The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare

 From the article:

Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as “massive criminal securities fraud” in the bank’s mortgage operations.

And now, with Holder about to leave office and his Justice Department reportedly wrapping up its final settlements, the state is effectively putting the finishing touches on what will amount to a sweeping, industrywide effort to bury the facts of a whole generation of Wall Street corruption. “I could be sued into bankruptcy,” she says. “I could lose my license to practice law. I could lose everything. But if we don’t start speaking up, then this really is all we’re going to get: the biggest financial cover-up in history.”

They’re gonna destroy her for that … sooner or later. The elitists are ‘patient’.


JPMorgan whistle-blower Alayne Fleischmann
Chase whistle-blower Alayne Fleischmann risked it all.

The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare (Rolling Stone, Nov 6, 2014):

By Matt Taibbi

She tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn’t take it anymore.

“It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street,” she says. “I thought, ‘I can’t sit by any longer.'”

Fleischmann is a tall, thin, quick-witted securities lawyer in her late thirties, with long blond hair, pale-blue eyes and an infectious sense of humor that has survived some very tough times. She’s had to struggle to find work despite some striking skills and qualifications, a common symptom of a not-so-common condition called being a whistle-blower.

Fleischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing.

Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as “massive criminal securities fraud” in the bank’s mortgage operations.

Thanks to a confidentiality agreement, she’s kept her mouth shut since then. “My closest family and friends don’t know what I’ve been living with,” she says. “Even my brother will only find out for the first time when he sees this interview.”

Six years after the crisis that cratered the global economy, it’s not exactly news that the country’s biggest banks stole on a grand scale. That’s why the more important part of Fleischmann’s story is in the pains Chase and the Justice Department took to silence her.

She was blocked at every turn: by asleep-on-the-job regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, by a court system that allowed Chase to use its billions to bury her evidence, and, finally, by officials like outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, the chief architect of the crazily elaborate government policy of surrender, secrecy and cover-up. “Every time I had a chance to talk, something always got in the way,” Fleischmann says.

This past year she watched as Holder’s Justice Department struck a series of historic settlement deals with Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America. The root bargain in these deals was cash for secrecy. The banks paid big fines, without trials or even judges – only secret negotiations that typically ended with the public shown nothing but vague, quasi-official papers called “statements of facts,” which were conveniently devoid of anything like actual facts.

And now, with Holder about to leave office and his Justice Department reportedly wrapping up its final settlements, the state is effectively putting the finishing touches on what will amount to a sweeping, industrywide effort to bury the facts of a whole generation of Wall Street corruption. “I could be sued into bankruptcy,” she says. “I could lose my license to practice law. I could lose everything. But if we don’t start speaking up, then this really is all we’re going to get: the biggest financial cover-up in history.”

Alayne Fleischmann grew up in Terrace, British Columbia, a snowbound valley town just a brisk 18-hour drive north of Vancouver. She excelled at school from a young age, making her way to Cornell Law School and then to Wall Street. Her decision to go into finance surprised those closest to her, as she had always had more idealistic ambitions. “I helped lead a group that wrote briefs to the Human Rights Chamber for those affected by ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” she says. “My whole life prior to moving into securities law was human rights work.”

But she had student loans to pay off, and so when Wall Street came knocking, that was that. But it wasn’t like she was dragged into high finance kicking and screaming. She found she had a genuine passion for securities law and felt strongly she was doing a good thing. “There was nothing shady about the field back then,” she says. “It was very respectable.”

In 2006, after a few years at a white-shoe law firm, Fleischmann ended up at Chase. The mortgage market was white-hot. Banks like Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup were furiously buying up huge pools of home loans and repackaging them as mortgage securities. Like soybeans in processed food, these synthesized financial products wound up in everything, whether you knew it or not: your state’s pension fund, another state’s workers’ compensation fund, maybe even the portfolio of the insurance company you were counting on to support your family if you got hit by a bus.

As a transaction manager, Fleischmann functioned as a kind of quality-control officer. Her main job was to help make sure the bank didn’t buy spoiled merchandise before it got tossed into the meat grinder and sold out the other end.

A few months into her tenure, Fleischmann would later testify in a DOJ deposition, the bank hired a new manager for diligence, the group in charge of reviewing and clearing loans. Fleischmann quickly ran into a problem with this manager, technically one of her superiors. She says he told her and other employees to stop sending him e-mails. The department, it seemed, was wary of putting anything in writing when it came to its mortgage deals.

“If you sent him an e-mail, he would actually come out and yell at you,” she recalls. “The whole point of having a compliance and diligence group is to have policies that are set out clearly in writing. So to have exactly the opposite of that – that was very worrisome.” One former high-ranking federal prosecutor said that if he were taking a criminal case to trial, the information about this e-mail policy would be crucial. “I would begin and end my opening statement with that,” he says. “It shows these people knew what they were doing and were trying not to get caught.”

In late 2006, not long after the “no e-mail” policy was implemented, Fleischmann and her group were asked to evaluate a packet of home loans from a mortgage originator called GreenPoint that was collectively worth about $900 million. Almost immediately, Fleischmann and some of the diligence managers who worked alongside her began to notice serious problems with this particular package of loans.

Jamie Dimon cufflinks - The seal reads Seal of the President of the United States and includes the arrow-carrying eagle

Jamie Dimon cufflinks - The seal reads Seal of the President of the United States and includes the arrow-carrying eagle-2

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1 thought on “The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare”

  1. The corrupt government will protect JP Morgan. The bankers now own the US. Debt is 100% of GDP, that means every cent that comes in is owed elsewhere. Instead of raising taxes, or charging the greedy guts for their wars, the idiots in power continue their mad spending of money we no longer have.

    The FED cut off QE a year and a half ahead of schedule. They are a private bank. As long as the US was the world reserve currency, they were safe. Now, that only 33% of the world uses the dollar, 67% do not, the FED is getting nervous. They are also paying the interest on the national debt, currently at 434 billion dollars…..or better than 6 months of QE……at some point, they are going to cut that off, too.

    Then, the US will find out what it is like for other countries trying to get money from these bloodsuckers……….and only then.

    The next domino to fall will be one or more of the EU states to drop the dollar for BRICS. When that happens, the dollar will collapse.

    One good thing, the US won’t be able to finance more greedy gut wars. Bad side is that the nation will be totally and completely bankrupt.

    I have been warning of this since early 2010 when Hugo Chavez introduced the first electronic currency, the Sucre, for his tiny organization, the South American Trade Alliance. It allowed all member nations to trade with each other using their own currencies, leaving the dollar out. I knew that was the beginning, and I wrote of it at the time in early Summer of 2010. In November, 2010, Russia and China adopted the same system, and I knew we were in trouble. If I know it, why don’t they?

    Reply

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