NEW YORK -- A Democratic fundraiser was found guilty Friday of engineering a $21 million bank fraud scheme. Courtney Dupree was convicted of vastly overstating the billings of his Long Island City-based lighting company GDC Acquisitions in order to fraudulently obtain a loan from Amalgamated Bank.
Dupree, 42, sat stone-faced as the verdict was read in Brooklyn Federal Court. He faces up to 30 years in prison and has to pay back at least $18 million.
Dupree was done in by a mountain of paperwork, which prosecutors said proved he was a crook, and by testimony from cooperating witnesses who were involved in the scheme.
"This is a case about lying to a bank to get money," Assistant U.S. Attorney David Woll told the jury during the trial. "It is about telling lies over and over again in order to grab millions of dollars of the bank's money."
Dupree, who attended the elite Wharton School of Business, was a rainmaker in Democratic circles. In 2008, Dupree hosted a $1,000-a-ticket fund-raiser for Barack Obama at his Broad St. apartment that was attended by top aide Valerie Jarrett.
His company counted NBC Universal and Goldman Sachs among its clients.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/31/2011 00:00 ||
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#1
Good Riddance.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
12/31/2011 0:22 Comments ||
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#2
Happy new year, Courtney. Maybe rainman BO will add you to the pardon list in a year.
China's leaders are "largely insulated" from the everyday air breathed in the country's notoriously polluted urban environments. "As it turns out," the New York Times reports, "the homes and offices of many top leaders are filtered by high-end devices, at least according to a Chinese company, the Broad Group, which has been promoting its air-purifying machines in advertisements that highlight their ubiquity in places where many officials work and live." "Creating clean, healthy air for our national leaders is a blessing to the people,"the Broad Group claims.
Here, though, we clearly see the value of also adding literature on the politics of this atmospheric phenomenon--the spatial politics of governmentally regulated and maintained spaces of filtered air--as if, again, we might someday recognize a space of Chinese state sovereignty not through such things as armed security teams or surveillance cameras, but through the quality of the air being breathed there. In fact, the spatial relationship between governmentality and the atmosphere only becomes more extraordinary when we put this in the context of Chinese attempts at weather control during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Perhaps the future of state sovereignty, then, is no longer about the terrestrial control of territory--i.e. land--but about, in a very literal sense, who controls the air. The notion of air power takes on a whole new meaning here.
Posted by: Water Modem ||
12/31/2011 02:19 ||
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#1
The government are the only ones with true data about just how bad the air really is. No wonder they insulate themselves from the consequences of their own actions.
#5
I ran into a woman at the grocery store who, like me is a corporate wife. She related that after spending four years in Guang Zho, she had permanent and debilitating lung damage....and they'd lived in the penthouse of a modern building, well above the street level pollutants.
#6
All that bad air drifts out over the Pacific Ocean and then over the North American continent. Got mercury in your fish? It's from Chicom smokestacks. It's just one more of the downsides to letting them do all of our manufacturing. They never met a smokestack scrubber that they like.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
12/31/2011 13:53 Comments ||
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Abu Uluque good point and the cities will be fined for air polution levels being too elevated.
#8
One of the reasons that the US environment has cleaned up since the creation of the EPA (yes, kids, it really has)is that many manufacturing plants were shut down because the cost of upgrading them to meet the EPA standards was too high.
China was willing to step in to take up the slack. Since they aren't burdened by the environmental regulations like we are, the result is what you see in China today.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
12/31/2011 17:51 Comments ||
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#9
Anybody who has lived any length of time in southern California can tell you that the air has indeed become cleaner than it was in 1972 when you could just about cut that smog with a knife...and that was in San Diego...just imagine places like Los Angeles and Houston. Remember folks, it was Richard Nixon who initiated the EPA. Go ahead and vilify him if you will but he did some good things and he was nowhere near as crooked as his predecessor. IMHO, he was nowhere near as crooked as the current POTUS.
So now the Chinese have the smokestacks, the manufacturing and the smog. Hey, I'm all in favor of science, technology and industry. No, I really am. If we'd kept it here and kept it cleaner we'd all be better off. Hey, I'm all in favor of profits too. But you can't go on polluting the environment to that extent. Your workers will die. Besides, do you really want to live all your life indoors breathing air that is mechanically purified?
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
12/31/2011 18:20 Comments ||
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been here in San Diego since I was born - 1959 - and the air, although not quite as bad as Abu says (editorial license granted) his point is quite correct. The air is WAY better than it was in the 70's. The EPA and CARB are agencies with declining "priorities", so they expand their control to justify their jobs. They deserve reduction in staff and budget instead
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/31/2011 18:43 Comments ||
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#11
Remember the Cuyahoga River, the one that caught on fire in the 1960's?
It is now so clean that the unemployed go fishing there to while away the time.
#12
Anyone can find out the air quality in China. There is a live hourly report on Beijing air quality from the roof of the US embassy using US standards posted to twitter. It is here.
http://twitter.com/beijingair
Go look if you are curious.
As the Chinese become more wealthy, they will pollute their environment less. Right now most people there make barely enough money to buy food and housing. The better off are working on obtaining indoor plumbing and electricity. The wealthy are spending their money on education, internet, and cars. Only when most people in China are making $1k a month will they seriously start to care about the environment.
When biggest environmental problem in your town is the foaming rivulets of sewage in the street, people focus on that. Air quality is less important.
#13
AH9418, I went to college in Cleveland, graduating in 1969. I remember how bad the river was, and how bad downtown smelled from the refineries and other plants.
In 1999, I went back for my college reunion, and we had dinner in the "Flats" right on the river. It was clean, and didn't smell bad at all. Of course, all the refineries and steel plants were shut down.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
12/31/2011 22:07 Comments ||
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#14
The MSM-Net once showed lots of fotage depicting Chinese kiddies playing in oir around montains of industrial-consumer waste + multi-colored waters.
As for the CPC Leadership. there are adults + mostly geriatric.
A post on sUAS Newsa blog tracking the "small unmanned aviation system industry"we read about the possibility of drone aircraft being used to enforce residential property tax.
Citing a recent court ruling in Arkansas that "has approved the use of aerial imagery to collect data on property sizes," and making reference to the already-controversial state deployment of aerial surveillance tools, sUAS suggests that drones could someday be used to manage a near-realtime catalog of local property expansions, transfers, and other tax-relevant land alterations.
Posted by: Water Modem ||
12/31/2011 01:27 ||
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#1
Well that'll put a stop to nekkid sunbathing in yer backyard...
#2
Of Course! This is old news since the "War on Drugs" got a ruling that you don't need a search warrant if it is visible from the air.
Miami-Dade county,Fl uses helicopters to look for improvements they can then tax. They flew over the old fish farm at less than 100ft hanging out of the door taking photos. Then the property tax bill comes you are only using 1/2 of the property for agriculture the rest we are going to tax at the residental rate.
I also had a black blackhawk with no insignia fly over the farm one day same MO I just waved at the nice DEA men.
#3
You'd think they'd pick up VDH's comments about single family dwellings in CA being used as duplexes or triplexes for 'migrant workers' by the owners. They could use Google street pics to assess the 'homestead' as commercial rental property and adjust the bill accordingly.
#5
Cities have been using aerial photography for years for zoning purposes. And since they have so many helicopters used for many things, at least in larger cities, this would be for smaller towns, or for state tax assessments.
None of which requires "real time" anything. Once a year is sufficient. The only "real time" aerial use is by police and traffic control agencies.
As an added note, commercial airports hate this stuff, because even with very restrictive flight paths for low level aircraft like helicopters, pilots do not like airspace competition. And the FAA listens to pilots.
(I remember when someone proposed a football stadium right next to Sky Harbor, justifying the risk by saying that "pilots would only have to take off at a 15 degree higher angle and it will be perfectly safe." A major airline pilot got on a call-in radio show, and was so enraged that they had to bleep half of what he screamed.)
#6
Property taxes should be raised on the location value, not what's built on it.
We used to have that kind of attitude till developers started working with local assessors to drive up the price of farm land to force the farmers off of their land cause the return on the farming couldn't pay the enhanced tax bills. States intervened to stop the process to keep active farm land priced according to its use rather than potential at the hands of developers.
#7
Assessments will never go down. Better to rent. Then they will get you for water sewer fees. Trash, phone service, anything to squeeze ya. I wish they would go after the movie stars. $100 million and $45 million for professional athletes.
Greedy CEO's chump change. Well if you live in slum you don't have to worry about all that great American dream stuff. Oh, I am just ranting. With my luck the nekkid sunbathing would be in the 300 pound range.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
NEW YORK -- A Democratic fundraiser was found guilty Friday of engineering a $21 million bank fraud scheme. Courtney Dupree was convicted of vastly overstating the billings of his Long Island City-based lighting company GDC Acquisitions in order to fraudulently obtain a loan from Amalgamated Bank.
China's leaders are "largely insulated" from the everyday air breathed in the country's notoriously polluted urban environments. "As it turns out," the New York Times reports, "the homes and offices of many top leaders are filtered by high-end devices, at least according to a Chinese company, the Broad Group, which has been promoting its air-purifying machines in advertisements that highlight their ubiquity in places where many officials work and live."
