficult to put that money directly in their pocket when we’re talking about the great financial crisis. Right?

[00:42:46.730] – Black

Right. It comes from bonuses.

[00:42:48.230] – Pelletier

Right. So what you do, the profits are always gravy. Right? But you’ve got to show the jury where the break was in the crime. Why isn’t it just ordinary behavior – how they lied, how they cheated, how they deceived. And so we trained prosecutors. We worked very hard to train prosecutors and agents how to prove those cases, not to talk about, not to call experts to talk about accounting rules and things like that, because that’s nonsense, right?

And so and then we spent a lot of time every month we would get together at Main Justice: who’s working what case, where is that case going? How come there’s no cases being made here. What’s going on? Do you need any more resources? And so that type of activity is what is what you do when you’re institutionally want to tackle the problem that in the great financial cases, when I’m talking, when I’m telling you about right now, never happened.

So nobody knew where these whistle blowers were percolating up. Nobody knew what the evidence. Nobody knew what was happening in California. What did we see on TV? We saw Countrywide being slapped on the wrist and the CEO of Countrywide being told we’re not going to prosecute you literally 10 to 12 weeks after he took an SEC settlement.

So how does that happen in a world where people give a shit? And I’m just telling you, that didn’t happen with respect to the great financial crisis. We saw it happening in slow motion.

[00:44:24.740] – Black

And two episodes ago in this podcast, the chief whistleblower at Countrywide talked to us about how he could have delivered on a platinum platter, right at that level, the CEO, Mozilo.  He personally had the conversations with him and given the intent being difficult. What happens when we are able to present testimony of the senior people saying, “I brought to attention and I quantified that the percentage of fraud in what in our representations and warranties we’re giving to Fannie and Freddie is 80 percent.” And in response, I got fired.

[00:45:09.400] – Pelletier

Well, that’s not a very good story to tell in front of a criminal jury. And remember the reason everybody I mean, when you watched Lanny Breuer on TV, when you watched Eric Holder on TV, they always talked about was how complicated these cases were and how, you know, lawyers blessed all this stuff. But that was just pure nonsense, right?

In reality, what people were doing was lying about valuations on the front end and lie about valuations on the back end. That’s very easy to prove if you’re a prosecutor, if you have a witness that can back that up. So it was really about lying about valuations – either you’re lying about the value of the stuff as you’re putting it into the market or you’re lying when the market figures out you’re lying about what’s happening to your portfolio as the markets collapsing around.

[00:46:00.410] – Black

And do we have a doctrine that helps us prosecute if the CEO makes sure that he doesn’t hear bad facts?

[00:46:08.890] – Pelletier

Yeah, that’s called deliberate ignorance or willful blindness.

[00:46:12.620] – Black

Yeah, willful blindness as such that we actually get an instruction from the judge to the jurors that this can establish intent, Right?

[00:46:21.610] – Pelletier

Right. And what juries and what common sense dictates is that we don’t have a bunch of people acting in a major financial institution, acting as sort of rogues during these . . . .People know that in these companies, it’s a fairly orderly system. You don’t have a lot of rogue behavior.

And so it doesn’t take juries much to understand that the boss usually knows about this stuff when it’s happening. Because the worst thing that can happen, that could happen to you if you’re an underling is if the boss doesn’t know something you’re doing, you’re going to get fired. So anyway, jurors understand that as sort of a common sense.

[00:47:09.880] – Black

Right. But it’s nice to have a whistleblower who personally wrote to Robert Rubin and to put him on notice.

[00:47:18.490] – Pelletier

Right.  You call him a whistleblower. I call it an eyewitness to the crime.

[00:47:23.110] – Black

I . . . exactly what I would call them if I was wearing your hat.

[00:47:27.700] – Lovell

So, you know, in this incredible revelation of everything that you guys are bringing in now and also what we got on camera when we were producing The Con, one of the things that just dumbfounded me, Mr. Swecker, was when you put into context that you thought La Cosa Nostra was sophisticated, how then would you characterize the CEOs of this control fraud?

[00:47:49.270] – Swecker

I mean. There’s no comparison. I mean, the LCN ply their trade, they knew their trade, it was prostitution, it was gambling, it was labor racketeering and all that good stuff. That doesn’t compare to this type of white collar fraud. It’s very complex, it’s a business-related fraud. It’s fraud in the business environment involving business processes, and it can be an incredibly complex to unravel, hence the need for the whistleblower.

You know, one of the reasons, Patrick, that we went public so, so aggressively was we wanted people out there to know that we were open for business. We wanted those whistleblower calls. We wanted them to come forward and know that it wasn’t going to fall on deaf ears and that the risks they were taking was worth whatever the reward would be.

After, Paul talked a lot about the corporate fraud crisis, after the corporate fraud crisis, they created laws that incentivize whistleblowers. But we just weren’t getting them in the mortgage fraud area. And we really were trying to prime the pump to get those phone calls. And we got a few. The more you need the whistleblower and the more they need the insider.

[00:49:03.980] – Pelletier

Right, because what the whistleblower does is it gets you from A to Z a lot quicker than if you’re trying to unravel it without understanding what the math was.

[00:49:14.690] – Swecker

Let me draw an analogy. I mean, police officers ride around in cars, and they get a call, and they go to the scene of the crime because somebody reported something going on. In the world of white collar, you’ve got to dig up the crime. It’s not going to fall out of the sky. It’s not going to land in your lap. You’ve got to go looking for it, and you’ve got to be sophisticated enough to find the crime.

It’s not coming to you. So you have to go develop strategies and techniques, sort of mine the crime out of all of that other chaff. And that was an incredibly difficult part of the mortgage fraud dynamic. I mean, I think, Paul, we got to it in the corporate fraud area, and I think we threw that all out, all hands on deck, flood the zone effort.

I think we created some very visible deterrents. But then, you know, along comes this other type of fraud. And it’s a whole, it’s a different animal. But but it’s not totally different. What we needed, though, and you pointed it out, was that aggressive prosecutive push, an investigative push and it just didn’t seem to materialize when it needed to.

[00:50:24.510] – Eric Vaughan

Had you received everything that you were, all the resources that you were hoping to get when you, Mr. Swecker, you went to the Bush administration and eventually what would have been to Congress what would have happened? Like what were you, if you got all the resources you were looking for, what might have been different?

[00:50:47.440] – Swecker

Yeah, what we were looking for was the same effort and sense of urgency that we had around the corporate fraud. What Paul is describing is an accounting fraud, the Enron. We had an inventory when I retired from the FBI, we had an inventory, about 400 cases and about 20 of them were losses of over a billion dollars.

And there was, you know, there was a very quick sense of urgency around all of that corporate – Enron was sort of the bellwether case. But for whatever reason, we needed the resources, we needed to get out there and investigate it aggressively. We needed to let people know we were out there. And frankly, I’ll tell you, we had 100, a little more than 100 FBI agents working mortgage fraud.

That was nowhere near enough. 9/11 was an influencer. We were in that, in the, still in the throes of post, the post 9/11 era when it was all about terrorism and counterintelligence. But we needed, we desperately needed another 150 or so agents. Paul can’t prosecute unless we bring him a case. And we needed more prosecutors, too. We really needed that all hands on deck effort.

[00:51:57.610] – Black

Let me put together this prioritization in numbers that you’re talking about from my perspective as a regulator, but also as a criminologist, white collar criminologist. When I was Ed Gray’s principal lieutenant in the reregulation of the industry, he made it really clear ala the Bush speech, your number one priority is getting the frauds out of control of the institution, because as long as they’re in control, they’re going to cause losses to grow enormously.

Your number two priority is to assist in every conceivable way and pressure the Department of Justice to prosecute. Right? So that was our mandate and we created, if you recall, back then, there actually wasn’t even a uniform SARS, criminal referral.

[00:52:54.160] – Swecker

Right.

[00:52:54.610] – Black

We actually created as part of that process, that system, and then we created coordinators in every one of our offices and those coordinators were not little people or people who had failed. They were highly successful people within our organization. And they had responsibility for meeting with their counterparts in the FBI and the assistant US attorneys at least every quarter and on every major referral, getting feedback.

What had we done wrong, what could have been strengthened, how should we make this process work better? And then they would go and retrain our people and make it better. In jargon, this is continuous improvement type system. So eventually on major cases, our criminal referrals were 40 pages long with 200 to 300 pages of attachments, but with super user-friendly design for precisely what the FBI in the AUSA needed. Right?

And then on really big cases, we would detail one of our most experienced examiners to the grand jury investigation. Right? So that the sixties-type secrecy issues, they could continue as the internal expert on banking. And as much as, you know, FBI agents try to get expert, you can imagine we live our lives with financial institutions.

We know a heck of a lot about them, and we know about how to put it into plain English. We picked people that could testify in English as opposed to a whole series of numbers. Right? And at peak, we had 1,000 FBI agents assigned just to the savings and loan case.

[00:54:48.740] – Swecker

We were transferring agents all over the country, nationally transfers to the hot spots.

[00:54:55.010] – Black

Right. And we had in Dallas task force alone 100 FBI agents. But and both of you know this, but to the listeners, but they’re not just FBI agents, right? So we had postal inspectors, we had Treasury specialists, we had IRS forensic accountants specialists, and, of course, this huge contribution from the regulators making all these referrals and then actually testifying in the cases.

And we trained our regulators how to ask the questions in writing and demand written responses. And we had tight questions, not the ones you can evade, in which they either had to admit that they had violated the regulation or lie. And as you know, lying to a federal regulator with the intent to deceive is itself a federal crime. So hundreds of the people convicted in the savings and loan debacle were convicted because they lied to the federal regulators.

Because we actually had rules that you could violate. It was this whole process, it was super high priority. Eventually, it became the thing that if you took one of these top 100 cases, we hyper-prioritized the cases at Justice Department request, the 100 most serious fraud schemes. Six hundred individuals, 300 institutions, virtually all of them were prosecuted successfully with a 90 percent conviction rate.

Again, we need to get across to the viewers, these are incredibly difficult cases. Anybody who tells you bringing elite white collar cases is simple is bullshitting you. But that doesn’t mean if you get really good and do it right, and again, Paul’s lesson, Chris’s lesson, my lesson, we know how to do it right. You can have enormous success. And my guess is that the three of us have all spent many hundreds of hours of our lives training people.

[00:57:09.110] – Pelletier

And so, Bill, I agree with you that these are complex cases, but we’re not putting a man on the moon, right? We’re not the man on the moon. So the way I see it, the way I see sort of the three C’s of success. And what you’re talking about, what Chris is talking about in terms of the sense of urgency and putting and putting the pieces together with the stakeholders, that’s the first thing, that commitment.

You want law enforcement, regulatory and political commitment to tackle the problem. We did not have that in the great financial crisis. There was not a commitment from above. And what’s the second C? You also talked about – is competence. You have competent leaders in charge and you have competent people like you were just talking about, addressing the cases and addressing the investigation from a leadership perspective.

We did not, by the way, in the accounting fraud scandals, we had Larry Thompson, Jim Comey, at least from the from the Department of Justice’s perspective, we had the most competent leadership of senior prosecutors who were empowering us to go forward to do this. So we had the second C as well. We had competence. We did not have that in the great financial crisis in our leadership at all. And then the third component, which I think is the most important component, if you’ve nailed those down the third C is courage.

You got to have courage to bring cases that you just might lose. Right? You just can’t worry about losing. You have to have the courage to do what nobody’s done before. And that was lacking in the great financial crisis as well. That’s the way I think it boils down to that. And I do, I do want to stress is as complicated as these cases are, it’s not putting a man on the moon. There is a recipe to do it.

[00:59:05.240] – Black

I agree. And by the way, our lesson was the same, of course, as you know, we didn’t bring shotgun, super complicated economics cases. We simplified, simplified, simplified. Can we explain in common English that somebody deceived somebody and they did it deliberately?

[00:59:30.090] – Grumbine

Gentlemen, I want to jump in real quick. What I’m hearing here is that these crimes, which affect millions of people

[00:59:37.860] – Pelletier

Tens of millions

[00:59:40.260] – Black

Tens or hundreds of millions

[00:59:41.010] – Grumbine

Hundreds of millions of people, right? These crimes that affect so many people, caused so many suicides, caused so many deaths in general, caused families to break up, caused destitution, caused people to be homeless. Not be able to eat, you name it, all these crimes.

There wasn’t the political will, there wasn’t the courage to chase after that, but yet for the average person who gets arrested for a joint or gets arrested for not paying a fine on time, a $50 fine, or gets arrested for any number of petty, easy kind of clunky crimes, you know, these easy, ah, there you go. Easy takes no political will, no courage whatsoever to attack.

These are the people that are losing their homes. And we have to be able to make them see the tie ins so that they can get angry enough and focused enough and direct enough to bring about what we’re talking about, which is a new modern Pecora hearing. We want to bring justice to this situation. And it seems like you guys are the best in your craft. Were the best in your craft.

Understand this inside and out. You’ve told your story to anybody that will listen. People have not listened. Or if they have, they haven’t put it all together. I’m hoping that at the end of this effort that we’re doing here, that we’ve presented in the combination of The Con, other things that have happened, other newsreels and this series right here, that people will have enough information, enough energy, enough, you know, feel like they can have the courage to push forward and demand justice.

What would you say to an average person who’s watching these guys? Literally, I would call it murder because the deaths are direct from their behavior. Sure. There’s somebody that would fight me over the technical definition of murder, but regardless, I call it murder. What would you say to them as these people walk free? What would you say to them to help them understand and how to channel their anger?

[01:01:47.750] – Pelletier

What I would say to people is what I say to everybody anyway. And look, as a prosecutor for almost 30 years, I prosecuted from street crime, drug crime all the way to a high-level white collar crime.  It is very clear that there’s a different judicial system, a different system of justice for the guy with the joint, the person of lower socioeconomic needs, the person that doesn’t have the money to fight, there’s a different justice system for those people.

And I fought it.  I fought it. But it exists. What I would say to them is when people tell you that that maybe there wasn’t a crime here, maybe it was too complicated, maybe to trust your gut.  That’s nonsense. It is complete nonsense. And you got to demand that our justice system treat the CEO of Wall Street the same as it treats the guy on Main Street selling crack on the corner.

They’ve got to do it, and they can do it. We have the capacity to do it. We’ve done it. So at the end of the day, I believe that people can’t let either politicians or leadership and law enforcement off the hook by agreeing that somehow the dynamic is so different that one you can effectively tackle and one you can’t because we’ve proven that’s false.

[01:03:13.160] – Grumbine

How about you, Chris?

[01:03:16.000] – Swecker

I think you’ve got to get the public engaged in this type of thing. And I think we did a pretty good job in the Enron corporate fraud crisis. The media can help, too. I mean, we have to demand the same type of effort out of our prosecutors, our agents, our regulators, our legislators that we did to take care of that crisis and to get in on the prevention end of it. We can’t forget what happened in 2008, 2009. That’s not ancient history.

We’re in . . . Our mortgage market right now is red hot. Real estate is red hot. And I see the same bubble developing right now that I saw in 2007, then in 2000 . . . in the lead up to that financial crisis. And we seem to be oblivious to it. So it’s the very reason I’m participating in this is because I don’t want that to happen again.

And it really, total awareness, getting the media out there to talk about this again and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Talk about the mistakes that were made back then. That’s what we’re talking about right now. So I just think that total, complete awareness of what happened back in 2008, 2007 and that mantra of never again.

[01:04:41.110] – Grumbine

You know, as I look at the Biden administration filling up the cabinet spaces and stuff like that, I’m not exactly convinced this administration is lining itself up to be an ally in this fight. Would you say that?

[01:04:57.060] – Swecker

Banks have an incredible lobby. They spend a lot of money on elections, and they just finished spending a lot of money. And I worry all the time that they, you know, that money buys you a lot of goodwill in the part of the very people that ought to be going after them when they do something wrong.

[01:05:15.750] – Pelletier

I’m an eternal optimist, and I believe that school’s still out, I believe that the Biden administration can get it right, has the intention to get it right, but I believe how they staffed the Department of Justice and who they put at cabinet levels over the agencies that have responsibility for these types of financial crimes is going to go a long way into the competence component of success in my view. I think it’s possible and I hope that and I certainly hope that they will put the commitment to that effort that’s necessary.

[01:05:53.490] – Grumbine

One final question. You know, when you guys look at the understaffing, I know that Chris made the mention that we were in the midst of, you know, counter terrorism work and having to move agents and so forth there. But do you see a consistent, small, government minded approach to limiting government to the point where it’s ineffective, too small to actually jail, if you will, in this case? Do you see a subversive element there that makes it so that these staffing decisions are such that we don’t have enough air? Or do you think that’s just happenstance?

[01:06:33.080] – Pelletier

My experience has been and remember, the Department of Justice has over 2000 prosecutors.  OK? And so my experience has been that when you have competent people, trained people, people who are up to the job, that they find a way to get it done. Right? Because I, look, I’ve worked in the Department of Justice for a long time.

There’s a good 30 percent of people that don’t do a heck of a lot in government throughout government. Right? So you’ve got to train and empower the people who want to do it. And, so I’ve never been this guy and this guy who says, “Oh, we don’t have enough resources.” Yeah, we always want more resources. But there’s over 2,000 prosecutors across the country that for the most part, most of them took the job to do exactly what we’re talking about.

So it’s a matter of, again, getting them trained up to do it, getting them committed to do it, and then having leaders with the courage to ask them to do it. So I don’t see that dynamic that you’re talking about. But my view, my perspective is just from the Department of Justice.

[01:07:37.940] – Black

Can I tell you from what I think is our joint perspective, but I’ll let people speak for themselves. As you say, lots of people have been trained to believe from the president and the attorney general and the head of the criminal division, either that this wasn’t criminal conduct, or that it was impossible to prosecute, and they are frustrated hearing those things, and they don’t ask the next question:  “Well, then what is your proposal to fix it?”

You know, if it’s this destructive and it’s not currently a crime, what bill are you sponsoring tomorrow that’s going to make it a crime so that we can actually prosecute it? But, I believe, again, speak up if I’m wrong on this, the three of us know that both of those things are untrue.

[01:08:31.670] – Pelletier

Yes.

[01:08:32.420] – Black

They were overwhelmingly crime. And we could have prosecuted them successfully. We knew how to do that. And so for people like us, if I can use the word us, it just . . . . my stomach is sick thinking about this. Because I knew we could succeed and the people at the top never even let us try to succeed. They ensured that we would fail in this response.

In the savings and loan debacle of those thousand felony convictions, to my knowledge, not a single one of them reappeared in the great financial crisis. But in this crisis, now they have all the skillset developed and none of them have criminal records. Incredibly dangerous.

[01:09:30.470] – Vaughan

I think that what we have here . . .  very early on we spoke to a couple of gentlemen from Summit County, Ohio, who successfully prosecuted some low-level players in this crime epidemic that led to 2008. And I think that the question that we ask is, why didn’t this happen on a national scale?

Really incredible thing that we heard here is that we have three gentlemen that represent the fact that something could have happened on a national scale, that these crimes could have been prosecuted, and that that is something that provides me hope, knowing that there’s people like Bill and Paul and Chris that are out there and have been out there who have been working so incredibly hard to make the right things happen that I have to . . . I mean, I’m not going to let go of my optimism that there’s . . . that we can right this shit. And I think that is probably going to be the key things that I’m taking away from this discussion.

[01:10:49.430] – Grumbine

And, Patrick, you had something to say.

[01:10:52.920] – Lovell

Well, I want to add to Eric’s sentiment because we’ve been joined at the hip, Eric and I, literally years and years and years.  We’ve crisscrossed this country, more times than we can possibly count in search of the truth. And, you know, when I grew up, my grandfather always told me that you can achieve anything you want to, but you got to be willing to put in the work. Right?

Never did I think in a gazillion years it would have taken us this long and it would be this uphill of a battle with our partner, Eric, to get to the point of literally talking to the untouchables. Right? Dude, what we are witness to here are the people that should be not just on a podcast between us, but sought after by every single politician who’s ever said that they serve the people of the United States.

I can think about five or six on my hand right now that have told us over the last several election cycles all the stuff that they’re going to do for us, all the stuff that they actually stand for. But did they ever go to these people? No, they didn’t. We did. And so the bottom line is, I hope that our listeners out there will demand that everyone that’s here in this show that they’ve heard, The New Untouchables: The New Pecora Files, gets elevated in a way where it’s like the critical mass has to rise to the level of what this criminality is.

Like Paul said earlier, like Chris said earlier, like Bill said earlier, we’re talking tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of victims of the situation that has gotten completely out of hand. In fact, when we started, I thought this thing couldn’t get any worse. Every day we’re reminded, every day we’re reminded that this thing can get worse and it seemingly is getting worse.

If we don’t step up to . . .  if the professionals don’t step up to the plate to be able to do what we expect of our country. Right? Who knows what happens next? All I care about is the fact that today we’ve delivered on a platinum platter the truth. Now it’s up to the people.

[01:13:00.330] – Grumbine

Yes, you know, and with that, you know, as founder of Real Progressives and the opportunity, the incredible opportunity to be able to be a part of this, I mean, I’m humbled to the point that words escape me. This has been such an education for me from watching The Con series to talking to each of these individuals on this show and to be able to talk to you all offline.

I want to see action come from this. I don’t want this just to be infotainment. I want this to be something that people take and act upon. And I think between us here at RP and others in the alternative media and hopefully mainstream media, hopefully everyone picks up on this, that they take direct action and that we bring this to justice, and we create laws like a new Glass-Steagall that bring this corruption to a halt, stop it dead in its tracks so no one else gets hurt.

But with that, I want to thank each and every one of you all for being a part of this. Bill Black, thank you, sir, for being just a great friend and just a wonderful resource. Paul, it was so nice to meet you on this. Thank you so much for being here.  Chris, I really appreciate you taking the time to be with us as well. Eric, of course, you have been just amazing. And to my team at Real Progressives who has worked on this in the backend.

Every one of you is a superstar in my book. And to our listeners, I hope you take this seriously. I hope you take action, find a way to be a part of this, find a way to contribute, find a way to take this information and get it in other people’s hands so that we can stop this once and for all.  And with that, thank you all very much. Have a great one.