Penny Pritzker as an example of the criminality of our elites [View all]

[HiPointDem]

Many of you already know that I used to be an economics correspondent, and that I burned out and became depressed watching Wall Street have its way in the early 1990s in what was called, back then, "off balance sheet liabilities" (what we today call "financial derivatives" - the stuff, like credit default swaps, that blew up in 2007 through 2008, and left a dismaying amount of the world's economy in ashes). Well, that's not really the whole truth. About what got me depressed, that is. So, tonight, you're going to learn a bit more...

In a word, the mob. Organized crime. The syndicate. In Chicago, it was called the Outfit. But every major city had its own crime family, or branch thereof. You see, part of what I researched and wrote about in that depressing period of nearly a quarter century ago was how the billions of dollars, nay, hundreds of billions of dollars that were fueling what was politely called mergers and acquisitions, most especially including leveraged buy outs, came from, not entirely, but in large part, organized crime. That included hundreds of billions of dollars that the Wall Street banks laundered from illegal narcotics trafficking, including heroin and cocaine. The beginnings of financial derivatives were closely tied to the mob going legit...

The story of the hour is Penny Pritzker becoming Secretary of Commerce. So, tonight, you're going to learn about the Pritzker family and its fortune. I suspect that it's probably more than you want to know.

The origins of the Pritzker family fortune was her grandfather's mob connections when he was a tax attorney for a lot of people in "The Outfit," the Chicago mob, beginning under Al Capone, and continuing through the 1980s. This connection to organized crime was reportedly what financed the creation of Hyatt Hotels by Penny's father. There was no crime involved, but the financial backing came from organized crime, plain and simple. The details are in Gus Russo's 2006 tome Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America's Hidden Power Brokers. Russo's book is crucial reading for anyone trying to understand why America's ruling elites are, well, so bad...

Before Superior Bank, the Pritzkers controlled Frontier Finance, a loan company in Chicago that one source told Russo "is believed to be the secret to the origins of the family's involvement with criminals." The president of Frontier Finance was Frank Buccieri. And Buccieri's brother was the greatly feared "collector" for the Outfit, Fiore "Fifi" Buccieri, who Life magazine in May 1969 termed "leader of [Sam] Giancana's assassination squads..." Buccieri used a warehouse where he would hang his victims on a meathook...

Is it impolite to ask about the similarities in the business models of Frontier Finance in the 1950s and Superior Bank in the 1990s...? In other words, if you traced today’s sub-prime crisis back to its origins, you would come upon the role of the Pritzkers and Superior Bank of Chicago.... ....it turned out that the Pritzkers were the largest depositors in one of the most notorious offshore tax havens ever devised, The Castle Bank of the Bahamas, which was nothing less than an intersection of the Supermob, known gangsters, pop stars, a U.S. president, and the covert branch of the CIA--all of whom had good reason to hide their money from Uncle Sam...

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/05/19/1210299/-Penny-Pritzker-as-an-example-of-the-criminality-of-our-elites