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Sam E. Antar: The Big Fraud Continues

Sam E. Antar
Sam E. continues to malign me as anti-semitic becuase I keep exposing him as as convicted fraudster who stole hundreds of millions of dollars and cannot be trusted
By Edward Manfredonia
December 21st, 2009

[Policing Wall Street]

In a previous piece, “Whitewashing Crazy Eddie’s Cuz Is Insane,” which appeared in The Black Star News on October 28, 2009, I wrote about Sam E. Antar, a convicted felon who assisted in the stock fraud, Crazy Eddie. Crazy Eddie was a stock fraud, which involved the old inventory scam and inflated sales figures.

Like most felons, Sam E. has portrayed himself as the mastermind of the criminal activity in which he participated. Unfortunately for his ego, the real mastermind of the Crazy Eddie stock fraud was Eddie Antar, Sam E.’s cousin and the founder of the Crazy Eddie electronics empire. But the media loves a self-proclaimed penitent and Sam E. has become a media darling.

Sam E. has appeared on Herb Greenberg’s television show on CNBC. Sam E. has appeared on Larry Kudlow’s CNBC television program.

(Greenberg did not respond to my request for comments. A spokesperson for CNBC responded this way on behalf of Kudlow: “Sam Antar has appeared on CNBC once in the last three years to argue infavor of more resources to combat insider trading and stricterenforcement. His convictions were disclosed.”)

Sam E. recently wrote a little piece about Bernard Madoff for Newsweek. Sam E. has been praised in Fortune, December 25, 2007, in an article, “Takes One To Know One,” by Peter Carbonara, and in Crain’s New York Business, in an article, “Crazy Like A Fox,” by Aaron Elstein, on October 4, 2009. I personally debunked the Crain piece in my article, “Whitewashing Crazy Eddie’s Cuz Is Insane.”

But to paraphrase Shakespeare, I have not come to praise Sam E. I have come to bury him; and I shall accomplish this by exposing a dark secret.

Sam E. has publicly stated on various internet message boards that he has donated his time and his wife’s money (yes that is correct his wife’s money) to expose stock frauds and fraudulent accounting practices. Sam E. was very proud of his wife’s largesse and stated that the money came from his wife’s family, which is heavily involved in real estate.

Sam E.’s wife, Robin, was so generous that, according to Sam E.’s internet postings, Robin permitted him to give $250,000 to Barry Minkow, another convicted felon. Minkow masterminded the stock fraud ZZZZ Best, which cost the American public in excess of $100 million in the 1980s. Sam E. said that he admitted Minkow’s prowess in exposing fraud. Of course the money was donated to Minkow’s Fraud Discovery Unit- and not to Minkow personally. And there is an excellent financial reason for that. Minkow’s salary is being garnished because he owes the federal government $16 million, which Minkow illegally earned in his stock fraud.

As for the origin of the $250,000 some internet bloggers have questioned if the money truly belonged to Robin or if Sam E. were passing along money from short sellers and class action attorneys.

There have been some unfortunate developments for Sam E. Robin has not been feeling generous anymore. Or perhaps Robin became too upset with Sam E.’s antics and his addiction to his computer and his internet postings.

How do I know that Robin does not feel generous to Sam E. anymore?

Robin filed for divorce in 2007 in Kings Civil Supreme Court. The index number is 043286/2007.

What does this mean? Well it entails a small discussion of Jewish law. And the last time I explained Jewish law to Sam E., he called me an anti-Semite: Just because I pointed out that Sam E. had violated the Ten Commandments of Hashem as well as many of the 613 mitzvoth, which Orthodox Jews must observe.

Surely you remember the Ten Commandments including: “Thou shall not steal” and “Thou shall not lie.”

Well Sam E. stole and he committed perjury. Yes, he testified against his cousin, but that was after he was given permission by a Rabbi. (This has been recounted in my lawsuit for my FBI files, 08-CV-01678-SLT-LB.)

In Orthodox Judaism, especially among Syrian Jews in Brooklyn, a woman cannot initiate a divorce. Only a man can initiate a divorce. And this is accomplished by giving your wife a “get;” this means that your former wife can remarry.

In Orthodox Judaism divorces, at least those where a man grants a woman a divorce by providing his former wife with a “get,” are decided in a rabbinical court, a bet din. The distribution of property is even decided by the rabbis. Thus, Orthodox Judaism is like Sharia (Islamic) law in many instances with the religious authorities deciding the divorce.

But it is apparent that Sam E. has not granted his wife a “get;” so Robin has sued in civil court.

Matrimonial proceedings are sealed. So, I have not been able to read the court filings. But it appears to me that Sam E. does not wish to let the “free ride” on his wife’s money disappear.

And Sam E. has no assets. Sam E. declared bankruptcy in the 1990s. And Sam E. has not been gainfully employed. Sam E. boasts that he donates his fraud spotting services for free- while being supported by his wife.

Sam E. repeats lies ad nauseam. Even though the Anti-Defamation League has said in a letter, dated July 2, 2007, that my comments about Sam E. and his violations of Talmudic Law were not anti-Semitic, Sam E. has continued to deride me as an anti-Semite- just because I know that a convicted fraudster, who stole hundreds of millions of dollars, cannot be trusted.

In February 2008 Robin filed for an Order of Protection against her husband, Sam E. Antar. Robin withdrew the request for an Order of Protection the next day.

Yet on April 8, 2009 at the request of Robin, Judge Rachel Adams issued an Order of Protection and a Restraining Order against Sam E. Antar.

And this restraining order has remained in effect.

What do Sam E. Antar’s friends, Larry Kudlow, Herb Greenberg, Howard Sirota, and those investigative reporters at Newsweek, Fortune and Crain’s have to say about all this?

Stay tuned and we will find out.

Please post your comments directly online or submit them to milton@blackstarnews.com to avoid truncation

“Speaking Truth To Empower.”

What might happen if U.S. investors learned that the Bear Stearns and Lehman Brother’s statistics were not that atypical when a U.S. corporation falls into the “easy prey” category as they did? What might happen if U.S. investors suddenly realized that development stage U.S. corporations all go through a stage of development in which they present as an “easy prey” to abusive Wall Street insiders and their hedge fund “guests”?

What might the repercussions be if U.S. investors learned that many of their past investments in development stage corporations never did have a chance for success while the congressionally mandated providers of investor protection i.e. the DTCC, the SEC and FINRA sat passively by and monitored the blood-letting? These crimes have to be covered up when the investing public becomes suspicious even if it’s a little embarassing for “securities cops” to proffer that a 151-fold increase in FTDs was “background noise”.

Here’s the rub; by definition these congressionally mandated providers of investor protection cannot simultaneously be in “cover-up” mode at the same time they are supposedly providing robust investor protection.

The sad history of our markets in relation to abusive short selling frauds have our current “securities cops” handcuffed and the perpetrators of these frauds know it. That’s why the gross fraudulent conduct with BS and Lehman occurred without anybody worrying about any adverse consequences. There needs to be a day of reckoning wherein all current FTDs over a certain age are bought in and those shares are finally delivered to their purchasers. This will unhandcuff our securities cops and allow them to shift from cover up mode to investor protector mode.

“In regards to the Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers attacks one might intuit that abusive short sellers willing to induce the triggering of the potential systemic risk repercussions and the inevitable microscopic scrutiny of their actions associated with attempting to take down two systemically important institutions would not direct the clearing of these nefarious trades through the NSCC’s CNS system for all to see. It’s a bit hard to appreciate but the 145-fold and 151-fold increases in FTDs are actually grossly low. The question begging to be asked is whatever happened to the inevitable microscopic scrutiny of the trading data. If it did occur then why were the results covered up?

One must also keep in mind that the 145- and 151-fold increases in FTDs only address those FTDs that survived “pre-netting” at the CNS. One would also have to factor in the FTDs held at trading desks via “desking” or “broker/dealer internalization”, those held in “ex-clearing arrangements” between abusive clearing firms, those held in Canadas’s “Central Depository for Securities” or “CDS”, those held in other clearance and settlement systems offshore, etc.”

“I would refer you in Congress to the results of a very exhaustive “post-mortem examination” performed on these two admittedly damaged corporations by Dr. Rob Shapiro the Clinton administration’s former Under Secretary of Commerce and Dr. Nam Pham released in April of 2009. You can study their findings at http://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-08-09/s70809-2850.pdf.

As you will notice in the Bear Stearn’s attack from the first quarter of 2007 to March of 2008 although “declared short sales” (“short interest”) increased an incredible 4-fold their failures to deliver (FTDs) increased an astronomical 145-fold. Similarly, in the case of Lehman Brothers from the third quarter of 2007 to September of 2008 their “declared short sales” also increased 4-fold but their FTDs increased a mind-boggling 151-fold. Despite these remarkably aberrant statistics to this very day the SEC, the DTCC, the Wall Street lobbyists and FINRA still feel compelled to stick to their story. WHY? What might the repercussions be if the truth be told as to the integral role of abusive short selling crimes in the demise of these corporations and the near demise of our entire financial system? Note that these massive increases in “strategic” (Dr. Leslie Boni 2003) delivery failures in these two corporations illustrate the concepts of “targeting” a corporation deemed to be at least temporarily an “easy prey” as well as the concept of perpetrating criminal activity while “working in concert” i.e. “racketeering”.

Unlike an increase in a corporation’s declared “short interest” even a mild increase in FTD levels might imply the intent to defraud. The benchmark to evaluate in regards to “intent to defraud” issues is the increase in FTD levels above the historical norms for that particular corporation. Perhaps even more impressive than Bear Stearn’s 145-fold increase in FTDs is the fact that this represented a 57-fold increase in FTDs above the previous all-time “high water” mark. Only corrupt Wall Street bankers, “deeply captured” regulators and conflicted SROs in the midst of a gigantic cover-up process could possibly refer to statistics like these as mere “background noise” that should be filtered out.”

We all want to know if naked shorting broght down Bear and Lehman (NSS, of course combined with trading on inside information). If the spike in fails occurs after the price crash, that’s to be expected. A fail is not recognized until several trading days AFTER the trades too place. So the data does not in fact support your argument that NSS trades happened after the crash. When you adjust for the delay in recognizing the fails, the data supports the hypothesis that NSS attacks brought down Bear, Lehman, Fannie, Freddie, abd others, even Goldman was getting hammered until the SEC shut down short selling entirely for a while.

http://www.law.com/jsp/tal/digestTAL.jsp?id=1202438954800&Wheres_the_Beef_in_BeefedUp_SEC_Enforcement_A_QA_with_SEC_Actions_Blogger_Thomas_Gorman

Absolutely. I completely agree. I don’t think anyone would say that speculation alone caused the collapse. There had to have been a number of other things going on.

Anticipating something and causing it to happen are two different things. Sure. Np argument there.

On the other hand, I don’t think people actually know what transactions took place and when. So any theorizing is only that.

If you jump off a cliff, the fact that you had high cholesterol is immaterial to your death, yes. (That’s Ritholtz on his blog, dismissing concerns about NSS – which he treats incorrectly in the narrow sense).

But that analogy can be turned around. Maybe you died because you jumped off the cliff. But maybe, also, an autopsy shows that someone got you dead drunk just before, and then took you out to the cliff at midnight. And maybe that same someone had taken out an insurance policy on you…

And had a history of taking out insurance on people who promptly fell off cliffs.

Wouldn’t that change the narrative a bit?

One more thing. All this talk about needing “smoking guns” to prove guilt is also misplaced.

Not every murderer needs to have been witnessed in the act in order to be found guilty. There is such a thing as circumstantial evidence, and when there is enough of it and when motive and opportunity are also present, there is NO reason to flinch from drawing conclusions.

The rest is a lot of bunkum to confuse people who don’t know better.

Remember, no one really even knows if T+3 is really when these trades were settled. And because of the clearing system, we don’t know how the BD’s wrote off trades against each other. And the records aren’t forthcoming.

Actually, given the magnitude of what happened, if all the relevant parties don’t cough up every scrap of paper or digital finger print remotely relevant to what happened, and don’t scramble to do it, we’re going to have to assume bad faith.

And even if every last one of these gents had only the purest of motives, there’s also the matter of incompetence and negligence of the most colossal kind.

I mean, if you get drunk and drive your truck through a school yard filled with toddlers and kill a dozen of them, the fact that you didn’t know what you were doing isn’t going to be enough.
You’ve been criminally negligent.

So, whichever way you cut it, the Fed Reserve, JP Morgan, Goldman, and some allied funds, are in it up to their necks.

As for the media, enough has been said. In my opinion, some journalists need to be strung up higher than the banks.
Financiers, after all, are money men. No one expects much better from them.

But journalists? Prattling endlessly about the sanctity of the fourth estate, tearing everyone else down, making and breaking careers and reputations, not just in the US, but all over the world – what about them?

Why are they assumed to be beyond criticism?

Where are the resignations?

Wnere is the contrition?

On the contrary. They’re busy making up history out of whole cloth, giving each other prizes, and vilifying the people who got it right!

The sheer gall is enough to make anyone give up in despair.
Except, of course, there were many people who spoke out, who did what they were supposed to do, and who got it right….We have to take comfort in that.

It’s just too bad that it’s not those people who are in the driver’s seat..

Let me ask you a question. Assume an executive of a Investment Banking firm like J.P.Morgan or Goldman or Morgan Stanley knows of a take-over deal that will be announced in two weeks where the stock is expected to advance from 20 to 30 upon the announcement and goes out and buys 3000 calls that are expected to triple when the announcement is made.

Then others find out about the deal and buy 6000 calls and others do spread trades to disguise their insider trades but are still bullish.

Now when the announcement is made these guys make billions. I do not believe that anyone would say that the purchase of the calls caused the stock to go from 20 to 30.

I believe that the large put buyers, and short sellers (both regular way and naked) were trading on inside information, which is done every day. To claim that “naked short sellers” together with rumor mongers caused the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman does nothing more that point the finger away from the true culprits. Those are the ones who arranged the collapse and pulled it off and shorted stock and bought puts prior.

If they looked for inside trading, the finger would point to the Federal Reserve Bank Officers, JP Morgan, Dimon, Paulson and others who participated in the take down. In fact I believe that executives at J.P. Morgan and Goldman were short Bear Stearns, Lehman, Merrill, AIG and others early on, as hedges versus their holdings of their own equity compensation options and restricted stock. The money that was stolen is in the billions, giving them the power to influence corrupt regulators. So we all know that there was stealing in Bears Stearns and Lehman’s collapses, we just disagree on how and who did it.

You are wrong, luvvies….or at least, I am more correct.

Salty language is forgivable, but we cannot suspend the laws of logic (and this is a logical item) even for Roddy Boyd.

When the object of the preposition (in the main clause) is a relative CLAUSE (“whoever is….”) and when “whoever” is also the SUBJECT of the verb “is” in the aforementioned relative clause – then whoever is in the nominative…

If it had been, say, “whomever he met there”, “whom” would then be both the object of the preposition in the main clause AND the object of the verb “met” in the relative clause. Then indeed you would have been right.

Maybe it’s a British versus American thing.
But I don’t think so.

Even if you defend yourselves on the grounds that King James, Defoe, Shakespeare and others have gone with “whom” in similar circumstances (rhetoric being a stronger argument than logic), you will have to contend with the fact that they did so when “whom” was at least mellifluous. That is, their uses SOUNDED right.

But, you’re out of luck on that count, because besides being illogical, ‘whomever’ sounds simply awkward here.

In grammar, go with style..

Lila

Jackson, yes, the language may cross the saltiness line, I agree: It is hard for me sometimes to express my contempt for Roddy (and a few of the other characters involved) without resorting to terms scatological or metaphors involving debasing one’s self for pay. I agree, this is a reflection of my own limited abilities.

Lila, I love your work as well. But I do believe it is “whomever” here (“…would have been a material event for … whomever was then displaying…”). Object of the preposition “for”. However, I also get the subtle humor of your remark, and applaud.

DCN – Right on with the stuff from John Boyd (no possible relation to Roddy, I assume).

Patrick