A construction official falsely billed $1.2 million for supplies not delivered to clean up a toxic ground zero skyscraper in exchange for cash, clothes and trips to the Caribbean, prosecutors said Tuesday.
Robert Chiarappa was the purchasing agent for the John Galt Corp., which was hired to clean up the former Deutsche Bank tower after it was heavily damaged in the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center across the street.
Prosecutors said Chiarappa told companies to submit phony bills for plastic sheeting, safety equipment, gloves and protective clothing; he signed off on the invoices and used his take of the payments to pay credit card bills, lease luxury automobiles and take a vacation….
The company he worked for was fired from the cleanup job and later indicted on manslaughter charges for a 2007 fire that killed two firefighters at the skyscraper. The criminal investigation of the fire uncovered evidence of the theft....
Entrepreneurialism!
I had to check the AP source because I really didn't believe it. John Galt Corp.? Un fucking believable.
ReplyDeleteMs. Rand, welcome to reality.
I had the same thought. Clearly someone is an admirer of Rand.
ReplyDelete> Entrepreneurialism!
ReplyDeleteWell, yes. As long as you don't get caught with
your hand in the till, that's exactly what it is!
-------------------------
In her journal circa 1928 Rand quoted the statement,
"What is good for me is right," a credo attributed to a
prominent figure of the day, William Edward Hickman.
Her response was enthusiastic. "The best and strongest
expression of a real man's psychology I have heard,"
she exulted. (Quoted in Ryan, citing Journals of Ayn Rand,
pp. 21-22.)
At the time, she was planning a novel that was to be
titled _The Little Street_, the projected hero of which was
named Danny Renahan. According to Rand scholar
Chris Matthew Sciabarra, she deliberately modeled
Renahan - intended to be her first sketch of her ideal
man - after this same William Edward Hickman. Renahan,
she enthuses in another journal entry, "is born with
a wonderful, free, light consciousness -- [resulting from]
the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling.
He does not understand, because he has no organ for
understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance
of other people ... Other people do not exist for him
and he does not understand why they should."
(Journals, pp. 27, 21-22; emphasis hers.)
"A wonderful, free, light consciousness" born of the
utter absence of any understanding of "the necessity,
meaning, or importance of other people." Obviously,
Ayn Rand was most favorably impressed with Mr. Hickman.
He was, at least at that stage of Rand's life, her
kind of man.
So the question is, who exactly was he?
William Edward Hickman was one of the most famous
men in America in 1928. But he came by his fame in
a way that perhaps should have given pause to Ayn Rand
before she decided that he was a "real man" worthy
of enshrinement in her pantheon of fictional heroes.
You see, Hickman was a forger, an armed robber, a
child kidnapper, and a multiple murderer.
Other than that, he was probably a swell guy.
-- Michael Prescott, "Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer:
Ayn Rand and William Hickman"
http://michaelprescott.net/hickman.htm
Dale,
ReplyDeleteOn a highly related note, did you read the news that the guy that actually oversaw the entire operations of the major tech stock exchange on wall street was actually running the biggest pyramid scheme in history?
Great link on Google news:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081212/bs_nm/us_madoff_arrest
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The former CHAIRMAN OF THE NASDAQ STOCK MARKET (!!!) is best known as the founder of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, the closely-held market-making firm he launched in 1960. But he also ran a hedge fund that U.S. prosecutors said racked up $50 billion of fraudulent losses.
Madoff told senior employees of his firm on Wednesday that "it's all just one big lie" and that it was "basically, a giant Ponzi scheme," with estimated investor losses of about $50 billion, according to the U.S. Attorney's criminal complaint against him.
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Authorities, citing a document filed by Madoff with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on January 7, 2008, said Madoff's investment advisory business served between 11 and 25 clients and had a total of about $17.1 billion in assets under management. Those clients may have included other funds that in turn had many investors.
The SEC said it appeared that virtually all of the assets of his hedge fund business were missing.