Justice in America

The first principle of "The Law" in America is "never go after the big fish when you can terrorize the little fishes!"

Here's a bit from a NY Times article by Joe Nocera on how the US Justice Department is throwing the full weight of "The Law" against the little people while letting the big, the really big, criminals get off scott free!

In Prison for Taking a Liar Loan

A few weeks ago, when the Justice Department decided not to prosecute Angelo Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide, I wrote a column lamenting the fact that none of the big fish were likely to go to prison for their roles in the financial crisis.

Soon after that column ran, I received an e-mail from a man named Richard Engle, who informed me that I was wrong. There was, in fact, someone behind bars for what he’d supposedly done during the subprime bubble. It was his 48-year-old son, Charlie.

On Valentine’s Day, the elder Mr. Engle said, his son had entered a minimum-security prison in Beaver, W.Va., to begin serving a 21-month sentence for mortgage fraud. He then proceeded to tell me the tale of how federal agents nabbed his son — a tale he backed up with reams of documents and records that suggest, if nothing else, that when the federal government is truly motivated, there is no mountain it won’t move to prosecute someone it wants to nail. And it was definitely motivated to nail Charlie Engle.

Mr. Engle’s is a tale worth telling for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its punch line. Was Mr. Engle convicted of running a crooked subprime company? Was he a mortgage broker who trafficked in predatory loans? A Wall Street huckster who sold toxic assets?

No. Charlie Engle wasn’t a seller of bad mortgages. He was a borrower. And the “mortgage fraud” for which he was prosecuted was something that literally millions of Americans did during the subprime bubble. Supposedly, he lied on two liar loans.

There's much more. Go read the whole article.

But it comes down to "the long arm of the law" going after a petty crook while looking the other way to let the big crooks run free. It is like going after the corner drug seller while ignoring the head of the criminal gang that is bringing in hundreds of tons of drugs and setting up the thousand man operation to push drugs onto the schoolyards of America.

The killer bit of Joe Nocera's story is the extent to which the federal government went to "nail" this petty criminal:

Still convinced that Mr. Engle must be hiding income, Mr. Nordlander did undercover surveillance and took “Dumpster dives” into Mr. Engle’s garbage. He mainly discovered that Mr. Engle lived modestly.

In March 2009, still unsatisfied, Mr. Nordlander persuaded his superiors to send an attractive female undercover agent, Ellen Burrows, to meet Mr. Engle and see if she could get him to say something incriminating. In the course of several flirtatious encounters, she asked him about his investments.

After acknowledging that he had been speculating in real estate during the bubble to help support his running, he said, according to Mr. Nordlander’s grand jury testimony, “I had a couple of good liar loans out there, you know, which my mortgage broker didn’t mind writing down, you know, that I was making four hundred thousand grand a year when he knew I wasn’t.”

It did this while it has let the big shots of Wall Street and all those mortgage broker companies that crashed the US economy (and the world economy) walk free. Free as the birds. No prosecution. No femme fatales chasing after them to get them to whisper sweet nothings about their crimes so that hard-nosed feds can nail them for their crimes.

This is "justice" in America. The big shots dance free while the little guy gets his skin nailed to the wall. Yep... blind justice... blind to the rich and vicious when it comes to petty crimes. Steal a hundred billion and you get wined and dined (and appointed to big government positions in the Obama administration) but be a petty crook and you will spend years in the slammer!