Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Sanford (Sandy) Weill, Appearing On CNBC July 25, 2012
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, there is a right way and a wrong way to help yourself to other people’s money on Wall Street. The right way propels you into the one percent replete with mansions and yachts, your name memorialized on buildings, a golden parachute, an office and car for life fronted by defrauded shareholders and regular invitations to appear on CNBC and lecture others on how to structure the financial system.
Then there’s the wrong way – as Gary Foster found out the hard way in June 2012 when he was sentenced to eight years in the slammer for embezzling more than $22 million from Citigroup and compounding his lack of etiquette in the most unforgiveable fashion – he wired the funds to Citigroup’s arch rival, JPMorgan Chase.
Foster broke multiple etiquette rules for stealing money on Wall Street. First, his crime was too simple. He made it just too easy for prosecutors to explain to a jury how he wired funds from various corporate accounts at Citigroup, using fake contract numbers, to his personal accounts at JPMorgan. A man lacking so little criminal creativity is eschewed on Wall Street; he clearly has no future there so he might as well go to jail.
Foster broke another etiquette rule when he had the audacity to buy a luxury home in Tenafly, New Jersey rather than Greenwich, Connecticut. You’re just not going to build an adequate Rolodex of connections to get you out of jail in Tenafly.
Consider Foster’s simple plan with the bold and wickedly creative plan hatched by Sanford (Sandy) Weill to extract money from Citigroup. Weill’s plan became colloquially known on Wall Street as the Count Dracula stock option plan – you simply could not kill it; not even with a silver bullet. You couldn’t prosecute it because Citigroup’s well-paid Board of Directors was rubber-stamping it.
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