Today's Stories

August 14-16, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Fall of the House of Stanford

August 13, 2009

Eduardo Galeano
I Hate to Bother You

Joanne Mariner
Letting Cheney Off the Hook

Michael Donnelly
Burning Forests for Electricity

Norman Solomon
When the Dead Have No Say

Russell Mokhiber
Boycott Whole Foods

Tim Wise
Sick Heil! The Hitlerizing of Obama

Brian M. Downing
Succession and the Pakistani Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Single-Payer and Medicare

David Manning / Miriam Cotton:
Iran Versus Honduras: a Subtle Difference

Martha Rosenberg
John Hughes, Gone With Only 59 Candles

Website of the Day
Congress Can't Find Their As-teroids

August 12, 2009

Michael J. Watts
Nigeria on the Brink

Bouthaina Shaaban
Where are the Arabs to Stand Up for the Hanoun and Ghawi Families?

Ricardo Alarcón
The Cuban Five: Justice in Wonderland

Binoy Kampmark
Terror Australis

Paul Craig Roberts
Concocting the Appearance of Recovery

Alan Farago
Going Down Absurd: the Future of Florida Bay

James Ridgeway
Ghostwriting Your Meds

Dave Lindorff
10 Questions to Ask If You Find Yourself at an ObamaCare Town Hall Meeting

David Macaray
Labor and the Conventional Wisdom

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Assimilation of Niranjan Ramakrishnan

Website of the Day
A Petition in Support of Janice Harper

August 11, 2009

Ricardo Alarcón
Forbidden Heroes

Marshall Auerback
America's Biggest Economic Problem?

Reza Yavari
Inside Iran's Most Infamous Prison

Winslow T. Wheeler
How Congress Pays For Its Pork

Tim Wise
Red-Baiting and Racism

Uri Avnery
A Moral Person

Deepak Tripathi
Getting Away With Torture

Greg Moses
Time to Plan for the Worst

Benjamin Dangl
Boycotting Big Beer

Dave Lindorff
Hecklers Unite! Why Aren't Progressives Disrupting ObamaCare Town Halls?

Website of the Day
What Bush Told Chirac About the Iraq War

August 10, 2009

David Price
Trial by FBI Investigation

Mike Whitney
There is No Recession; It's a Planned Demolition

Alan Farago
Seeds of Destruction: How the National Economy was Wrecked by the Politics of Deregulation in Florida

Conn Hallinan
The Honduran Coup: a U.S. Connection

Russell Mokhiber
Health Care: In Defense of Disruption

Paul Krassner
The Mystery Behind the Manson Murders

Sousan Hammad
Orgy of the Dead: the 2009 Fatah Conference

Jonathan Cook
Israeli School Apartheid

Ira Glunts
Netanyahu's Sister-in-Law Detained by Israeli Police; Calls Evictions an Unjustified Folly

George Wuerthner
Dead Tree Hysteria

Website of the Day
Conyers: ObamaCare is Crap

August 7 - 9, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
It Pays to Have a Nuke

Mike Whitney
Economy on a Scaffold

Elaine C. Hagopian
Obama's Israel Albatross

Carl Ginsburg
RX For Healthcare

Miguel Tinker Salas
Honduras is Only Part of the Story: the Conservative Counter-Attack in Latin America

Saul Landau
The Kidney Broker and the Money Laundering Rabbis

John Ross
The Mexican Genome: Big Science in the Service of Indian Genocide?

Anthony DiMaggio Obama and the Israel Lobby: Origins of Power

John Stanton
Expanding Human Terrain Systems?

Christopher Brauchli Legal Absurdities: Outing Three Strikes

Wajahat Ali
A Muslim American Hero: an Interview with Dave Eggers on "Zeitoun"

Ron Jacobs
As Long as the Wars Continue, We Must Resist Them

Franklin Lamb
Sunday Morning on the Dunes: Cleaning "Free Gaza Beach"

Bruce E. Levine
Protect Us From Our Friends

Michael Winship
Neighborhood Watch for Planet Earth

David Macaray
Glimmers of Hope for Labor?

Stephen Fleischman
Suicide Squad

Robert Bryce
Unplugging the Next Big Thing: the Hype Over Electric Cars

Robert Dodge, MD: Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembered

Mark Seth Lender
The Message of the Glossy Ibis

David Yearsley
Vaucanson's Faun and the Duck in the Attic

Ben Sonnenberg
Chris Fuller's Brilliant Debut

Lorenzo Wolff
When Music's the Character

Poets' Basement
Dominguez and Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Warren Buffett's Betrayal

August 6, 2009

Ishmael Reed
Let's All Have a Beer

Paul Craig Roberts
The Expiring Economy

William Blum Assassinations and Coups: Keeping Track of the Empire's Crimes

Michael Donnelly
Rod Coronado: the Hardest Working Man in Animal Rights "Terrorism"

Jonathan Cook
Rabbis Ban Marriage for Israeli "Untouchables"

Dave Lindorff
The Health Care Reform Sell-Out

Ellen Brown
The Public Option in Banking

Website of the Day
Ellsberg on Hiroshima

August 5, 2009

Dedrick Muhammad /
Barbara Ehrenreich
The Destruction of the Black Middle Class

Norman Solomon
The Incredible, Shrinking Health Care Plan

William Blum
The Myths of Afghanistan: Past and Present

Gareth Porter
The ISI and the Taliban: US Officials Are Protecting Pakistani Aid to Taliban

Mary Lynn Cramer
The Myth of Medicare for All

Jim Goodman
Obama Needs to Take a Stand on Trade

Nadia Hijab
Playing From Strength in the Middle East

Gretchen Kroth
Guatemala's Garbage Dump Education System

Steve Macek /
Scott Sanders
Privatizing the Airwaves

Sarah Lazare
Inside G.I. Resistance

Website of the Day
The Locavore Myth

August 4, 2009

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Shell Game

Dave Lindorff
The Recession Isn't Over, By a Long Shot

Patrick Cockburn
Did British Bomb Attacks in Iran Provoke Hostage Crisis?

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Campaign to Silence Human Rights Groups

Jeff Sher
Making a Mess of Health Care Reform

Dean Baker
Why Don't We Globalize Health Care?

Andy Worthington
Gitmo as Hotel California

Uri Avnery
A Jeremiad

Mark Weisbrot
U.S.-Brokered Mediation in Honduras Has Failed

Alvaro Huerta
Hold That Dustbin! So Much for the "End of Racism"

Website of the Day
Pentagon to Ban Facebook and Twitter?

August 3, 2009

Pam Martens
Millions of Americans Pushed Into No-Law System by Colluding Banks

Anthony DiMaggio
Media Backlash: Obama and the Settlements

Udi Aloni
And Who Shall I Say is Calling? A Plea to Leonard Cohen

Mike Roselle
See the Mountains of WestVirginia ... Before They're Blown Up!

Dr. Susan Block
Beat It! Sex, Death and Michael Jackson

Roy Bourgeois / Margaret Knapke
School of Coups

Joe Bageant
A Yard Sale in Chernobyl

Dina Jadallah
Hiding the State

Dave Lindorff
Of Blue Dogs and Jellyfish

Martha Rosenberg
Grand Closings in Evanston: How the Recession is Hitting Illinois

Website of the Day
Why We Can't "Afford" Health Care

July 31 - August 2, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Biden and Clinton Mutinies

Gabriel Kolko
Searching For Enemies

John Prados
The Intelligence Oversight Mess

Joe Bageant
The Bastards Never Die

Tim Wise
Rationalizing Racial Oppression

Carl Ginsburg
Frist First: Follow the Money (and Find the Plump Heart of "Health Care")

Michael Fox
The Honduran Coup as Overture

John Lindsay-Poland
Revamping Plan Colombia

Michael Winship
Pay-to-Play: Washington's Sport of Kings

Rev. William Alberts
White Men Can Jump ... to Conclusions

Andy Worthington
Judge Orders Release of Tortured Gitmo Prisoner

Steve Breyman
Counting the Unemployed

Cyrus Bina
Racism, Class and Profiling

Missy Beattie
Promises Ignored

Ron Jacobs
Into the Vapid: Consuming the Cultural Product

Willie L. Pelote, Sr.
Party of Concessions: Democrats Never Learn

Lucia Alvarez
Fall of the House of Kirchner? Return of the Right in Argentina

Dave Lindorff
David Brooks' White Guy Nightmare

Lawrence R. Velvel
Madoff: What Should be Done Now?

Omar Barghouti /
Sid Shniad
United for Freedom and Universal Justice

James L. Secor
The Name of the Game is Wipe-Out

Belén Fernández
Zelaya in Nicaragua: Has Another Constitution Been Violated?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Frank Lloyd Wright in Hollywood: the Ennis House as Imperial Ruin

David Yearsley
Beauty in Dark Places: Berlin's Olympic Stadium

Brian J. Foley
Pre-Eating: a Threat to Restaurants Everywhere

Alan Cabal
Onward, Into the Fog: Thomas Pynchon's
"Inherent Vice"

Kim Nicolini
The Way War Feels

Lorenzo Wolff
The Way It Felt the First Time: the Jump Rope Magic of the Shangri-Las

Poets' Basement
Four Poems From the Chinese

Website of the Weekend
Obama's Ex-Doc Knocks ObamaCare

July 30, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Victims of a Covert Tit-for-Tat War

Gareth Porter
Afghanistan's US-Backed Child-Raping Police

Saul Landau
Summer of Denial

Greg Grandin
Honduran Coup Over?

Diane Farsetta
Pentagon Pundits Get a Pass

Stephen Soldz
The King Case, the APA and the Missing Ethics Investigation

Alan Farago
Learning How to Survive in a Depression From "Weeds"

David Macaray
Cops and Labor Unions

Mike Howells /
Jay Arena
Volunteerism Will Not Rebuild the Gulf Coast

Christopher Brauchli
Oatmeal Envy

Website of the Day
Changing the SOFA

July 29, 2009

Carl Ginsburg
Our Crisis, Their Gain

Clifton Ross
From Tegucigalpa to El Paraiso: a Voyage From Curfew to State of Siege

Paul Craig Roberts
How Fake is the "Recovery"?

Franklin C. Spinney
Winning Hearts and Minds, Pentagon Style

James Bovard Lackawanna Six: Bogus Charges and Martial Law

Anthony DiMaggio
Health Care, the Media and Public Opinion

Bouthaina Shaaban
How Will Arabs Wake Up?

Greg Moses
A Catch and Trade Policy for Labor Costs

Wajahat Ali
No Racism in Obama's Post-Race America?

Gary Leupp
Beer Will Not Solve This

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Musharraf, Imran Khan and Overseas Pakistanis

Website of the Day
Why Single-Payer Gets No Respect

July 28, 2009

Jean Bricmont
Bombing for a Juster World?

Uri Avnery
Obama, Netanyahu and the Settlements

Dean Baker
Right to Rent: a Remedy for the Foreclosure Crisis

Heather Gray
Stupid Cop Tricks: Driving Too Close to a White Female and Other Episodes in Racist Policing

Jonathan Cook
Can an "Arab Soul" Yearn for Israel's Anthem?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Beyond the F-22: the Future of Pentagon Reform

Belén Fernández
Thomas Friedman Does Afghanistan

Carl Finamore
The Hotel Workers' Kickass Local 2

Eli Jelly-Schapiro
Striking the World Cup

Harvey Wasserman
We All Stand Before Peltier's Parole Board

Website of the Day
Behind the Wheel

July 27, 2009

Ishmael Reed
Gates: Post-Race Scholar Yells Racism

Patrick Cockburn
Elections Shake Kurdistan

Roger Burbach
Hillary and Obama Nix Change in Honduras

Steve Breyman
Bomber Joe and Russia: Why is Biden Channeling Cheney?

Ramzy Kysia
Gaza: On the Right of Resistance

Stephen Soldz
Will the American Psychological Association Renounce the Nuremberg Defense?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Sexual Hocus Pocus in the Episcopal Church

Greg Moses
The Color Line is Black

Binoy Kampmark
Swine Flu Panic

Kim Ives
Lavalas and Haiti's Student Union Unite

Website of the Day
Meet the Paid Assassins of Health Care

July 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
"A Damned Murder, Inc."

Clifton Ross
Surreal Honduras

Patrick Cockburn
Party of "Change" Challenges Old Guard in Kurdistan

William Polk
Report Card on Obama From a New Frontiersman

David Sterritt
Screening the Politics Out of the Iraq War

Ray McGovern
Hooded in Bush's Hood

David Lindorff
Cops Gone Wild

Hannah Mermelstein
"The War is With the Arabs"

Carl Ginsburg
The Actually Existing Health Care System

Helen Redmond
The Selling of Single-Payer Features

John Ross
The Song of the Guerrilla

Bill Simpich
Fair Play for Cuba and the Cuban Revolution

Mark Weisbrot
Learning From China on How to Beat the Recession

Lee Sustar
U.S. Labor in Crisis

David Macaray
Union Workers Forced to Accept Massive Cuts

Felipe Matsunaga
Obama's Slow (and Familiar) Dance With Cuba

Sara Mann
Why Health Care Will Kill My TV

Martha Rosenberg
Which is Worse? Germs in Our Food or the Antibiotics That Kill Them?

Missy Beattie
Cha-ching Culture

David Ker Thomson
Empty Nest: a Natural History of Now

Ron Jacobs
United4Iran, a Footnote

Stephen Martin
The Crying of Lots 1 Thru 50

David Yearsley
Psst, I Show You a Feelthy Gluck

Gilad Atzmon
Bruno: a Glimpse Into Zionism?

Kim Nicolini
Guilty Laughter in the Dark: Seeing Brüno Twice

Poets' Basement
Kakak and McLellan

Website of the Weekend
Dead Prez: Summertime

July 23, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Masters of Perfidy: AIG and the System

Saul Landau /
Nelson Valdés
Hypocrisy and the Honduran Coup: Term Limits Only Apply When Governments Help People

Jonathan Cook
The Reality of Israel's "Open" Jerusalem

Nadia Hijab
Israeli Warships in the Red Sea

Dave Lindorff
Living in a Police State: the Gates Incident

Laura Carlsen
21st Century Coups d'Etat

Steve Breyman
Bankers Beware?

Ellen Brown
How California Could Turn Its IOUs Into Dollars

Norman Solomon
Spinning Health Care

Jorge Mariscal
Youth Activists Demand Military-Free Schools

Website of the Day
Copy-Editing Sarah Palin

July 22, 2009

Bernard Chazelle
How to Argue Against Torture

Nikolas Kozloff
The Coup and the U.S. Airbase in Honduras

Carl Ginsburg
The Recovery, Phase Two

Clifton Ross
Back to the Future? Return to El Salvador

Anthony DiMaggio
Health Care, Media and the Case for Socialized Medicine

Michael Donnelly
The Whoppers Behind WOPR

Nadia Hijab
Memoirs of a Lost Arab World

Dedrick Muhammad
Structural Inequality: News Not Fit to Print?

Charles Thomson
Cronyism at the Tate

Alan Farago
Ted Williams and the Florida Keys

Website of the Day
Himmelstein: Howard Dean is a Liar

July 21, 2009

Sasan Fayazmanesh
The Iranian Election and Its Aftermath

Uri Avnery
Breaking the Silence on Israeli War Crimes

Dean Baker
Séance on Wall Street

Jonathan Cook
Team Twitter: Israel's Internet War

Dave Lindorff
Saving Private Bergdahl

Andy Worthington
Interrogating the Uighurs

David Macaray
Heat, Dust and OSHA

Carl Finamore
The Deferential Party

Harvey Wasserman
Cronkite and Three Mile Island

Walter Brasch
The Marie Antoinettes of Health Care

Website of the Day
Linebaugh: Magna Carta and the Commons

July 20, 2009

Pam Martens
Judicial Apartheid

Nikolas Kozloff
Honduras and the Big Stick: Obama's Bullish Behavoir in Latin America

Paul Craig Roberts
Threatening Iran

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Policy on China and Iran

Ira Glunts
Netanyahu's Time Bomb: Building in the Vineyard of the Mufti

P. Sainath
Put Your Money Down, Boys

Binoy Kampmark
The Moon Landing and the Cold War

Stephen Fleischman
The First Anchorman

Norman Solomon
Cronkite and Vietnam: Beyond the Hype

Andy Worthington
Predictable Chaos as Gitmo Trials Resume

Ron Jacobs
Out of the Haze, Into the Darkness: Recalling 1979

Website of the Day
Why Publishing Can't be Saved (as it is)

July 17-19, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
"Watch What We Do, Not What We Say"

Nikolas Kozloff
Chiquita in Latin America: From Arbenz to Zelaya

Joanne Mariner
CIA Apples: Bad at the Top of the Tree

Joe Bageant
America's White Underclass

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Road Signs: Wiping Arabic Names Off the Map

Saul Landau
Why So Much Sympathy for Madoff's Dupes and So Little for the Poor?

John Ross
Jurassic Fallout in Mexico

Sue Sturgis
Senator Sessions, Race and Impartiality

Anita Sinha /
Daniel Farbman
The Ricci Case and the Myth of Special Treatment

Peter Morici
Obama's Donut Economics

Pervez Hoodbhoy
Whither Pakistan? A Five-Year Forecast

Ramzy Baroud
Gaza and the Language of Power

Greg Moses
The Real Demand Crisis

Kia Mistilis
The Niger Delta Crisis

Missy Beattie
The Placebo President

David Ker Thomson
How Not to See: Things to Tell Your Eyeballs

James G. Abourezk
Evil Spirits: the Booze Strip in Indian Country

Paul Richards
Why Does Jon Tester Want to Log Wild Montana?

Dave Lindorff
Dark Days for Working People (With Three Small Rays of Light)

Marc Levy
Just Like Hanoi Jane

Matt Siegfried
The Good War Goes Hot

Stephen Martin
Panopticon Blues

Ben Sonnenberg
Sembène's Faat Kiné

David Macaray
Casablanca: When Melodrama Trumped History

Charles R. Larson
A Pakistani, Victorian Novel Celebrating Women

David Yearsley
That's Women for You: Abbas Kiarostami's Così

Lorenzo Wolff
Death Rattle and Roll: the Sound From England's Gutters

Poets' Basement
Payne, Anderson and Williams

Website of the Weekend
Hitler Learns of Sarah Palin's Resignation

July 16, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
What Economy?

Afshin Rattansi Iranian Planes and the Hidden Toll of Economic Sanctions

Gregory V. Button
The Search for Environmental Justice in Perry County, Alabama

Evan Knappenberger
Profile of a Deserter

Michelle Bollinger
Why is Leonard Peltier Still in Prison?

Russell Mokhiber
White House to ABC News: No Obama Single-Payer Doc

Belén Fernández
Iranian Penetration, Oh My!

Alice Walker
What is Torture Like? A Letter to Obama

Nicholas Dearden
Paying the Climate Debt: the G-8's Troubling Model

Albert Osueke
Sotomayor and the Identity Mountain

Website of the Day
Sotomayor for the Prosecution

July 15, 2009

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Assassination Bureau

Vijay Prashad
A Political Recession

Dean Baker
Stimulus Arithmetic

Ray McGovern
Cheney Sweating Bullets

Jonathan Cook
Jenin's Model of "Economic Peace"

David Rosen
Shouts From the Gallery: the Sotomayor Hearings and the Culture Wars

Eric Walberg
Uighurs vs. Afghans: a Study in Contrast

Greg Moses
Three Dimensions of a Complete Stimulus Plan

Sousan Hammad
Decolonizing Israel

Binoy Kampmark
The Trial of Charles Taylor

Tracy McLellan
The Story of My Arrest

Website of the Day
11 Days in Saudi Gitmo

July 14, 2009

Eamonn McCann
The Emperors of Bombast: Bono, U2 and the Crisis of World Capitalism

Joanne Mariner
Obama's New Euphemism

Franklin Spinney
The Taliban Rope-a-Dope

Steve Heilig
Walking Mount Tam: an Interview with Gary Snyder

Ali Abunimah
Hamas' Choice

Dave Lindorff
The End of "Nice" Health Care Reform

Nikolas Kozloff
The Politics of Destabilization: McCain and Honduras

Ellen Brown
From Golden State to Subprime State

Alice Slater
How US Missile Defense Plans Sabotaged Nuclear Disarmament Talks With Russia

Ron Jacobs
Protest U.S. Aggression

Joe Allen
The Fight to Save James Hickman in Jim Crow-Style Chicago

Website of the Day
Mel Brooks Does the French Revolution

July 13, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Essence of the Regime

Mike Whitney
The Deflating Economy

P. Sainath
How the World Depression Hits Orissa

Gareth Porter
A US / Iraq Conflict on Iran

Paul Moore
Rap in the Streets, Rap in the Suites

Tim Wise
Off the Deep End: Private Clubs, Public Prejudice

Andy Worthington Former Insider Shatters Credibility of Military Commissions

David Macaray
Cartoon Voices: Serf's Up in Hollywood

Cal Winslow
The Healthcare Worker War

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Spring in the Time of Obama

Website of the Day
Washington's Deep Game with China

July 10-12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Biden Problem

José Pertierra
The Cuban Five: a Cold War Case in a Post-Cold War World

John Ross
After the Honduran Coup

Conn Hallinan
The Settlements and the Quartet

Nikolas Kozloff
C Street Band: Sex Scandals, Moral Hypocrisy and the Far Right Agenda in Latin America

Clifton Ross /
Marcy Rein
U.S. and Honduras: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Good Neighbor

Carl Ginsburg
Summers' Clouded Crystal Ball

Michael Neumann
Say It Loud, Say It Proud: There is No God!

Gilad Atzmon
The Left and Islam: Thinking Outside of the Secular Box

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Parable of the Golden Parachute

Ellen Hodgson Brown
California Dreamin': How the State Can Beat Its Budget Woes

Jim Goodman
Rural America Needs More Than Listening Sessions

Christopher Bickerton
Europe's New Politics of Hard Times

Wendell Potter
Health Care Industry Adopts Tobacco Lobby's Tactics

Dave Lindorff
CIA Lies: Why Isn't Congress in Open Revolt?

David Ker Thomson
Switchbacking Toward Bastille Day

Anthony DiMaggio
The Michael Jackson Feeding Frenzy

Raymond Lawrence
Michael Jackson as Sexual Pervert: the Calumnies of Peter King

Walid El Houri
Neda and Marwa: a Tale of Two Murdered Women

Stephanie Westbrook
Yes, We Camp

Roger Gaess
The Shades of Highgate Cemetery

David Yearsley
Tara, America's Dream House

Kim Nicolini
Caution: Men at Work, Robbing Banks

Poets' Basement
Five Poems From the Japanese

Website of the Weekend
Free Tiga and Hugh!

Weekend Edition
August 14-16, 2009

A Deadbeat Banker

The Fall of the House of Stanford

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

This is the story of a deadbeat banker. His name is Allen Stanford and he was once known as the $7 billion man. Now, he faces federal indictments that charge him with running a vast Ponzi scheme that bilked depositors out of billions.

Born in Mexia, Texas, the mysterious arc of Stanford’s career sees him rise from burger-flipping gym rat in Waco to globe-trotting banker, a lord of cricket, a friend (and travel agent) of politicians. His robust resume also includes strangely intimate histories with numerous female acquaintances (known in his circle as the “Outside Wives”), as well as the Drug Enforcement Agency.

Blinking stridently on the radar of federal investigators at various agencies for more than 20 years, Stanford’s banking empire was finally shut down in February by the Securities Exchange Commission, which claims, in self-congratulatory language, that Stanford’s fraudulent operations put the “integrity of the of the markets” at risk. Stanford and six of his partners now face an imposing list of charges, ranging from banking fraud to bribery of regulatory officials in Antigua to personal enrichment from the vaults of depositors.

Stanford, who was taken into federal custody by the FBI, denies all. He claims that the sudden insolvency of his banking operations stemmed not from embezzlement or fraud but from, in the words of his lawyer Dick DeGuerin, “the SEC’s heavy-handed actions.” Now there’s a first.

Left to sort their way through the rubble of Stanford International are more than 30,000 angry depositors, many from Latin America, who bought certificates of deposit, and other glittering financial instruments from Stanford-owned banks, only to discover, according to federal investigators, that Stanford had diverted  large chunks of those deposits into his own accounts to support the familiar playthings of today’s high roller: personal jets, yachts, sports teams, restaurants, women and gaudy mansions, including a 57-room palazzo in Coral Gables that is ringed by a moat.

Still, connoisseurs of financial crimes--and perhaps even the principals, themselves--are scratching their heads as to why the Stanford case, with its rich veins of scandal, sex and villainy, has yet to generate the same kind of media and governmental outrage sparked by the crimes of that other master Ponzi-schemer, Bernie Madoff. Some speculate that Madoff picked the pockets of a finer class of clientele: movie stars, writers, socialites, charitable foundations Holocaust survivors. Stanford’s victims, on the other hand, were either Latin American or obscure residents of the Sun Belt with more new money than they knew how to handle. Others hint at an even darker narrative involving the fruitful and symbiotic relationship many off-shore banks in the Caribbean have enjoyed over the decades with certain secretive federal agencies.

* * *

R. Allen Stanford is a large man. Some might call him imposing. He stands six-foot four and is, in parlance of the meatlocker, pumped, whether by hours at the gym or through the targeted administration of certain muscle-enhancing elixirs is unknown. He wears his hair clipped and sports a moustache favored by street cops and certain stars of seventies porn flicks. He once claimed to be descended from Leland Stanford, the former governor of California after whom Stanford University is named—a claim urgently debunked by officials at the university.
 He has a voice like a leafblower. It tends to steamroll people. He is a Texan and proud of it—though unlike many Lone Star tycoons he doesn’t affect the persona of a rancher or oil baron. In fact, he is something of an Anglophile. The England of the Empire, which became the world’s biggest booster of cricket, the game that Britain imposed on its colonies and which they learned to play better, with far greater elan.

Stanford likes the colonial style. His notorious bank in Antigua resembles a colonial plantation house out late Victorian photograph. He is so sensitive on the subject that he once sued a principal at a Catholic school in New York for calling him a “neo-colonialist.” Touchy, in other words.

As a business man, Stanford got his start in the late 1970s in sun-scorched and wind-blasted Waco, Texas, where he set up a network of swank — for the high plains of Texas, anyway — fitness clubs, called Mr. & Mrs. Health. He later changed the name to Total Fitness Center. From these humble beginnings a first-rate hustler was born. This pedigree is scarcely unique in the ranks of global swindlers. Recall that the infamous arbitrageur Ivan Boesky got his start in high finance after bankrupting the family business: a chain of Detroit strip clubs.

A profligate loudmouth, Stanford would buzz around Waco in his Jaguar and make surprise landings at the local football stadium in his private helicopter. “If you looked up narcissist in the dictionary,” former employee Tim Gardner told Vanity Fair writer Bryan Burrough, “you’d probably see a photo of Allen.”

By 1982, it had all gone bust. Stanford’s fitness empire crumbled during the Texas oil recession. The bruised bigwig filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, claiming $13.6 million in debts and only $200,000 in assets. The creditors and investors got shafted and Stanford, after a brief stint slipping meat pies at a place called Junior’s Hamburgers, disappeared.

A year later, though, Stanford resurfaced, running his own bank on the tiny Caribbean island of Monserrat, the kind of indulgent locale favored as a financial safe-haven by swindlers, tax cheats, drug runners and intelligence agencies. Stanford has variously claimed that the six million in cash to start up the bank came from shrewd real estate swaps in recession-battered Houston and from a heaven-sent investment from oil refinery workers in Aruba.

Why smoky Monserrat, the volcanic island with fewer than 12,000 inhabitants? Stanford supposedly fell in love with the island while he was there supporting himself by giving lessons to novice scuba divers. It’s really anyone’s guess.

But this sanctuary was not to be a mere postage-stamp operation, not one of the so-called Instabanks for which Monserrat had become famous in the twilit world of money circulation. Stanford, unlike the vast majority of Monserrat’s 350 off-shore banking houses, actually put a sign on a two-story building and hired local woman to work there, even giving them computers for their desks, but apparently never actually turning the power on. He dubbed his new operation the Guardian International Bank.

Stanford busied himself concocting a Dickensian fable about the origins of the bank—claiming that it had been opened during the depression in 1932 by his barber grandfather Lodis. Meanwhile, his associates in Houston and Miami begin marketing the bank, largely to Latin American clients and Cuban exiles in south Florida, by using sultry young women to hawk the bank’s enticingly high interest rates on certificates of deposit, guaranteed by Stanford to levitate at least two percentage points above the rates of the best American banks. It was called the two-point-more promise, a come-on often paired in ads with a shot of the cleavage of one of the bank’s models.

Silly as it sounds, the scheme worked. In 1989, the year bank’s tiny office was flattened by Hurricane Hugo, Stanford’s Monserrat institution claimed $55 million in deposits. Less than a year later, this figure had more than doubled.

Of course, who knows how closely those eye-popping numbers paralleled the reality in the vaults. The bank’s annual reports were objects of mystification. These crudely designed documents were hastily written after hours at the bank, presenting streams of numbers as opaque as an Oregon fog.

The money was coming in fast and, by most accounts, going out even faster—much of it into Stanford’s personal account and thence into sports cars, jets and a lawn-flamenco-pink hacienda near Houston.

In a mere six years, Allen Stanford had matriculated from the failed owner of a chain of Waco gyms to a global banker with hundreds of millions in assets, on paper at least.

So how did he did he do it? Stanford told friends that he was able to pay such gravity-defying interest rates because of shrewd investments and because of the delightful circumstance that his bank didn’t have to pay taxes in the libertarian paradise of Monserrat. Few swallowed the facile explanation, but even fewer really cared, as long as the money kept rolling in and the authorities, wherever they were, didn’t intrude on the festivities.

* * *

As it happened, the FBI was at that very moment beginning to sniff around the periphery of Stanford’s fishy enterprise, beginning a game of approach-and-avoidance that lasted nearly twenty years. In 1989, while pursuing a wide-ranging, though typically shallow, probe into a panoply of financial crimes being committed by off-shore banks, the feds began to follow the rising tide of Colombian drug cartel money then washing through Caribbean banks. Some of that money led them right to the steps of Guardian International and the Stanford Financial Bank.

When word reached the governor of Monserrat in 1991 that both Scotland Yard and the FBI were probing Stanford and his bank for laundering cocaine money, the government precipitously yanked the bank’s license to do business on the island.

Once again Stanford, expert scuba diver that he is, submerged from public view, only to resurface on the balmy, pink-sand shores of Antigua, another Caribbean island that was virgin ground in terms of nettlesome banking regulations. In the Antiguan capital of St. Johns, Stanford swiftly made an alliance with the fabulously corrupt Bird family, which had run the island as a kind of private holding company since Antigua gained its independence in 1991. The Birds soon unloaded the troubled Bank of Antigua on Stanford. In the steps of this initial foothold, Stanford opened a second version of the Stanford Financial Bank, in a white colonnaded plantation house-style building, a gleaming, Disneyfied caricature of colonial potency.

Not wanting a repeat of his ungracious eviction from Monserrat, Stanford set about showering Antigua with charitable contributions. The financier soon inveigled his way into admired status as the island’s financial patron saint: he built a hospital, libraries, cricket fields, bought the island’s leading newspaper and made multiple loans to the cash-strapped government. Those loans—eventually totaling nearly $90 million—tightly shackled the government of Antigua to Stanford’s fortunes, even after the Bird dynasty’s power came to an end in the elections of 2004.

The largesse paid off smashingly. By marketing the bank’s atmospheric interest rates to Latin American millionaires and businesses, Stanford Financial’s holdings began to soar, hitting $400 million by 1995. This windfall sparked an expansion of Stanford’s operations, as he opened new banks in Venezuela, Mexico, Panama, Peru and Ecuador. To market his operations, Stanford recruited young greedheads fresh from American’s finest business schools. These miscreants with MBAs, working in teams with nicknames like “Money Machine” and “Superstars,” were lavishly rewarded with what some called “banker’s crack,” an unprecedented one percent commission for every dollar they brought into the bank and out-of-the-blue bonuses that included pricey sports cars. The message: sell the product and keep your mouth shut.

On the flip side, employees who asked to many troubling questions about the enigmatic ways the company claimed to be making money tended to get 86’d from the bank, and fast. Many of these hyper-curious former employees, including Gonzalo Tirado, head of Stanford’s operations in Venezuela, conveyed their concerns to federal investigators—usually to no avail.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, a raft of federal agencies, including the SEC, US Customs, the FBI and the DEA, continued to regularly monitor Stanford’s affairs. Curiously, however, these probes did not seem to pick up on the fact that Stanford was engaged in a high-finance hustle, a con which promised a kind of cold fusion of the banking world, offering bottomless aquifers of cash with little or no risk. Instead of busting up this transparent Ponzi scheme, the feds spent their time trying to determine if the bank was serving as a money-washing station for the drug cartels. Lots of trace evidence, no indictments.

For nearly twenty years, the only federal agency that caused Stanford any real irritation was the Internal Revenue Service, which pounced on some disagreeable irregularities in his tax returns. The IRS sued Stanford for failing to file income tax returns in 1990. The IRS alleged that Stanford and his wife Susan, a former dental hygienist, owed the government more than $420,000 in unpaid taxes. Two decades later, the IRS was still hounding Stanford, claiming that he owed more than $26 million in back taxes for the years 1999 to 2003 alone.

The staggering increase in taxes imposed by the IRS roughly charts the meteoric rise in income claimed by Stanford to have flowed into his Antiguan banks. By 2001, Stanford Financial boasted of having more than $1.2 billion in assets. By 2008, this figure had ballooned to $8.5 billion. Of course, when the vaults were opened, $7 billion of that figure ended up missing, filched, according to federal prosecutors, by Stanford and his inner circle.

* * *

As billions began to multiply and the investigators circle closer to the heart of the scam, Stanford bought himself some protection. For one thing, he had deeply penetrated the very law enforcement agencies that were snooping into the seamier reaches of his business empire. As head of his corporate security division, Stanford hired the former chief of the Miami office of the FBI. He also retained Kroll Security Group, the global private investigations company functions like Blackwater for the corporate world. Kroll’s offices are thickly stocked with former spooks and FBI agents. These investments paid dividends for many years.

In the summer of 2006, the SEC appeared to be closing in on Stanford for running his bank as a Ponzi scheme. Then, in the winter of that year, the agency’s investigation was suddenly ordered to a skidding halt by the Bush Justice Department, which told the SEC to back off because another, unidentified federal outfit was involved with Stanford.

Which agency would that be? Speculation has focused on the Drug Enforcement Agency, whose relationship with Stanford stretches back to the late 1990s. In that year, Stanford turned over a $3.1 million check to the DEA. The money had been originally deposited in Stanford’s bank by a notorious Mexican drug kingpin Amado Carrillo Fuentes, known as the Lord of the Heavens.

The circumstances of this transaction remain murky, but the check served as evidence that Stanford’s bank had been a resting place on the migratory path of Mexican drug money. According to an investigative report by the BBC news program Panorama, at the time he turned over the check, Stanford was already working as a paid informant for the DEA, snitching for the agency on the flow of narco-dollars by bank clients from Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico. Sources interviewed by the BBC assert that this cozy relationship bought Stanford a decade’s worth of protection from criminal inquiries by other federal agencies, including the SEC. That was, of course, the same period of time which saw bank deposits and CD purchases soar from $1 billion to $8 billion. Thousands of depositors lost their savings, in part it seems, as a consequence of the federal government’s strange bargain with the brash banker.

Around this same period, Stanford putting high-ranking politicians in his pocket, notably the two Toms: Daschle and DeLay. Stanford’s prime concern at the time was an anti-money laundering bill introduced by Bill Clinton before he left office. Stanford sank $40,000 into Daschle’s “527” senate leadership fund and Daschle promptly helped to kill the legislation in the senate. During the same period, Tom DeLay collected $20,100 from Stanford. The ever-pliant DeLay also racked up beaucoup frequent flier mileage from his eleven trips on Stanford jets. The toilet seats on those jets are emblazoned with Stanford’s logo, a gold eagle.

Up in Miami, Stanford cultivated a relationship with Florida regulators almost as cordial as the ones he enjoyed down in Antigua. In a one-of-a-kind deal, Florida regulators granted Stanford the right to operate in the state as a foreign trust company. As detailed by Lucy Komisar in the Miami Herald, this unique arrangement allowed Stanford’s operation to channel tens of millions of dollars from deals in Florida to accounts in Antigua without reporting any of it to Florida regulators.

In addition, Stanford’s brokers in the resplendent office tower on Biscayne Bay were permitted to sell nearly a billion dollars in bank notes without opening their records to state inspectors cruising for fraudulent sales. Indeed, the transaction receipts from the sales of Stanford CDs were routinely shredded by the firm, loaded into 95 gallon barrels and trucked to the landfill. Florida regulators knew about the document destruction and did nothing to stop it. And those documents — so-called Single - Purpose Trust Agreements—were, of course, the hard evidence of a massive swindle.

Why the mad rush to transfer the money to Antigua? Because down on the island, as detailed in the federal indictment, government regulators were being lavishly bribed to turn a blind eye or two to the looting of deposits and the giant bank's supposedly independent auditors were a tiny firm of locals under the sway of the company. Pity the depositors. For down in Antigua, those CDs did not enjoy the protection of the FDIC insurance. Once the money was gone, there was no getting it back.

“Nobody was even asking questions about it,” said Mark Raymond, a Miami lawyer. “All you had to do was examine those certificates; you would have known they were fraudulent. It was more like Monopoly money.”

* * *

As the clock began to tick on Stanford’s scam, his behavior became more and more audacious. In 2008, Stanford landed his private helicopter on Lord’s, the Valhalla of cricket in London. Stanford hauled out a glass case containing $20 million, the winner-take-all reward for a challenge match between his Caribbean “Superstar” team and the English all-stars. The Caribbeans routed the English in the match, but the real scandal played itself out up in Stanford’s box seats, where he was caught on camera pawing the wives and girlfriends of the English players, including the pregnant wife of wicketkeeper Matt Prior.

“If that was my missus,” one player told the Daily Mail, “I’d have punched him.”

Stanford’s marriage to Susan had broken up in 1999, though she delayed filing for divorce until 2007. Sir Allen (for by now he’d been knighted by Antiqua) had not been a faithful husband. Indeed since the mid-1990s Stanford had entered into long-term relationships with what bank insiders referred to as “the outside wives.” These included another woman named Susan, who lives outside Dallas with Stanford’s 17-year-old son; Beki Reeves-Stanford, who resides in Florida, with her two children by Stanford; and Louise Sage, an English woman who also gave birth to two of Stanford’s six (known) children, Ross and R. Allena.

To this list we can add Stanford’s current girldfriend, 31-year-old Andrea Stoekler, a former Stanford employee. When a federal order froze Stanford’s assets this spring, Sir Allen went into hiding in Stoekler’s mother’s basement in Fredricksburg, Virginia, where he ultimately surrendered himself for arrest by the FBI on June 18 of this year.

For Stanford it ended not with a bang, but with a blogger. His name is Alex Dalmady, a financial analyst in south Florida, who had been asked to investigate the soundness of the bank by a friend who had sunk his life-savings into Stanford CDs. It took the inquisitive Dalmady only a few hours of digging through the bank’s corporate filings posted on its own website to reach the conclusion that there were serious financial hi-jinks going on inside the company. He picked up the phone, called his friend and told him to “take your money out as soon as possible.”

What did Dalmady see that so many others had missed? "There were a number of things that struck me, from the lack of detail to the simplicity of the business model to the lack of sophistication in the language they used," Dalmady said.

Then he wrote up his suspicions in an article titled “Duck Tails” for the January edition of a Venezuelan financial paper called Venecononmia. Even with the Madoff scandal unfolding in New York, the exposé attracted scant attention until it was reposted on an economic blog called The Devil’s Excrement, where the story went global. A few days later Business Week’s Matthew Goldstein published a long piece on Stanford that followed up on many irregularities exposed by Dalmady.

By the end of February, Stanford’s offices were aswarm with SEC investigators and FBI agents, showing up, as usual, about a decade too late for most investors and depositors.

Then suddenly Stanford disappeared from public view for months, into the basement of that house in Virginia, perhaps hoping that this storm too would blow over and he could resurface once again on some island paradise. But it wasn’t to be.

During a perp walk to his bail hearing in Houston, Stanford, with his hands shackled at his waist and dressed in an orange jumpsuit, mugged for the cameras one more time, flashing a louche grin that seemed to say: "Who? Me?"

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is just out from AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net. 

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