Lost Income wrote:Meantime there is no news about Ed & Joel's families planning to suffer any financial hardships.
Nor is there any news about Joel and Ed's families planning to take big fancy trips, purchasing expensive automobiles, big-ticket jewelry or buying blue-chip stocks. They may have done those things in the past. We just have no idea how the Wishners and Greys are supporting themselves now. It is a question that the receiver should have asked at some time.
Tednewsom wrote:worried's meticulous (if necessarily simplified) spreadsheet two pages back calculates the total skim to be $36,500,000.
Which is based on speculation. It's a model, not based on what factually happened, but what could be one result of many different options.
Tednewsom wrote:Are we to assume that two successful con men were simply too old and tired to continue? And that they both agreed simultaneously that the jig was up and there's no use fighting it? Nah. Makes no sense.
Of course it makes sense. They are old men, this had been running for 19 years and they hit a brick wall in attracting new investors - a brick wall, I might add, that you started erecting 5 years ago that probably started Ed and Joel down that dead end. What else could they do?
Tednewsom wrote:why stretch the game out past the point of usefulness? Why knock yourself out for years and be content with a modestly affluent lifestyle? And where did all their dough vanish?
Did they have a modestly affluent lifestyle? I have seen no reports from the receiver's report that shows what Ed and Joel did with the money that they skimmed - other than the Fuel Doctor and Oasis investments. As I pointed out before, Ed and Joel may have spent a quite a bit of money on things that could never be traced or recovered. That interview above was done poolside at the Four Seasons in Hawaii. Perhaps Joel has blown a lot of that money on trips - I doubt that he moonlighted as a waiter and paid for the rooms at the Four Season out of his tips. And Joel/Ed may have spent quite a bit of money on other things that don't retain or create equity. And until there is a definite link made between known assets owned by the Wishners or the Greys and that money from NAS went towards paying for those assets, we are simply making wild-ass guesses.
You keep thinking that the only thing you can do with money is put it into financial purchases or physical purchases. The truth is that there is a great deal of wasteful things out there that people are all too willing to sell you that result in you having anything than a pleasant memory about. But tell you what, there is one thing that may have some value, if they haven't already booted Joel out, and that is the membership at the yacht club in Marina Del Rey.
Tednewsom wrote: don't think I ever used the word "idiots," did I? I truly can't recall. Crooks, yes. Con men, grifters, thieves, criminals, embezzlers, yeah, a number of times. Maybe even jerkwads, heartless bastards, no-good sons-of-bitches, depending on the phase of the Moon. But not idiots. I don't think.
No, they weren't damned fools,...
But they would have had to been damned fools for them to have stashed a ton of money away and then to sit meekly by and face a sentence in jail that may result in them dying there.
Wishner and Gillis did not (again, as far as anyone has found) live the life of royalty and conspicuous consumption. They lived well, but not overly extravagantly.
What are you basing this on? I have yet to see one thing that demonstrates even one thing about how the Wishners and the Greys lived.
Tednewsom wrote:I suppose we can dismiss this and surmise that they were both so altruistic and concerned about their customers that they started dipping into their own ill-gotten gains and paying out the monthly dividends from their own pockets, for the sheer pleasure of keeping their leaky boat afloat.
Why not? You are assuming that they kept this thing going for 19 years, stashing tons of money aside and then going off to jail so that their kids and grandkids can enjoy the fruits of their labor while they die in prison. That is pretty altruistic as well. But Joel, at least from the few anecdotes I have read about him doesn't seem to be the person whose picture you will find in the dictionary next to the definition of "altruistic." Just a hunch on my part.
But in light of that, the middle ground suggests it could just be that Ed and Joel knew that they had a chance to keep this scam going on for a long time if they didn't get too greedy and kept the boat above the waterline as much as possible. That meant funneling most of the money back to the marks, even if it meant having to buy out the wiseacres who were getting suspicious, if not already in the know, about the invisible ATMs. They could skim enough money that would allow them live comfortably, take some nice trips, own a classy auto, keep the wife happy with a new diamond bauble, and get the grand kids into a good private school or university. And hey, once Ed and Joel went to that Big Griftpalace in the Sky, well the whole NAS scam would collapse. But it wouldn't be their problem to worry about anymore.
Of course, they forgot to plan for that non-investor who started asking penetrating questions on Quatloos...
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