Who says crime doesn't pay?

Life at JP Morgan Chase is very, very good. Especially this week.

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Yes, life is good at JPM. Raking in huge profits, doing god's work, and - oh yeah - getting prosecuted for racketeering.

Yesterday, three traders at JPMorgan Chase, the bank headed by Jamie Dimon, got smacked with the same kind of criminal felony charge that was used to indict members of the Gambino crime family in 2017. The charge is racketeering and falls under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO. According to the Justice Department, the traders engaged in a pattern of rigging the gold, silver and other precious metals markets from approximately May 2008 to August 2016.

One of the traders, Michael Nowak, was actually a Managing Director at the bank and the head of its Global Precious Metals Desk.
...Trunz and the other former JPMorgan trader who admitted guilt said the manipulation was routine, sanctioned by higher-ups and went on for years.

“While at JPMorgan I was instructed by supervisors and more senior traders to trade in a certain fashion, namely to place orders that I intended to cancel before execution,” former trader John Edmonds said at a October 2018 hearing, after admitting to commodities fraud and conspiracy.

Nothing says "one bad apple" like criminal conspiracy charges.
This investigation into illegal price suppression of precious metals has been going on for years. The Justice Department had already brought criminal charges against 16 people, including traders who worked for Deutsche Bank AG and UBS Group AG. Seven pleaded guilty, one was convicted at trial.

I would like to remind the jury of the defendant's history of criminal conduct and general disregard for the rule of law.

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In one chapter, they compare JPMorgan Chase to the Gambino crime family and point out both the similarities and the differences – concluding that both organizations were structured to profit from violations of law. The biggest distinction is the dress code.
... Yet another chapter lays out the evidence which convinced the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations that Jamie Dimon made knowingly false statements to the public about the London Whale losses. With absolute impunity, of course.

JPM paid roughly $20 Billion in fines in 2013 alone, and then came 2014.

In 2014 the U.S. Department of Justice charged the bank with two felony counts for its role in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. The bank put in writing to U.K. regulators that it suspected Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme but failed to report it to U.S. regulators. The bank allowed tens of millions of dollars to be laundered through the Madoff business bank account it maintained for decades. The bank admitted to the wrongdoing but no individual was charged at the bank. The bank was given a three-year probation and handed a deferred prosecution agreement.

The very following year, the bank was charged with another felony for its role in rigging foreign currency trading. It also admitted to that felony charge and was given a deferred prosecution agreement. Its probation for the foreign currency charge doesn’t end until January of next year.

That's three criminal felony counts and probation in the same year.
Let's say you plead guilty to multiple criminal felony counts and somehow stay out of jail. That's a big if.
Then it turns out that you are conducting a criminal conspiracy while under probation for multiple felonies, just how fast do you think they would throw your ass in prison?

Yet Jamie Dimon, who knowingly lies to Congress while running a criminal enterprise, still walks free and gets paid billions of dollars to run a criminal bank that investors love.

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and make my living getting sweetheart deals for bankers as their defense attorney.
Thing is, I have to live with myself.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

dervish's picture

JPMorgan should be doing life upstate with the rest of the scumbags and criminals.

So should any individual officer found to have participated in malfeasance.

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"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."