Me, Martoma and the Government’s Dirty Wins, By James Fleishman - Guest Blogger

Progressive Prison Project

Innocent Spouse & Children Project

Greenwich, Connecticut

Me, Martoma and the Government’s Dirty Wins

By James Fleishman - Guest Blogger

James Fleishman contacted us the day after he was "featured" on PBS's Frontline's, "To Catch a Trader."  He shared with us his compelling story - including being misled and misquoted on Frontline. We have since stayed in touch and invited him to write a guest blog. Our ministry's policy is to not comment on the tragedies of individuals - but we make no restrictions on guest bloggers. 

 

Earlier this month former SAC hedge fund manager Matthew Martoma walked out of a federal courthouse in Manhattan, freshly convicted on insider trading charges that will likely imprison him for ten years or longer. His wife Rosemary held his hand as they walked down the courthouse steps.  The press had followed the case closely and the attractive couple can be seen in hundreds of shots outside the courthouse I know so well. In nearly all of these pictures Mrs. Martoma is smiling widely and dressed very fashionably, clutching her husband’s hand. She appears to be arriving at the symphony or ballet, not a federal courthouse.  Her husband always looks much more somber.

Minutes after the jury’s verdict, Mrs. Martoma held her husband’s hand but looked miles away. You could tell she’d been crying. In one picture, her eyes seemed to plead for ‘HELP’ as she stared directly into the camera lens. She looked as if she was the one who’d just been convicted. Looking at her, I thought about my own wife. I was alone when I walked down those same steps after my conviction in September of 2011. My wife was home in California with our infant and toddler.  After seeing the candid, anguished shot of Mrs. Martoma I was grateful for that.

After the Martoma verdict, the press was quick to applaud US Attorney Preet Bharara for his perfect record (79-0) in his crusade against insider trading over the past few years. He’s been on the cover of Time Magazine and he was recently praised in Frontline’s completely one-sided piece, To Catch a Trader, applauding the government’s war on insider trading. Meanwhile, no one has gone to jail for the mortgage-backed securities fraud that crippled our economy, costing millions their jobs and homes. But we’re not supposed to spend too much time thinking about that. The Feds want us to know there’s a new sheriff in town busting the bad guys on Wall Street. Just as the government looked at SAC’s outsized returns over the years with suspicion, the public should understand what has fueled Bharara’s perfect record: cooperating witnesses doing and saying anything to save their own skins.

Cooperators are the bedrock of our justice system.  Sure, if someone is caught up in wrongdoing and looking for a way out I don’t blame them
for agreeing to testify to whatever “facts” the government feeds them. But what happens when the government asks for help from someone who has committed lesser crimes than the government theorizes, or worse, has done nothing wrong at all? These victims of the government must either lie to stay out of prison, or risk their freedom in a rigged game they can’t win.  This type of unjust government overreach isn't just occasional: it is the norm.  It was used to convict me and possibly also Martoma.

As we learned at Martoma’s trial, the only reason the Feds went after him was to get him to cooperate against his billionaire boss, Steven Cohen. When the FBI approached me in May of 2010 they made it clear that it was not me, but my superiors they were interested in. They wanted me to wear a wire to help incriminate the guys who ran my company and in exchange I could have gotten probation.  If I had been guilty or if I had had any reason whatsoever to suspect my bosses of wrongdoing, I would have been happy for this opportunity to stay with my family. The only problem was that I hadn’t seen any crimes at my company and decided I didn’t want to help the Feds ruin more innocent people’s lives. I chose not to lie about my involvement and others but was convicted largely due to the testimony of those who chose the other path.

If you don't believe me, simply check out the public trial transcripts for yourself.  At my trial, government cooperators lied repeatedly and my lawyer demonstrated this to the jury. A guy who worked with me actually “forgot” his cell phone number (even its area code) in order to keep us from proving his lie about a call that never took place. A consultant testifying against me said I recruited him even though he signed on before I even began at the company. Another consultant presenting detailed testimony of my wrongdoing actually didn’t even know who I was before his arrest, and we played a telephone call for the jury where he said just that. Despite the lies, the jury decided to convict me. And those who testified against me, even those who clearly broke the law in the worst of ways, were given probation or immunity.

I have a lot in common with Martoma but there are some considerable differences. Martoma made millions, while my salary never approached anything close to seven figures. I paid for my own defense, which wiped us out financially while Martoma’s team of high-priced lawyers was paid for by SAC. Martoma was found guilty of using inside information to make huge profits for himself and his firm. I was rung up on conspiracy charges. The government said that I helped connect investors with people at my company who fed them inside information but there were no profits directly linked to my involvement. Our clients did thousands of calls a year with consultants.  The FBI recorded all the calls for six months and found that inside information was being exchanged on less than 1% of these calls. I usually didn’t even set up these calls and never participated in them. However the Feds said I knew about these few calls where consultants were giving out inside information. I didn’t. I decided to fight, knowing it would be a difficult battle but one I now understand to be a dirty game that is impossible to win. No defendant has won a criminal insider trading case in New York in over twenty years.

The question everyone wants to know is why did Martoma go to trial? Why didn’t he turn on Cohen and accept the government’s help in maintaining his freedom? Why would a father of three young children take this enormous risk when he simply could have gotten a deal?

Martoma’s lawyers did a great job of discrediting the 80-year-old doctor who testified in exchange for a sweetheart, non-prosecutorial deal with the government. The doctor admitted to holes in his memory regarding his meetings with Martoma from eight years prior but remarkably was able to recall the most damning testimony in the weeks leading up to the trial. Martoma’s multi-million-dollar defense team not only discredited the government’s star witness but used a securities expert to prove the information provided by the doctor had been made publicly available months before. Why did Martoma go to trial? For the same reason I did. I think he believed he could win.

I consider myself lucky. I was sentenced to 30 months in prison. I met guys in prison serving five or ten years on similar conspiracy charges. The Fed’s war on insider trading is nothing but a publicity stunt to win public approval after their failure to catch the real crooks behind the crimes that brought about the Great Recession. Bharara will run for office. Several of the prosecutors have already left for lucrative jobs with marquee firms as criminal defense attorneys. These are the real “wins”. Meanwhile, the losses are piled much higher in broken marriages and homes without fathers. 

James Fleishman is an author, public speaker 

and advocate for criminal justice rights, especially 

as they relate to persons accused of 

white collar crimes and their families. 

His book, Inside Story, is compelling.

Kindle edition available on Amazon.

Walt Pavlo's Forbes column about

James Fleishman is worth reading. 

____________________

Progressive Prison Project/
Innocent Spouse & Children Project
Rev. Jeff Grant, JD, M Div, Director
Christ Church Greenwich
254 East Putnam Avenue
Greenwich, Connecticut, USA 06830
(o) +1203.769.1096
(m) +1203.339.5887
jgrant@pppx.org
jg3074@columbia.edu

Lynn Springer, Advocate
lspringer@innocentspousechildrenproject.org
(m) +1203.536.5508

Affiliates:

First Baptist Church of Bridgeport
126 Washington Avenue, 1st Floor
Bridgeport, Connecticut, USA 06604

Jesus Saves Ministries
784 Connecticut Avenue
Bridgeport. CT, 06607

Cathedral of Praise C.O.G.I.C. Int'l

45 Gregory Street

Bridgeport, CT 06604

The Overlooked Victims of White Collar Crime, by Andrew Schwartz - Guest Blogger

Progressive Prison Project

Innocent Spouse & Children Project

Greenwich, Connecticut

The Overlooked Victims of White Collar Crime

by Andrew Schwartz - Guest Blogger

Andrew Schwartz is a friend & classmate 
from Union Theological Seminary.
A recent conversation in his office at
the seminary led to this important guest blog.

It’s easy to vilify white-collar criminals. Post the crash of 2008, the country cheers in unison when a banker or broker gets what is coming to them. Before 2008, the country either knew or didn’t care about white-collar crime, or they stayed mostly ignorant to the crimes that occurred on Wall Street. 

But in our post-2008 financial crash world, most all Americans know that bankers and stock brokers are criminals, and we Americans are ready to see justice done to them.

While this sentiment is justifiable, we must not let our lust for justice (revenge?) cloud our ability to differentiate between the criminals and their victims. In particular, we need to remember that the victims of these crimes are not simply the ones who were defrauded or stolen from. We must also remember the family members of the white-collar criminals: the wives and children of these men. 

More often than the not it is not just the banker or stockbroker who is punished. It is their whole family. On the heels of the release of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, Christina McDowell, formerly Christina Prousalis, daughter of Tom Prousalis who was a former business partner of Jordan Belfort, wrote a scathing open letter to anyone who would listen. In the letter, she describes what it was like to be an eighteen-year-old girl who was unwittingly made complicit to a series of crimes her father had committed but that she had nothing to do with. 

Unbeknownst to Christina, her father had taken out multiple credit cards and opened several bank accounts in her name to use her as a front for his seedy dealings. When the DOJ came down on him, she was caught up in the tumult and came out on the other side, destitute and nowhere to call home.  She spent years putting her life back in order and now lives in relative anonymity in California. 

Ms. Prousalis is representative of countless others whose only crime was being family with a criminal. It’s something she couldn’t control, let alone stop. It is the same story for so many different wives and children who must deal with the repercussions of their husbands/fathers sins. The criminal’s fate is but for their family members there is often nothing but questions. Almost always, wives who share bank accounts and titles to their home(s) with their now convicted husnadas have their share of the property taken from them as well. The courts choose not to differentiate between the holdings of the husband and wife, quickly leaving the wife with very little. 

In one fell swoop, the life they once knew is gone and it is now up to them to make due with what little is left to the mother to make a life for her and her children. As is unfortunately typical with white-collar crime, the families of the convicted are alienated and shut out of the communities they once belonged to. The friends they once had will no longer speak with them and the church they once frequented no longer welcomes their membership. Mother and children are left alone to find their way by themselves in a world that now no longer cares for them or their well-being.

They deserve it, we tell ourselves, and we secretly revel in their fall from grace. But this is not justice and it is not right. If the wife and children were in cahoots with their criminal father in his criminal activities, then we should place the whole family into custody. Instead, we imprison them in our way through public disgrace and by placing them in the poor house. If the wife and children are truly innocent, though, then it is our duty to insure that they are treated like victims and not criminals. 

We should work to help them transition from their old life into a new one, and be willing to provide mental, emotional, and spiritual support along the way. As Christians, we are called to be with being when they are at their lowest, and to commune with those that the rest of society has deemed unworthy. It is a radical style of love that asks us to look beyond our comfort zone and to welcome “the least of these” into our lives, regardless of who they are or where they are coming from. It is a transcendent love that is willing to extend a hand where no one else will and say, “Welcome, you will find rest here.” 

Andrew Schwartz is a writer and blogger who focuses on
 social justice and interfaith relations. As a Christian Agnostic,he works to find common ground for justice between the religious and religious. A graduate of Union Theological Seminary, he is a staff blogger for the Huffington Postand is currently working on a book project.
You can follow him on Twitter @schwartzajs.
 

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Lisa Lawler left this comment on Sunday evening, Feb. 17, 2014:

Thank you for your thoughtful post. I was a white collar wife and my son and I will forever have to live with the severe repercussions of having our lives pulled out from under us by the thoughtless mid-deeds of my ex-husband. I've been writing a book about our experience for the past few years and hope to finally finish it this summer. I've also written a survival guide for white collar wives and will hopefully also have that published as a companion piece. My goal with my book has always been to take it on the road to companies large and small in hopes that our story might serve as a cautionary tale. I started writing a blog a few months ago but as so many women suffer guilt by association they mainly seem to be in hiding and I've had no interaction. I do hope my book will help flush them out and bring them back into the light. Thank you for remembering that wives and children are victims too. Readers can find my blog @ White Collar Wives Club.


Progressive Prison Project/
Innocent Spouse & Children Project
Rev. Jeff Grant, JD, M Div, Director
Christ Church Greenwich
254 East Putnam Avenue
Greenwich, Connecticut, USA 06830
(o) +1203.769.1096
(m) +1203.339.5887
jgrant@pppx.org
jg3074@columbia.edu

Lynn Springer, Advocate
lspringer@innocentspousechildrenproject.org
(m) +1203.536.5508


Affiliates:

First Baptist Church of Bridgeport
126 Washington Avenue, 1st Floor
Bridgeport, Connecticut, USA 06604

Jesus Saves Ministries
784 Connecticut Avenue
Bridgeport. CT, 06607

Cathedral of Praise C.O.G.I.C. Int'l

45 Gregory Street

Bridgeport, CT 06604