I know how Joe Hirko can escape his plea deal. He simply needs to claim that there was a secret verbal side deal with the government assuring him that all charges would be dismissed if the SCOTUS remanded his petition.
The government has already established that actual written agreements are trumped by secret verbal side deals. So they would have to let him go!
I must pass this on to Hirko’s attorneys ASAP.
See Dealbreaker. I’m sort of speechless, except to say ew, ew, ew, gross! and yet so spleen-bustingly funny.
Okay! I finally figured out what is going on with Hirko.
There was a time when Hirko, Yeager, and Shelby each had a petition before the SCOTUS at the same time. The SCOTUS decided to hear Yeager’s argument and not hear Shelby’s. They published no opinion on Hirko’s at the time. What we know now is that the SCOTUS held Hirko’s petition pending their decision on Yeager. So now, both Yeager’s appeal and Hirko’s appeal have been remanded to the Fifth Circuit. Shelby gets a chance at the Gilmore level with the option to appeal to the Fifth Circuit.
What does this mean for Hirko’s plea?
This is where Cara Ellison’s heart breaks. The government crafted the plea to lock Hirko out of exactly this eventuality. He agreed to plea guilty, no matter what happened to Hirko’s or Yeager’s appeal at the Supreme Court, and he can not withdraw his plea.
My feeling is that if the Supreme Court decrees that one’s Constitutional rights have been violated, there must be recourse to correct the situation. Hirko pleaded guilty because he was tired of fighting; he wanted this mess to go away. Had he waited, he would have the same shot as Shelby with Gilmore and then the Fifth Circuit. But he was so eager to get it over that he took a plea. The government, possibly fearing that Yeager and Hirko both had a good shot at the Supreme Court, specifically barred him from asserting or correcting the violations to his Constitutional rights. So what happens if Hirko is eventually legal exonerated and yet is still obligated to spend sixteen months in prison? How can that possibly be legal – or ethical?
One possible avenue for Hirko is Judge Gilmore. Gilmore could effectively choose not to accept the plea by refusing to sentence within the plea range. Gilmore originally declared the sentence too light. But the SCOTUS decision could change her mind. It will be interesting to see what Hirko’s attorneys do.
What interesting legal cases the Enron defendants provide. How marvelous. How sad.
Enron was created with the merging of two companies, InterNorth and Houston Natural Gas Company. Before InterNorth was InterNorth, it was Northern Natural Gas Company. The Northern Natural Gas Company is just now selling off its headquarters at 2223 Dodge St. in Omaha, Nebraska.
Besides a little piece of history (which, let’s face it, everything possesses to some degree), the buyer will have more than four football fields’ worth of usable space, plenty of off-street parking and nearly four acres of land. The building carries a $10.95 million price tag, reduced by $1 million over the past year and less than its purchase price of 20 years ago.
The 15-story building overlooks Joslyn Art Museum’s new sculpture garden and Creighton University to the north, the Midtown Crossing development to the west and, to the east, the Missouri River and the central business district.
From some offices, you’d be able to watch the 2011 College World Series, although you’d need a good telescope to see who’s on first.
“I think it’s the greatest view in town,” said John Lund, whose Lund Co. real estate firm is listing the building. “This is a very big deal for Omaha. This is a large asset in a very significant corridor, Dodge Street. It’s a landmark building.”
It’s ready for occupancy almost immediately, Lund said.
All the asbestos in the building has been removed. There’s a fully equipped cafeteria on the sixth floor, and 200 of the parking spots are covered. The top two floors, where executives once presided over more than 2,000 high-salaried engineers and other employees, are linked by a spiral staircase. (Which reminds me of another company… in Houston… that had that same crazy-wacky idea….)
If you’re in the market for a great piece of Omaha real estate, you can do no better than this fine establishment. It is still in pristine condition, says Lund, and is being considered for the National Register of Historic Places.
If I were in Omaha, I would snap this baby up, tear up the first two floors for lofts, and then keep the upper floors for corporate use. But that’s just me. If you have $10 million and a jonesing for a piece of Omaha history, you can do whatever you wish.
Bethany McLean chimes in on the Madoff scandal and has a few more pearls of wisdom about Enron.
And as I had mentioned at the beginning of this, after the sentencing of Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay in the Enron case, I wrote a piece for Fortune saying that the rules—the rules had changed now, and everybody in the business community understood that it wasn’t OK to operate in the grey zone. And what is our financial crisis but a massive case of everybody in the system operating in the grey zone? And so, it turns out that the Enron case really was the canary in the coal mine, and the sentencing in the Enron case did absolutely nothing to deter anybody else from following—from going down the same path.
If only we had listened to Bethany McLean. If only!
This morning, Bernie Madoff was sentenced to the maximum of 150 years in prison for his role in a ponzi scheme that defrauded investors of billions. In every report I’ve read, Jeff Skilling is mentioned at least once. I have problems with the analogy for several reasons, but the most important one is that Jeff Skilling was an employee of a public corporation who functioned as part of an organization (and that’s what his trial was about: whether he provided Enron Corporation with his honest services.) Madoff, on the other hand was an individual and every decision was his alone. There is simply no-one else to blame in Madoff’s case.
What fascinates me is the punishments of both men. Here’s a crude math problem.
Bernie Madoff received 150 years for $50 billion fraud
Jeff Skilling = 25 years for $50 billion (The Task Force never said he was running a $50 billion fraud, nor was he convicted of bankrupting the company, but $50 billion is about what the company was worth when it collapsed, so I’m using that as a nice round number.)
Bernie Madoff will be paying $33,333,333 per year for his fraud. (50 billion divided by 150 years.)
Jeff Skilling will be paying $200,000,000 per year for basically being a CEO who made a few bad business decisions (50 billion divided by 25 years).
Jeff Skilling is 55 years old.
Bernie Madoff is 71.
The average life expectancy for Madoff is 13 more years.
For Jeff it is 29 more years, which means he can expect to live for four years after he is released from prison (as the sentence stands now.)
In 13 years, $433 million will be paid off of Madoff’s sentence.
In 25 years, $50 billion will be paid off in Jeff’s sentence.
Jeff’s time sentence is 16.7% of Madoff’s; however, Jeff’s financial sentence is 1154.7 % of Madoff’s.
This is just cool. The SCOTUS issued no previous order on Hirko’s appeal. The assumption was that they held it, but they never said so. This means they now looked at his case in light of the Yeager decision and have remanded it to the Fifth Circuit.
Unfortunately, his plea deal is ironclad, so he cannot get out of it. But this may help him at sentencing.
More information as it becomes available.
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