Want the Hairs on the Back of Your Neck to Crawl?

Brent Baker, proud lawyer for slime

If so, read about how ex-Overstock.com legal brain Brent Baker crowed to the Salt Lake Tribune about his poor, downtrodden, misunderstood client, Stanford Financial's CFO Laura Pendergest-Holt.

Hold on to your barf bags, folks. The woman is innocent. Yessir. A victim of overzealous regulators. And that's not all. Innocent people like Pendergest-Holt and Overstock's fabulously inept CEO Patrick Byrne know that they can get great representation at popular prices!

"We took on the representation knowing the assets were frozen but it goes to the reason why I get a lot of national cases," said Baker. "It's because we can take the risk because I don't have outrageously high overhead. I don't have to have to get millions and millions of dollars up front. If I believe in a client, I'll take a chance."

Baker goes on to wax rhapsodic about his former client Byrne, who waxes rhapsodic right back.

I had been wondering why the stock market conspiracy websites, which ordinarily tie in every Wall Street crime into a grand naked shorting conspiracy, failed to lasso in the Stanford defendants. Now I know why. Pendergest-Holt is good people, as are other ex-clients Baker believes in like Byrne and the Universal Express ripoff crew.

Baker learned to "believe in" these nightcrawlers while working for the SEC. Your tax dollars at work, folks, providing training for lawyers of white collar defendants in years to come.

Baker is a real piece of work. He once had a blog called sectales.com in which he said the following in response to a post of mine talking about his role at Overstock and issuer retaliation:

Guess what? Patrick and the DeepCapture folks are all correct. I saw it from within the belly of the beast and I can honestly tell you that "bent journalists" are more of a problem for our capital markets than "retailating issuers." Give me a break.

He signed this post "Fraudstopper." Seriously. This guy views himself as a "fraudstopper" by mouthing crap like this and by charging popular prices to represent the likes of Stanford's CFO, Patrick Byrne and the Universal Express bunch.

Baker (or his law partners) decided to be the ones to give him a break, by nuking these brilliant comments and what would have been a very interesting blog.

P.S. Baker's ex-colleagues feel that Pendergest-Holt is a "flight risk" who should continue to wear an electronic monitoring device, Reuters reports. I'm sure that in a few years they'll be finding a lot to "believe in" when it comes to the creeps and hoods of Wall Street and Corporate America.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Has the SEC Lost the Scent on Allen Stanford?

Have you seen this man?

Yesterday the SEC pulled out all the stops to announced a three-year-delayed securities bust, involving Allen Stanford, whose $8 billion financial empire is allegedly infested with fraud. Well, guess what? Apparently Stanford has read all that terrific media, because he has gone missing.

Bloomberg says that the crackerjack SEC enforcers have lost track of the gent. Bloomberg reports:

“We don’t know where he is, quite frankly,” said Rose Romero, director of the SEC’s office in Fort Worth, Texas.

Gee, you'd think that the feds would keep tabs on someone engaged in a "massive, ongoing fraud" of the Bernie Madoff variety, as this one is supposed to be. After all, they might flee the jursdiction. Duh.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

The SEC Triumphs on Stanford Financial! Not.

The SEC today is wearing out its shoulder blades today, slapping itself on the back for rolling up an alleged $8 billion fraud at Stanford Financial.

Only problem is that a whistleblower alleged it was a Ponzi scheme in a lawsuit three years ago.

God bless our regulators for being right on top of the job. If they were in charge of the Normandy landings they'd have hit the beaches at about the time of the premier of the Ed Sullivan Show in 1947.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.