Suitably Flip

Norman Hsu Guilty

Again.

Norman Hsu, a former top fund-raiser for the Democratic Party and convicted Ponzi scheme operator, was found guilty Tuesday of illegally funneling tens of thousands of dollars to candidates for federal office by pressuring investors to donate to his favored candidates.

A jury of five women and seven men convicted Mr. Hsu of four counts of campaign finance fraud after about two-and-a-half hours of deliberations over two days. Each count carries up to five years in prison.

"I think he expected [the guilty verdict] because it was quick," said Alan Seidler, Mr. Hsu's lawyer.

Earlier this month, Hsu pleaded guilty to wire fraud and mail fraud charges in a Ponzi scheme that prosecutors said raised at least $60 million and swindled investors out of at least $20 million. He faces up to 20 years in prison on each fraud count.

Sentencing on all of the charges is set for Aug. 19.

Mr. Seidler said Mr. Hsu plans to appeal the convictions on the campaign finance fraud charges.

Prosecutors had alleged Hsu, in order to raise his public profile, pressured some investors in the Ponzi scheme between 2004 and 2007 to individually contribute thousands of dollars to candidates for president and Congress whom Hsu supported, including Hillary Clinton.

Well, yes, Hsu did serve as illicit benefactor to candidates for President and Congress.  But let's not forget the candidates for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, mayor, controller, district attorney, treasurer, assessor, and city supervisor, not to mention 20 state and federal Democrat parties and committees.

Previous Norman Hsu coverage

The Clinton-Hsu Tapes

Reader discretion is advised; contains sickeningly cloying adoration of a convicted, fugitive con artist:

Hillary Rodham Clinton gushed to disgraced Democratic fund-raiser Norman Hsu that he would "single-handedly" help her win the presidency because nobody "has been more loyal and been more effective" in landing donations.

"Norman, it's Hillary! What am I going to do with you, Norman? You're working so hard for me that I, I just don't even know what to say anymore," fawned then-Sen. Clinton in a taped voice message to Hsu, who -- unbeknownst to her -- was illegally funneling thousands into her war chest.

"I've never seen anybody who has been more loyal and been more effective and really just having greater success supporting someone than you," said Clinton on the embarrassing tape -- played during the kickoff of Hsu's campaign-finance fraud trial yesterday in Manhattan federal court.

"Everywhere I go, you're there. If you're not, you're sending people to be part of my events.

"You know, we're going to win this campaign, Norman, because you single-handedly are going to make that happen.

"I hope to see you again soon," Clinton purred. "Take care, my friend. Get some sleep, slow down for a few minutes. We're going to get to the end of the first quarter, and then we can all take a little rest. "Lots of love. Bye, bye."

After Hsu's illegal antics came to light, the red-faced Clinton campaign returned $850,000 in donations he had steered her way.

Previous Norman Hsu coverage

Hsu Pleads Guilty

The two-time fugitive, Ponzi scheme operator, and fraudulent benefactor of prominent Democratic politicians (including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hilary Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, et al) has pled guilty to a slew of fraud charges, but has not acknowledged any political motives.

Former top Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu pleaded guilty in federal court Thursday to charges he cheated investors out of at least $20 million in a massive Ponzi scheme.

The 58-year-old Hsu (SHOO) pleaded guilty to 10 counts of wire and mail fraud before U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero.

"I knew what I was doing was illegal," Hsu told the judge.

His lawyer, Alan Seidler, said outside court afterwards that his client was likely to testify on his own behalf at a trial on four counts of violating federal campaign-finance laws. Hsu is accused of violating those laws by making hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to more than 50 politicians.

"He's like a groupie. He just likes the political process," Seidler said, adding that Hsu was adamant that he never made a political contribution expecting something in return. Prosecutors said he made contributions to political candidates in the names of others.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Katherine Lemire told Marrero that the government will seek to prove that Hsu made political donations "to fuel" the Ponzi scheme and pressured victims of his fraud to contribute to political candidates.

(HT: JWF)

Previous Norman Hsu coverage

Norman Hsu Wants Trial Delayed On Account Of Madoff Prejudice

Thus is our hunky President-elect now publicly (if quite indirectly) tied not only to the Blagojevich spectacle, but also the Bernie Madoff scam.

We're just sprinting through that honeymoon at this point, eh?

In addition to the Rod Blagojevich pay-for-play probe, Obama could figure in the upcoming fraud trial of Norman Hsu, the disgraced Democratic fundraiser who was charged last year with operating a $60 million pyramid scheme. According to investigators, Hsu, a major Hillary Clinton fundraiser, pressured investors to donate money to political candidates with whom he was aligned. In a letter last week to U.S. District Court Judge Victor Marrero, Hsu's lawyer, Martin Cohen, requested a 60-day delay in the start of Hsu's trial, scheduled to open January 12 (Cohen cited the "extraordinary level of negative publicity" generated by the recent arrest of alleged Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff). In his December 22 letter, a copy of which you'll find below, Cohen also noted that Hsu was already "notorious for his political activities" and that it was "inevitable" that his client's "connections" to Bill and Hillary Clinton "and other democratic notables--including perhaps the president-elect--will be introduced at trial." Before becoming a key fundraiser for Hillary Clinton's presidential bid, Hsu co-hosted a 2005 California fundraiser for Obama's political action committee and introduced the Illinois Democrat to Marc Gorenberg, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who later joined the Obama campaign's national finance committee. Prosecutors allege that Hsu directed his investors to donate money to specific candidates, and then reimbursed them in violation of federal campaign laws. Unswayed by Cohen's argument, Marrero declined to delay the trial, which will begin a week before Obama's inauguration.

Indeed, after Hillary Clinton, Andrew Cuomo, and Eliot Spitzer (all local politicians from Norman Hsu's perspective), Barack Obama was the largest beneficiary of Hsu's illicit largesse.  The tens of thousands of dollars in contributions from Hsu's alleged straw donor network to Obama arrived over the course of at least 26 transactions, dating back as far as 2004.

The Smoking Gun has a copy of the letter from Hsu's lawyer.

Previously: Suitably Flip: Norman Hsu Index

RNC Filing FEC Complaint Over Obama's Excessive, Secret, and Foreign Campaign Cash [Update: $34 Million In Particularly Filthy Lucre]

Instapundit notes an email from the RNC that reads:

"Republican National Committee (RNC) Chief Counsel Sean Cairncross will announce today a complaint that the RNC is filing with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) against the Obama campaign. The complaint will address foreign national and excessive contributions accepted by the Obama campaign that demonstrate it is operating outside of federal campaign finance law."

The presumption is that the complaint relates to the pattern of thousands of evidently fictitious small-dollar donations Obama has accepted from donors like "Will, Good" and "Pro, Doodad" (irregularities that have already invited requests for verification from the FEC).  For contributions under $200, the FEC requires significantly fewer contributor details to be published by the campaign, unless and until their aggregate contributions exceed that threshold.

"Will" and "Pro" often reported similar nonsense (e.g. "Loving" and "You") as their employers of record and sometimes resorted to simple gibberish and random strings of letters that neighbor each other on the keyboard.

The country of origin for more than 10,000 contributions has also raised eyebrows at the FEC, with 520 appearing to originate in Iran alone.

The suspicion (my suspicion, anyway) is that these thousands of apparently bogus contribution records are being used to illicitly funnel tens (if not hundreds) of thousands [or tens of millions, per update below] of dollars to the campaign on behalf of contributors who either 1) have very deep pockets, but have already maxed out their personal contributions and need a way to shovel unlimited funds under the radar, or 2) are not U.S. citizens and are therefore prohibited from contributing.

After all, the campaign's displeasure at the Americans-only restrictions of American elections is well documented.

It's hard to imagine such a large scheme being perpetrated without one of more campaign treasury staffers being complicit (or grossly, willfully thick-headed).  In the past, the campaign has issued partial refunds related to these highly suspect donors, but (in another move that's marvelously idiotic in its most innocent interpretation) didn't refund enough to bring those donors anywhere near the $4,600 contribution limit.

Nor is this precisely strike 1 (or strikes 1-10,000, rather) for the Obama campaign.  Long-time readers will recall that no politician outside of New York took more dirty money from Norman Hsu and his band of straw donors than Barack Obama - more than $70,000 in total.  An unconfirmed account relayed to me at the time (by someone in a position to know such things) also maintained that representatives from the Obama campaign approached Hsu when they caught wind of his Clintonian largesse and began asking questions about where all of his money was coming from, agreeing to keep their mouths shut only when Hsu agreed to grease Obama's palm.

This is obviously just a distraction on the part of people who don't want to talk about socializing healthcare or imposing windfall profit taxes on select businesses, but I suppose for real law and order buffs, determining the extent of federal malfeasance perpetrated by the Obama campaign might be of at least passing interest.

Previously:  Good Will Funneling

Update:  Amanda Carpenter has much more info on the complaint (which will be formally filed on Monday), including this nugget.

RNC General Counsel Sean Carincross said various press reports have called into question at least 11,500 donors names. Those names donated approximately $33.8 million to Obama's campaign.

Carincross said, "There were no quality control devices," such as a method to verify a U.S. passport if a citizen was donating to Obama's campaign from overseas. He said he believed Obama had knowingly accepted foreign donations and taken no reasonable action to investigate the illegal donations.

For reference, $33.8 million represents roughly half of Obama's cash on hand, as of the most recent filing.

Erstwhile Pot-Smoking Hippie Senate Candidate Whines About Being Compared With Pot-Smoking Hippies

Rep. Mark Udall (D-CO), who was pulled over and arrested for (and subsequently pled guilty to) marijuana possession in 1972, and who voted in favor of Dennis Kucinich's Department of Peace and Non-Violence (but against funding the troops), is a candidate for U.S. Senate this year.  The aging hipster's campaign is so exciting, even Norman Hsu was inspired to contribute to it.

Now, Congressman Moonbeam is crying foul over an ostensibly buzz-harshing ad by Freedom's Watch that lampoons Udall's hard-earned reputation as a stoner and a peacenik.

Mark Udall is not a happy camper, and Freedom's Watch is taking all the credit. As Josh wrote yesterday, the conservative organization is up with a new ad slamming the Democratic Senate candidate for voting for a Department of Peace.

An attorney representing Udall's campaign fired off a letter to at least two television stations in Denver yesterday demanding that the ad, which shows an aging hippie bragging about the legislation, originally sponsored by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, near his beat up Volkswagen van, be yanked from the airwaves.
...
"The offensive representations and slanderous image directly tie Mark Udall to the use and promotion of marijuana. This is an outrageous portrayal that finds no credence whatsoever in fact" Friednash wrote to Cornetta. "Further, there is nothing in the Department of Peace legislation that authorizes the purchase of a van or that says one of the activities of the Department will be smoking marijuana in a smoke filled van."

True... but I'm not sure that was one of the ad's implications (nor is the legality of van purchasing a particularly controversial issue).

Watch the offending ad below.

Welcome To the Fray, Senator Biden

Longtime readers will recall that Barack Obama's newly tapped running mate Joe Biden was fugitive bundler Norman Hsu's 5th most richly lavished Senator, behind Clinton, Obama, Harkin, and Kennedy.

Over a 15 month period from 2005-2006, the veep hopeful accepted at least $39,100 from Hsu's suspected straw donors.

Hsu's Clinton gambit may not have paid off (and the $87,000 in illicit funds he allegedly steered to Eliot Spitzer probably won't be paying any dividends), but with multi-jurisdictional criminal charges pending, having a friend in the Presidential on-deck circle shouldn't hurt.

Guilty: Another Illegal Clinton Bundler-cum-Fugitive Faces Prison Time

Pakistani immigrant Abdul Jinnah may go away for as long as five years for filling Senator Clinton's campaign coffers in a very familiar way.

LOS ANGELES (CNS)  -- A Northridge businessman has pleaded guilty to funneling tens of thousands of dollars in illegal campaign contributions to Senators Hillary Clinton and Barbara Boxer.

Abdul Rehman Jinnah admitted reimbursing employees and others for contributions made in their names. There is a $2,000 cap on individual contributions to candidates.

Jinnah faces up to five years in federal prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines when he's sentenced on June 2nd.

The m.o. of Clinton campaign fraudsters is fastidiously observed.

Indicted in May of 2006 for his crimes, Jinnah promptly cheesed it back to Pakistan.  After being hunted by the FBI for about year, he returned to California for a dramatic and medically complicated surrender.

[Jinnah] surrendered to the FBI on a year-old indictment Tuesday [May 29, 2007], then collapsed in Los Angeles federal court.

Looking tired and disoriented, Abdul Rehman Jinnah, 56, complained of chest pains and began shaking an hour into a contentious bond hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Patrick J. Walsh. The judge interrupted the hearing for nearly 30 minutes while paramedics attended to Jinnah.

Sounds like Jinnah and Norman Hsu are working off the same playbook.

Thanks to JustADude for the heads up.

Clinton and Obama Play 1-On-1

I'm not going to bother trying to tease out the minutia that divide the two persons left standing on the Democratic stage in California tonight - just going to point you directly over to Hot Air's thread, where any notable video tidbits will be extracted for posterity and lampooned for fleeting comic relief from the suddenly deafening and ominous ticking down of the Super Tuesday clock.

Me, I'm waiting for the midnight hour, when the last-minute Presidential filers will upload their year-end financial disclosures.

Things to watch for:

• Was Sandy Berger briefly a paid adviser to the Clinton campaign during the fourth quarter, despite the candidate's insistence that he served no "official role"?
• Were any of the 4 Democratic Presidential candidates on Norman Hsu and Pals' payroll sloppy and/or audacious enough to accept additional contributions from previously outed members of his suspected straw donor network?
• Did Hillary actually accept re-donations by suspected straw donors whose money she refunded in the third quarter (as she rather astoundingly said she planned to do), rather than allowing that money to (hopefully) make it back to the people from who it was allegedly stolen by Bill and Hillary's "friend Norman"?

Stay tuned for updates...

Update:  The filing are now rolling in.  I'll be dumping any interesting findings here.

NYC Comptroller and Mayoral Candidate's Ongoing Hsu Problem

Yesterday, The New York Times reported that New York City Comptroller William Thompson has emerged the leader among several rivals in the money race for the 2009 mayoral election.

Alert readers may remember seeing Thompson's name in previous posts, as I included him in September on the roster of local politicians who accepted campaign contributions from convicted felon and serial fugitive Norman Hsu.  Hsu was recently re-sentenced to three years in prison for defrauding investors in the early 1990s and now faces a 15-count federal indictment for allegedly swindling investors out of as much as $60 million (money he's suspected of using to grease some 80+ Democratic politicians).

Hsu directly contributed the maximum allowable $4,950 to Thompson in 2006 and according to the campaign finance disclosures released just hours ago, Thompson has failed to return any of those funds.

This, despite the fact that such funds might be used to help compensate Hsu's victims, many of whom are current constituents of Comptroller Thompson, whose duties include the management of the city's $105 billion in pension funds.

Yesterday's financial disclosures show that three of Thompson's opponents in the Democratic mayoral primary who had also received contributions directly from Norman Hsu (City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Congressman Anthony Weiner, and Councilmember John Liu) managed to find time to return the tainted funds within the week following the Hsu revelations at the end of August.  Four months later, it appears Thompson has not.

In the early days of the Hsu scandal, Azi Paybarah at The New York Observer reported that an aide to Comptroller Thompson said he planned to donate his Hsu money to charity.  Indeed, there are three charitable contributions from September listed on Thompson's latest financial disclosure, which collectively approximate the amount he received from Hsu.  The problem is, according to the Campaign Finance Board, the use of campaign funds for charitable donations is explicitly forbidden.

A candidate is not permitted to take public funds that he has received for a specific public purpose, and re-direct them toward an entirely different and non-campaign-related purpose. Some candidates have argued that such expenditures are indirectly campaign-related because they generate good will and favorable publicity among voters in their districts. However, such benefits are too tenuous to be considered “in furtherance of” a campaign.

That might be why Thompson's counterparts chose to disgorge the money via refunds, in keeping with local election laws.

That said, Rep. Weiner and Councilmember Liu weren't able to get their hands completely clean.  Weiner refunded a total of $15,750 in contributions from Hsu, three members of the Hsu-connected Paw family of California, and four other suspected members of Hsu's straw donor network.  However, he received thousands more from Hsu's identified affiliates that he has yet to return.  Liu made just one refund - to Mr. Hsu directly, who only accounted for $4,950 of Liu's total haul of $22,950 in Hsu-tainted contributions.  Speaker Quinn's only problematic transaction was a single $4,950 contribution directly from Hsu, which she promptly returned.

Still, notwithstanding Weiner's and Liu's incomplete disgorgements, Comptroller Thompson appears to be the only mayoral candidate to decide to keep a check actually signed by Norman Hsu.  If the indictment against Hsu is accurate, that money was almost certainly swindled directly from some of the very people who put Thompson in his current office and whom he will ask to elect him mayor next year.

If Thompson plans to make the case that his mayoral qualifications are validated by his performance as the city's chief money manager, he may want to consider clearing his books of this indignity.

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The summary and transaction-level detail of the nationwide contributions of Hsu and his suspected affiliates are available in these Google spreadsheets.  A searchable database of campaign finance disclosures is available on the NYC Campaign Finance Board's website.

Previous Norman Hsu coverage

Norman Hsu Gets Three Years On Old California Charges

Fitting (if perhaps a bit lenient), given that it was an agreed-upon three year prison sentence that Hsu skipped out on when he went missing in the early 1990s.

A judge on Friday sentenced disgraced political donor Norman Hsu to three years in state prison after rejecting the one-time Democratic rainmaker's bid to throw out a 16-year-old fraud conviction.

The court didn't buy Hsu's legal team's absolutely stupefying argument that his right to a speedy trial had been violated by insufficient efforts to hunt down the globe-trotting fugitive (the previously mentioned "Sixth Amendment-wrapped turd of a premise").

The crime underlying this re-sentencing is wholly unrelated to the 15-count federal indictment against Hsu related to his alleged swindling of $60 million out of bicoastal investors during the present decade and the suspected use of those funds to illegally line the pockets of Hillary Clinton and some 80+ other prominent Democratic politicians.

Ten weeks ago, this sentencing was unexpectedly delayed (until just after the first-in-the-nation political contest) to allow Hsu time to "research" what was expected to be a possible plea deal.  I have an idea of the ace Hsu is pocketing, but it appears either California prosecutors were unimpressed with the information he proferred or he's saving it to play it for the feds (perhaps depending on whether the primaries play out in such a way that he feels he can and/or needs to make such a deal).

Previous Norman Hsu Coverage

Hillary Nabs 6th Hsu-Tainted Senate Endorsement

Today, the Clinton campaign is trumpeting an endorsement milestone, as Maria Cantwell (D-WA) became the 10th Senator to throw her weight behind Hillary.  A statistic the campaign doesn't mention is that Cantwell is now the 6th Senator with financial backing from Norman Hsu and/or his network of alleged straw donors to endorse Senator Clinton.

Other Hsu-greased Democratic Senators already in the Clinton camp include Dianne Feinstein (CA), Robert Menendez (NJ), Mark Pryor (AR), Debbie Stabenow (MI), and Sheldon Whitehouse (RI).  Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), one of Hsu's most richly funded politicians, has not made a formal endorsement, but his wife Ruth endorsed Clinton in July.

Cantwell received financial support from Norman Hsu directly and at least 8 members of his suspected illegal straw donor network in 2005 and 2006.  If the 15-count indictment against Hsu is accurate, the illegal contributions he funnelled to Cantwell were financed with money stolen from dozens of innocent victims who are still awaiting restitution.  That illicit financial support helped Cantwell win re-election in 2006 and to maintain the office from which she now endorses Clinton's Presidential bid.

According to FEC records, it appears Cantwell has yet to refund a dime of the tainted funds (which exceed $15,000) in the wake of Hsu's outing as a professional swindler and serial fugitive.  Nor has she even disgorged Hsu's direct contributions (totaling $4,200) through charitable donations, the half-measure taken by many of her Hsu-gilded colleagues.

Norman Hsu Indicted

Will this federal indictment in New York shake loose whatever plea deal Hsu's legal team has been "researching" ever since winning a postponement of the California proceedings?

A federal grand jury on Tuesday indicted Norman Hsu, a top Democratic fundraiser accused of cheating investors of at least $20 million and using some of the money to make illegal donations to political campaigns.

In the 15-count indictment returned in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, the government accused the 56-year-old clothing-industry entrepreneur of duping investors nationwide with a massive Ponzi scheme.

The government said Hsu also violated federal campaign finance laws by making contributions to various political candidates in the names of others.

Via Michelle, here's a copy of the indictment (pdf).

Previous Hsu coverage.

NYT Op-Ed Columnist Still Fooled By Norman Hsu's Bogus Investor Pitch

In a piece that manages simultaneously to pooh-pooh luxury brands like Gucci and Prada for supriously manufacturing their ostensibly high-end, European goods in China and to castigate the "xenophobic" brand executives who seem to believe Chinese manufacture indicates lower quality, New York Times op-ed columnist and Newsweek cultural correspondent Dana Thomas supports the former claim with a questionable source.

[The high] prices are worth it, we are told, because these goods are handmade in Europe by artisans. In fact, that is not always the case — as we learned from the recent news reports on the activities of Norman Hsu, the Democratic political fund-raiser indicted on charges of investment fraud. Mr. Hsu told potential clients that he would use their money to finance the manufacturing of Gucci and Prada items in China — and promised a 40 percent return on the investment.

This was surprising, given that both brands have long maintained that they do not produce their wares there. A Prada spokesman reiterated it when the Hsu news broke, telling Women’s Wear Daily that Prada does not manufacture its products in China — though if you look inside one of Prada’s popular nylon toiletry cases, you’ll sometimes find a small tag that states otherwise.

Thomas may not have fully understood the nature of "the Hsu news", because at the heart of matter is the allegation that Hsu's apparel activities were wholly fictional.  The "charges of investment fraud" relate to an alleged Ponzi scheme, in which the only business being done was the recruitment of more investors (and the occasional flood of contributions to dozens of Democratic candidates).  I visited Hsu's stated places of business back in September and failed to find not only a bustling apparel conglomerate, but any trace of Hsu or his many business entities.

That's not to say Gucci and Prada aren't using Chinese labor - just that the allegation is poorly supported by parroting Hsu's phony claims.  Dozens of investors were hoodwinked by Hsu, a mistake that has left them tens of millions of dollars poorer.  At the time, his A-list political affiliations and the impressive early returns he generated for his investors were enough to overshadow Hsu's otherwise unverifiable business activities.  With these political and corporate veneers now stripped away, it's odd that Thomas is still so willingly duped.

Clinton's Irish Cocktail Party - Bring Your Own Straws

With the specter of so many illegal straw donors already darkening Hillary Clinton's fundraising doorstep, I guess they figure in for a penny, in for a Euro.

Guess who is coming to dinner in Dublin?

None other than former US president Bill Clinton, who is mingling with a host of Ireland's elite at a fundraising bash on Saturday night.

The 1,600 euro (£1,145) a head dinner is in aid of his wife Hillary's presidential campaign fund - and the places have been much coveted.
...
The paper said that some Irish people who were so desperate to attend the fundraiser have been seeking out US citizens through whom they can channel the $2,300 (1,600 euro) admission charge.

Saturday, November 17th.  Well, we'll just have to keep an eye out for that date when the fourth quarter disclosures are filed.

There really won't be much plausible deniability if this event generates a slew of illegal straw donations that are happily accepted by Hillary's campaign.  Her denial of any suspicion of the massive election law violations that appear to have gone on under her nose in connection with the Norman Hsu scandal already stretch one's credulity to the breaking point.

Given the seriousness of the civil and criminal charges already filed in the case, the multiple ongoing federal investiations, and the huge dollar amounts allegedly stolen from investors to fund illicit contributions to her campaign, any slipshod vetting of donors comprising the quarter million dollars expected in the Dublin haul will be utterly indefensible if it enables additional exploitation of this documented Clintonian security chasm.

(HT: Bryan Preston)

Today's Head Scratcher: Hsu-Greased Pols Lining Up Behind Clinton

[Important, confusing update/correction below]

The Hill has compiled an updated roster of Congressional endorsements of Presidential candidates (HT: Matt Lewis).  Not surprisingly, Hillary Clinton is out in front, with 59 Representatives, 9 Senators, and one non-voting Delegate in her corner.  That gives Clinton 3/4 of the Senatorial endorsements and just over half of the House endorsements announced to date.

Here are a few other statistics worth a ponder.

15% of Hillary's House and Senate endorsers (10 of 68) received tainted contributions from Norman Hsu's donor network, compared to 7.5% (40 of 535) of all current Congress members.  A majority of her Senatorial endorsements (a whopping 56%) received Hsu money, compared to 28% of all current Senators.

That means legislators who threw their weight behind Clinton were twice as likely to be greased by Hsu as their average colleague.

(The percentage of Obama endorsers who received Hsu's support rate was not meaningfully different from the Congress-wide rate (7.7% vs. 7.5%) and not a single Edwards backer saw Hsu money.)

Likewise, Hsu-gilded legislators backed Clinton with roughly twice the frequency (25%) as Congress on the whole (12.7%).  Hsu's beneficiaries were 5x likelier to endorse Clinton than Obama (25% vs. 5%), while her endorsement advantage Congress-wide over Obama is only 2.6x.

Whatever causal link may lie behind the divergence is of course left to one's imagination.  The pattern does lead the more feverishly conspiratorial to wonder whether the seemingly scatter-shot dispersal of Hsu's support among dozens of candidates may have served a more focused end, such as the elevation of a single candidate for whom those recipients may have later had an opportunity to toss an endorsement.

But it's equally possible that Norman Hsu simply admires politicians who admire Hillary Clinton and that he chose to support them without so much as the most tacit of quid pro quos.

Or it could be a little of both.

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Update:  Oh, that's a little embarrassing.  It turns out I neglected to strip out the Republicans from the comparison.  When you do that, the differential between Hillary's support among Hsu recipients and Congress on the whole shrinks (roughly by half, substantially negating the 2:1 differential).  So while Hsu recipients are indeed twice as likely to endorse Hillary, that's primarily explained by the fact that Hsu gave no money to Congressional Republicans.  So all of the above is accurate; it's just not terribly meaningful.

A thousand apologies for the sloppy error, but rest assured the data make a similar point, even when you don't make this goof.

If you constrain the comparison population to Congressional Democrats, the key correlation holds.  The differential in Hillary's endorsement frequency among Hsu recipients vs. all Congressional Democrats (+1%) is significantly greater than the differential for Obama (-4%), Edwards (-5%), or all non-Hillary endorsees (-13%).

Another way to look at it (perhaps the most revealing way, and certainly a simpler way than the little roundabout we just went round) is to compare the percentage of endorsing Hsu recipients who endorsed Clinton versus the percentage of endorsing Democratic legislators who endorsed Clinton.  That gets us boiled back down to a single comparison of percentages - in this case 77% (10/13) vs. 54% (68/127), enough to illustrate the strong correlation (but not enough to dampen the shame).

Sorry again for the unnecessarily circuitous numerical journey.  I'd go and scrub up the post so it reads more cleanly, but documenting and rectifying our errors is what separates us from the animals.

And the mainstream media.

Hsu Case Postponed

Norman Hsu has just won another 10 weeks of California penal room and board, thanks to a postponement of his legal proceedings in that state unil January 4th.

The surprise delay raised eyebrows because Hsu's lawyers had filed motions asking the court to refund the $2 million bail he skipped out on in September and toss his 1992 fraud conviction altogether.

The postponement could signal anything from plea deal discussions to a ploy to fend off federal prosecutors in New York, who recently accused Hsu of a separate $60 million Ponzi scheme, one expert said.

"We're doing more research. These things take time," Hsu's lawyer, James Brosnahan, said...

Here's a prediction: Hsu is gathering documentation of the nature and timing of his relationship with one or more very significant people.  People significant enough (and a relationship with implications significant enough) that prosecutors are willing to give Hsu a surprising amount leeway to conduct such "research".

For a grand bargain to be worth Hsu's while, it would presumably involve negotiating with the U.S. Attorney in New York, who's wielding the new federal charges.  Skating on the 15-year-old California situation alone wouldn't go too far to brightening his future.  A palatable plea would likely require a reduction in those serious charges as well (or a favorable sentencing recommendation or some such) and that might require Hsu's "research" to yield a meatball of considerable spice, perhaps already proferred to prosecutors.

I think it will.

Say What You Will About Norman Hsu...

But the man is nothing if not bold.

Disgraced political donor Norman Hsu wasn't hiding from anyone over the past few years, his lawyers say. If California authorities really wanted to find him, they could have asked Hillary Rodham Clinton or one of the other prominent Democrats he showered with cash donation.

Hsu is asking a judge to toss his 15-year-old felony fraud conviction, arguing that his right to a speedy trial was violated because authorities weren't actively pursuing him.

Yes, Hsu is arguing that his due process rights were trampled because he'd undertaken the life of a fugitive and the state wasn't holding up its end of the bargain by chasing him diligently enough.

I have to agree that the authorities did an inexplicably dismal job in his pursuit, but I'm not sure I buy that this failure somehow disadvantaged Mr. Hsu.  Even if he can convince a judge to swallow this Sixth Amendment-wrapped turd of a premise, it seems moot,  given that Hsu was duly (and speedily) charged, pleaded out, and convicted of this crime back in 1992.  When Hsu cheesed it, he wasn't awaiting trial, but simply the formal sentencing of his agreed upon punishment of three years in prison.

If [Hsu's attorney James] Brosnahan fails get the case dismissed outright, he says he will then ask that Hsu be allowed to withdraw his 1992 plea because the judge who accepted it and was scheduled to sentence Hsu before he fled has since retired. If Hsu succeeds in taking back his plea, his case goes back to square one and could then go to trial.

"Mr. Hsu has the right to have the same judge who accepted his plea impose sentence," Brosnahan wrote in court papers.

Again, didn't Mr. Hsu himself cede that right by fleeing justice for the remainder of that judge's career?

However that plays out, Hsu has plenty of fresh troubles, in the form of multiple federal felony charges alleging his orchestration of Ponzi schemes and violation of federal election laws, and a pair of lawsuits brought by investor groups in California and New York, accusing Hsu of swindling them out of more than $60 million.

Still, I would imagine the prior felony fraud conviction could have an impact on sentencing for any additional convictions, which may be why Hsu is eager to wriggle out of it.

Any prosecutors or criminal defense attorneys feel free to weigh in.

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Previous Norman Hsu coverage

Unfortunately, That Train Has Sailed

The Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire reports on an apparent attempt by Hillary Clinton to reach out to the siderodromophile voting bloc.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign will close down Washington’s Union Station for all but the trains to hold a major fund-raiser there Dec. 6 — a month before the first and most-anticipated presidential-nominating vote in Iowa. The location is no accident, says a lobbyist who’s among the planners (though publicly still aligned with a rival Democrat): The metaphorical message is, It’s time to get on board.

Objectively, I'm not sure the "train" metaphor is inherently positive or inspirational.  Yes, you've got the Little Engine That Could (and to a lesser, creepier extent, Thomas the Tank Engine) as good train role models, but as the embarrassingly monied presumptive winner, Team Clinton lends itself more naturally to the image of the unstoppable freight train (which may or may not be what she's going for).  With all their momentum and pre-determined routing, the only interesting things trains do is derail.

The last time a train was in the the headlines, after all, it was only because authorities were dragging off a half-naked, delirious man in some kind of high-profile fugitive bust.  And that might not be the first thing Hillary wants voters to think of.

Hillary Defends Possible Straw Donor Cash With Disingenuous Straw Man Argument

Judging by Hillary's refusal to return the hundreds of thousands in Hsu-tainted funds that she raked in through her Senate campaign and HillPAC, and now her insistence that she'll keep (and keep on keeping) the questionably princely sums that are pouring out of low income, possibly non-existent Chinatown residents, one has to presume that she's decided the scandal has finally hit that magical Clintonian critical complexity, beyond which neither the public's attention span nor the media's already mild appetite for Democrat-damaging stories will hold her to any kind of reasonable standard of conduct.

She took advantage of the controversy's complexity this weekend in a defiant speech that addressed not the impropriety of keeping questionable funds, without so much of a second look even after serious questions were raised about the legality of those contributions, but the non-issue of the propriety of accepting donations from first-generation Americans.

A defiant Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton says she has no intention of curtailing her fundraising in the Chinese community despite reports that she accepted cash from dozens of questionable donors in Chinatown earlier this year.
...
“I represent New York and New York is a symbol of the success of immigrants coming to America,” the senator told reporters Saturday after addressing supporters at the Oak Park Elementary School in Des Moines.

“I am pleased to have a lot of first-generation American support as well as people who have been longtime involved in the political process … I’m going to keep reaching out to everybody in our country. I want to be a president to everybody.”

Earlier this year, Clinton returned about $7,000 of about $380,000 raised during a fundraiser that targeted donors from China’s east coast after campaign officials raised red flags about the donors. It’s not clear whether other refunds will be issued.

It's a good try.  And possibly shrewd, in a wholly deceitful way. Hillary's disingneuous straw man argument may work if people are losing enough of the plot to swallow the idea that what she's being assailed for is accepting donations from hard-working immigrants.  That, she can spin into an "I'll champion the underdogs, no matter how much they the establishment tries to stop me!" cry.  But of course that's not what's at issue.

As with the Norman Hsu scandal (which I suspect can be tied to the Chinatown situation at some level), the problem here is one of significant irregularities among Clinton's donors, specifically an apparent financial inability of many of the tightly clustered contributors to afford such largesse.  In the Hsu case, the tainted funds came from two sources - alleged straw donors who were reimbursed by Hsu and investors in the New York and Orange County investment funds who were pressured by Hsu to contribute to Clinton in order to participate in what they thought were legitimate business deals.

The specifics of the peculiar Chinatown donations have yet to come into focus, but based on the L.A. Times' investigation and follow-up by the New York Post, the contributors in question either cannot be found (sometimes because their addresses don't exist), hold minimum wage jobs that typically wouldn't support 4-figure political contributions, are not registered to vote, and/or specifically admitted they had been reimbursed for their donations.

The Chinatown cluster involves some 150 donors, suggesting it represents a sophisticated, large-scale, coordinated effort to circumvent federal election laws.  As in the Hsu case, the implications here are severe enough to warrant a more mature response from the Clinton campaign than a dishonest dismissal of the problem as one of ethnic intolerance.

Case in point:

"We do not ethnically profile donors," growled [campaign spokesman] Howard Wolfson. "Asian-Americans in Chinatown and Flushing have the same right to contribute as every other American."

Agreed.  Just as they're subject to the same prohibitions from violating election laws as every other American.

If, as appears to be the case, Hillary has made the decision to bank on the scandal's complexity to save her not only from having to answer for these ubiquitous irregularities, but even from having to return the tainted funds, she may be in for a surprise.  The public's Clinton scandal stamina may not have improved, but as the sordid details and immense scope of Hillary's fundraising problems continue to unfold, more and more mainstream media outlets are taking an interest.

Surely, she could wriggle out of almost any underlying impropriety, but overt denials, dismissals, and failures to address the irregularities as they splash across the front pages (i.e. precisely what we're seeing now in the Chinatown brush-off and the sloppy and incomplete Hsu refunds) may make for a stickier mess.

Hillary says she wants to be "President to everybody."  She can start by showing everybody that she's dependable and conscientious enough to deal responsibly with serious issues when they present themselves, not sweep them under the rug or shrug them off as the product of the prejudices of others.

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Previous Norman Hsu coverage

Mama's Gotta a Brand New Hsu

Michelle and Allah both weigh in this morning on a shiny new story from the LA Times (which, incidentally, has sunk its teeth surprisingly deep into the Norman Hsu scandal, making it easily the outlet with the second best coverage of the affair, behind The Wall Street Journal) about a shiny new Chinese fundraising scandal for Hillary Clinton.

As yet, there's no readily identifiable kingpin at the center of this flap, but the gist is that parts of New York's Chinatown have become an improbably gilded neighborhood when Clinton comes calling.

Something remarkable happened at 44 Henry St., a grimy Chinatown tenement with peeling walls. It also happened nearby at a dimly lighted apartment building with trash bins clustered by the front door.

And again not too far away, at 88 E. Broadway beneath the Manhattan bridge, where vendors chatter in Mandarin and Fujianese as they hawk rubber sandals and bargain-basement clothes.

All three locations, along with scores of others scattered throughout some of the poorest Chinese neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, have been swept by an extraordinary impulse to shower money on one particular presidential candidate -- Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Dishwashers, waiters and others whose jobs and dilapidated home addresses seem to make them unpromising targets for political fundraisers are pouring $1,000 and $2,000 contributions into Clinton's campaign treasury. In April, a single fundraiser in an area long known for its gritty urban poverty yielded a whopping $380,000. When Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) ran for president in 2004, he received $24,000 from Chinatown.

This is a suboptimal development for Hillary, whose lowball estimates of Hsu's tainted fundraising (that eye-popping $850,000 wound up topping a million) and whose reluctant and only partial refunds of Hsu-connected donorations have stretched the candidate's credibility when it comes to her insistence that the perpetual irregularities that have plagued her (and her spouse's) political finances are issues all sanitized by the magical cleanser of public financing.

The unlikely vein of campaign gold Hillary seems to have tapped in Chinatown certainly appears to be of the familiar Clinton scandal genus, but the species isn't quite identifiable yet - are these straw donors being quietly reimbursed behind closed doors, are they hard-working immigrants being pressured by local heavies to dig deep for their Senator, or are might they simply be figmental?

The Times examined the cases of more than 150 donors who provided checks to Clinton after fundraising events geared to the Chinese community. One-third of those donors could not be found using property, telephone or business records. Most have not registered to vote, according to public records.

And several dozen were described in financial reports as holding jobs -- including dishwasher, server or chef -- that would normally make it difficult to donate amounts ranging from $500 to the legal maximum of $2,300 per election.

Of 74 residents of New York's Chinatown, Flushing, the Bronx or Brooklyn that The Times called or visited, only 24 could be reached for comment.

The Times went further and actually called on some of these listed donors (hey, that's my schtick).  Needless to say, what they found didn't clear things up.

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Previous Norman Hsu coverage.

Hillary's 3Q Refunds Part III: Pry It From My Senate Campaign's Cold, Dead Hands

Not only are the 249 refunds sent by the Clinton campaign to Hsu-connected donors riddled with inaccurate mailing addresses, but now the campaign is vowing to keep any money these donors gave to her Senate campaign or to HillPAC (more than a quarter million dollars, according to the LA Times).

I noted Monday night that even among just the 26 Hsu contributors we knew about prior to the Q3 filing, there was a refund discrepancy of $125,000 related to the Senate and PAC money.  Turns out at least 50 other Hsu donors also sent part of their contributions through these doors (doors which, of course, ultimately led to the Presidential campaign via the candidate's $10 million inter-committee transfer in the first quarter).  And Hillary's happy to keep it.

"Because we did not keep track of contributions in the same way during the Senate campaign we have no basis for knowing that these individuals were solicited by Norman Hsu," said Clinton campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson. He said the Clinton campaign had gone beyond what it was legally or ethically bound to do when it gave back the presidential contributions.

That's tough to sync up with what Clinton said on Meet the Press on September 23rd.

[O]ut of an abundance of caution, we did return any contribution that we could in any way, no matter how indirect, link to [Hsu].

I'd say donors whose Presidential contributions were explicitly bundled by Hsu remain at least indirectly linked to Hsu when they contribute via her other committees.  Here's an easy rule of thumb to fulfill that "abundance of caution": anyone bundled by Hsu gets all their money back.

Among the donations whose connection to Hsu the campaign has "no basis for knowing" are more than $30,000 from the California Paws, the poster family of the Norman Hsu scandal.  So far, Clinton has refunded just $23,000 to the Paws (less than half of what they gave her).

And how about Danny Lee (another of the original Hsu-linked donors, whose home address was once listed by Norman Hsu as his own).  Out of an "abundance of caution", Hillary saw fit to refund $4,600 to Lee, but not the other $20,000 he "contributed" ($9,000 of which came in after the 2006 election).  Lee's co-habitants Soe Win Lee and Yu Fen Huang also each gave Clinton $9,000 after the 2006 election which is not being returned (despite the campaign returning their most recent donations, in an abundance of caution).

Between the Paws and the Lees alone (Hsu's easily identifiable heaviest hitters), Clinton is under-refunding by $70,000.  The mind boggles at the campaign not being able to find any link "no matter how indirect" between these donations and Norman Hsu.

In choosing to keep the $250,000 in Hsu-connected money that came in through the PAC and Senate committees, simply because the official bundler of such donations wasn't recorded, the Clinton campaign seems to signal it's forgetting (or dismissing) the fact that these funds aren't tainted only because they were solicited by a career criminal and serial fugitive.  The funds are tainted because that criminal is accused of reimbursing some of the nominal "contributors".  Further, the criminal complaints against Hsu allege that he financed his massive and fraudulent contributions with money he swindled out of more than a hundred investors.  The FBI, the SEC, the FEC, and at least one U.S. Attorney's office are investigating and the alleged victims are hoping to recover the $60 million they say Hsu stole from them.

For Clinton to be winkingly holding on to hundreds of thousands of dollars that can be quite readily linked to Hsu (as easily as referencing her own refund roster) shows an abundance of something, but it's not caution.

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Previous Norman Hsu coverage.

Update:  Commenting on yesterday's post about 47% of Hillary's Q3 refunds being sent to the wrong ZIP code, reader and postal worker Terri confirms, "Wrong zip code with correct address will be RTS, Return to Sender. The post office does not take the time to look up the correct zip code and manually fix and re-route."

What a financially serendipitous series of 118 clerical errors for the campaign to make.

Update:  I've e-mailed the campaign, asking if they have any insights into what happened with the bum ZIPs and whether they plan to re-issue the refunds if they're returned to sender.  Some of the 118 were for nearby or possibly synonymous towns, but 66 of them were clear out-of-state (accounting for more than $140,000 in refunds issued).  I've put those 66 into a new tab in the spreadsheet, available here, which I also pointed out to the Clinton campaign.

I've also asked one of the SFI (the New York fund) investors who did receive his refund check, despite being listed with a bad (though nearby) ZIP, to check the paperwork and see which one the campaign used in the actual mailing.  If it shows his correct ZIP code, then this issue appears to be just a matter of a hundred or so clerical errors in the filing itself.  If it shows the wrong one, then it's a good bet that much of the $140,000 will have truly gone astray (and as a result, will be retained by Clinton, unless she fixes the addresses and re-issues the refunds).

Update:  I've heard back from one of the NYC donors listed in the filing with a bad ZIP code.  While he didn't keep the envelope, the letter enclosed with his refund reflected his correct ZIP code, so it seems likely that this was a foul up contained at the disclosure level.  The campaign ought to file an amended report so the database will be accurate, but hopefully the refunds (while frequently partial) will all reach their addressees.

Hillary's 3Q Refunds Part II: Return To Sender

I'm still in the process of separating out Hillary's 250ish Hsu-connected donors into their respective groups (allegedly swindled investors and suspected straw donors) and collecting the contributions these new donors made in prior quarters.

In my last post, I noted that 24 of the 26 Clinton-supporting donors we already knew about appear to have received only partial or no refunds this quarter (an aggregate discrepancy of roughly $125,000).  It's not too surprising then that the new names on the list also appear to be frequently under-refunded.

Assuming the discrepancies represent donations made to Hillary's Senate campaign (rather than her Presidential campaign), it's still not clear whether she has already or intends to refund those contributions (since those paper filings are not yet available for review).  Either way though, whether she's refunding them from the other committee or whether she's decided to keep those funds, the total Hsu-connected contributions to Hillary the candidate will wind up being far higher than the $850,000 figure she disclosed last month.

Neglecting to refund the Senate-side contributions from Hsu-related donors (if that's the explanation for the discrepancy) could be the product either of heroic brazenness or extreme sloppiness.  And while I won't accuse Clinton of not being brazen, the more I look at the 3rd quarter filing, the more I'm leaning toward extreme sloppiness.

I realized something was seriously askew when I noticed a few California addresses among the refunded donors with New York City ZIP codes.  And vice versa.  With a little help from Google Maps, I ran the ZIP code for each of the nearly 250 refunds issued on 9/14 and found that 118 (47%) were incorrect.  What's more, 66 of the ZIP codes used (27%) didn't even hit the right state.  They're frequently hundreds or even thousands of miles off.

• Deborah Webster of Huntington Beach? Her refund went to Miami Beach: 2,700 miles off.
• Stephanie Trinidad of Palo Alto?  Hers went to the Bronx: 2,900 miles off.
• Charles Lafollette of Manhattan?  Honolulu: 5,000 miles off.

See for yourself.

If this wasn't a last minute clerical error (one which only affected the disclosure filing and not the mailings) and these ZIP codes were actually used as reported, something tells me a lot of these mislabeled refunds (which exceed $215,000) are never finding their way to their addressees.

But back to the issue of whether the under-refunded contributors are actually receiving their full refunds (and we just can't tell because we can't see the Senate-side disclosure yet), I'm leaning ever further toward no.  Whether the inaccurate Clinton estimate of $850,000 came in too low because she's planning on keeping tainted funds that came in through the Senate door or whether sloppiness prevented the campaign from even noticing those funds when sweeping up the Hsu monies, the fact that the campaign's estimate excludes such funds suggests they're not part of any refund plan.

To that point, I heard from a member of the Orange County investor group earlier today who reports on a Clinton refund that came in about 37% light.  Of course it's possible that there's another check on the way, but Hillary claimed on Meet the Press more than three weeks ago that all refunds had been issued.  Mail doesn't take that long (unless it has a bogus ZIP code of course).

The next installment will be a new Clinton grand total, including the actual refunds issued (between $800,000 and $850,000), the $125,000 discrepancy associated with the original 26 known donors, and the yet-to-be-quantified discrepancies that also appear to plague the roster of the 200+ newly unearthed donors.

Any guesses where the wheel stops?  We know it'll be north of $925,000.  If the discrepancy rate remains unchanged, the tally could top $2 million.  Register your pick in the comments.  TPIR rules, but only your most recent guess counts.

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This way to previous Hsu coverage.

Update:  A couple updates regarding the ZIP code issue in Part III.

Update:  I've heard back from one of the NYC donors listed in the filing with a bad ZIP code.  While he didn't keep the envelope, the letter enclosed with his refund reflected his correct ZIP code, so it seems likely that this was a foul up contained at the disclosure level.  The campaign ought to file an amended report so the database will be accurate, but hopefully the refunds (while frequently partial) will all reach their addressees.

Hillary's 3rd Quarter Refunds: Large, But Lacking

Hoo boy, this is one meaty filing.  Senator Clinton previously vowed to return $850,000 in Norman Hsu-connected contributions to some 260 donors.  Her 3rd quarter filing shows refunds to no fewer than 487 individuals for a total of $1.24 million.

This will take a little time to chew through, but we now have our arms around the 200+ missing Hsu donors and the several hundred thousand missing dollars.  It's just a matter of eliminating the unrelated refunds (accidental overpayments and the like) before we'll have a list of the previously unknown Hsu-connected donors to trace back through prior periods for both Clinton and other Hsu-favored candidates to bring us up to the new grand total.

But even before we do the deep dive, some problems bubble feverishly to the surface.

Consider this a rough cut through the data, subject to revision, but I'm showing more than $125,000 in thus far unrefunded contributions made by previously identified suspected Hsu straw donors (most of whom the Clinton campaign seems to acknowledge as Hsu-connected donors by virtue of the partial refunds they issued during the quarter).

18 of the 26 Hsu-connected donors listed below receieved only partial refunds for their aggregate Clinton contributions.  Just 2 of them received full refunds.  6 others (including 2 members of the Paw family) received no refunds.

It's important to note that this data does not include any refunds that HillPAC may have separately issued.  Once that data is available, I'll update accordingly.  As currently illustrated, the Clinton campaign appears to have refunded just over 40% of the previously identified Hsu-connected donations.

It's also important to remember that any of these Clinton donors who were reimbursed by Norman Hsu for such donations (allegedly with funds Hsu swindled out of unwitting investors) are not the legitimate owners of those funds.  Hundreds of investors in New York and California who allege Hsu bilked them out of more than $60 million are the primary aggrieved parties to any such swindling. Clinton's refunds, however partial, represent only the first step in returning such funds to their rightful owners.

We can only hope that federal authorities are rapidly chasing down each refund recipient to determine the appropriate dispotition of the involved funds, per the outcome of the ongoing civil and criminal complaints pending against Hsu.

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For background research, earlier ruminations, and links to the online data sets, sidle on over to the Norman Hsu category page.

Update:  It's possible some of the missing funds were refunded via Hillary's Senate campaign fund, though most of that money was transferred to her Presidential campaign during the first quarter of this year.  While the third quarter report for Clinton's Senate campaign committee was also due October 15th, those filings are not submitted electronically and are therefore not yet available for review.  Via the Center for Responsive Politics, the most recent data is current as of 12/31/06.

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Update (10/16): Well, I was going to post an update, but it grew into a post of its own.  This way, please.

Tom Vilsack, Come On Down!

You're the first Norman Hsu recipient to play 3rd Quarter Reconciliation!

While no longer an active candidate for President, Vilsack received a total of $4,300 from Hsu and his previously identified suspected straw donors, between May 3rd and May 10th of this year.

Until now, I'd only known about $3,800 of it, despite each of these donors being on the list, since the Vilsack campaign had recorded Soe Win Lee's name incorrectly at the time of her contribution.  Happily, Lee's name appears to have been spelled properly on the refund, as filed minutes ago by Vilsack's campaign committee.

Also reflected in that filing are refunds to Paul Su ($1,000) and Susan Chilman ($500).

Indulge me in a moment of quiet self-blandishment for having correctly identified Susan Chilman (aka the actress Susan Pari) as a Hsu bundlee, something you've read only on this blog.

*moment*

Those three refunds (each issued on 9/22) total $2,000, which takes care of everyone on the list, except Mr. Hsu himself, who contributed $2,300 on May 3rd.  Vilsack likely turned this money over to the United Way of Iowa, as his campaign cut them a check for $2,300 on August 30th.  Wave goodbye to that money, victims of Hsu's alleged Ponzi schemes.

Vilsack's Q3 filing also leaves us with a shiny little gem by the name of Seema Hingorani of Darien, Connecticut, the only other individual to receive a refund from Vilsack on 9/22, hers for $2,300.  Glancing at Hingorani's contribution history, we see her donations fit the Hsu donor pattern very nicely (including nearly $14,000 to Hillary and HillPAC and more than $26,000 to the DSCC since 2005).  I'd come upon Seema (and the two other Connecticut Hingoranis) previously, due to their fitting the Hsu contribution pattern so well, but never included them in the data primarily because Seema appears to have a legitimate and presumably high paying job, which is a decently predictive exclusionary criterion among suspected Hsu straw donors.  The Vilsack refund, however, seems to plant at least Seema if not the other Hingoranis firmly into the presumed Hsu-connected donor group.

Hingorani is sure to be just the first of (quite literally) hundreds of new Hsu-connected donors that will be unearthed by the end of the day.  Most will emerge when Hillary's filing is uploaded, though many of them will be alleged victims (coerced into making contributions as a condition of their participation in Hsu's ostensibly legitimate business deals), rather than allegedly reimbursed straw donors of the Paw ilk.

I won't be updating the data review in real time like this throughout the day, but I wanted to walk through this first very fertile filing step-by-step as a preview of things to come.

It's going to be a long night, on the other side of which we're likely to find ourselves discussing a much larger scandal.

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Previous coverage available in the Norman Hsu archives.

The Long Awaited Hsu Catalog

Today, The Wall Street Journal reports on the recent seizure warrants executed at Norman Hsu's SoHo apartment (pictured).  Thanks to the documents disclosed by the FBI, we now have a decently detailed accounting of what he'd left laying around.  And some of the details qualify as salacious.  Or at least intriguing.

Among the haul, find a previously unknown Hsu business entity, connections with 3 previously unknown investment firms (one of which is closely tied to some of Hsu's favorite politicians), and a possible connection to another huge Ponzi scheme (5 times huger than the one Hsu's currently charged with) which has already landed some folks behind bars.

So, on to the seized items...

In addition to that saxophone signed by Bill Clinton, agents found an extensive wine collection (including nearly a case of 1982 Chateau Lafite Rothschild, which fetches between $2,000 and $40,000 a bottle), a heap of highly relevant financial records, correspondence from politicians, and a Best Buy's worth of consumer electronics.  Anyone with a Motorola Verizon phone, a Samsung Sprint phone, and 3 Cingular Blackberrys likely either can't stand to be outside his service area or is trying to separate billing records.  Also seized were two laptops, a desktop, an iPod, and several portable drives and memory cards.  Even if the digital media has all been wiped clean and fried, investigators will be busying themselves blind with the trove of bank records, loan agreements, leases, investor materials, checks, and other financial records they turned up.  The FBI's itemized seizure inventory is available here (records and media) and here (wine collection) as PDFs of scanned handwritten pages.

But since few things in life are as unwieldy as PDFs of scanned handwritten pages, I've gone to the trouble of fixing us a nice, user-friendly spreadsheet instead.  This is the records and media tab and this is the wine collection tab.  Notable items (mainly the ones discussed below) are highlighted in an unpleasant shade of mint green.  It's even linked up so if you see a company or cohort you're interested in chasing down, you needn't but click.

I also took a whack at estimating the value of wine collection, using Wine Searcher.  No guarantees on the accuracy here (as I have less than zero wine knowledge), but generally speaking, these prices reflect something like the median retail price found for each bottle, as described.  My estimate of the total value is $68,000 (203 bottles), but given the wide price range for the 1982 Lafite alone, that could be low by a few hundred thousand dollars.  Any oenophiles who'd like to weigh in on the estimates, please do.

Anyway, on to the intriguing bits...

New Hsu entity:

Joining Components, Next Components, the only recently discovered Side B, and all the rest is New Equation.  All they found were incorporation documents and [something illegible], but this is pretty clearly another of Hsu's presumed shell companies as it officially shares that 561 7th Avenue address with Side B and Next Components (where none of them are).

New investment firms:

There are two allegedly defrauded investor groups involved in the complaints against Norman Hsu - Source Financing Investors in New York and Briarwood in Orange County.  In Hsu's home, however (in the same location in the same room as his bank statements and incorporation documents), agents found subscription agreements, adviser registrations, and marketing materials for 3 additional firms:

1. Robeco-Sage Capital Management (founded in 1994 by former Goldman Sachs partners)
2. Brentwood Capital (my best guess based on the handwriting - this could say Briarwood Capital, although Briarwood is actually called Briarwood Investors)
3. Marwood Group (site only accessible to investors)

At this point, there's no way to tell how (if at all) these firms or their principals fit into Hsu's world.  They could have invested in Hsu's ostensible apparel deals, much the way Briarwood and SFI did, but are reluctant to come forward.  They could be firms that employ acquaintances of Hsu's who were helping him develop his investor pitch.  Or Hsu could've been using the documents merely as templates of genuine investor materials.  But whatever the relationship, this third firm warrants further examination.

Marwood Group is an investment firm co-founded in 2002 by Edward Kennedy, Jr., son of Senator Ted Kennedy (recipient of nearly $50,000 in Hsu-connected funds) and brother of Rep. Patrick Kennedy (who received nearly $40,000 from Hsu and the gang).  Not surprisingly, many people at the firm make significant contributions to both the Senator and the Congressman.  Some have also given smaller amounts to the likes of George W. Bush, John Boehner, and the RNC, which is behavior we never see among Hsu's alleged straw donors, but since we won't be able to look at the contribution histories of Hsu's allegedly coerced donors (members of his two known investor groups), we don't yet know what their contribution patterns will reveal and can't yet make a good comparison with the Marwood folks.  In the meantime, here are all the federal donations made by those employed at Marwood Group since its founding.

[As a side note, while this may be completely coincidental, it's worth pointing out that the name and phone number of an actress named Shae Kennedy were printed on a recordable DVD retrieved from Hsu's apartment.  Kennedy was in a few films a few years back and now appears to be an assistant to comedian Lewis Black.  I had no luck determining whether she might be a "Kennedy" Kennedy.]

New huge Ponzi scheme:

This isn't so much a "new" scheme as one newly determined to be related to the Hsu case.  And it isn't so much "determined to be related" as it is "speculated by me to be related and kind of a long shot, but interesting enough to warrant discussion."

The seizure inventory refers to a letter from Samuel Somethingorother.  My best guess at what the handwriting was trying to convey was "Kefsal" (decide for yourself - page 4).  Google doesn't like "Kefsal" and instead suggests "Samuel Kelsall".  Samuel Kelsall is an interesting guy.  Samuel Kelsall V, no less, owns a two lawyer firm in Carlsbad, California.  Until 2001, Carlsbad was also home to a financial firm named PinnFund, where Kelsall appears to have served as in-house counsel.

PinnFund was shut down when federal investigators caught wind of a $330 million Ponzi scheme being perpetrated by the firm's principals.  Unlike Hsu's apparel-flavored schemes, PinnFund "invested" in sub-prime mortgages (years ahead of their time, finding their ruin in sub-prime).  Much like the alleged Hsu model, however, PinnFund's m.o. was to take money from their investors, "invest" it in these mortgage pools, and generate handsome (and guaranteed) returns for those investors.  In reality, they blew the money on, among other things:

...homes in Rancho Santa Fe, a yacht, a $31,000 dinner for nine people and a $5,000 tip at Laurel restaurant in San Diego, and...

...wait for it...

...a $5 million home in Laguna Niguel for [CEO Michael Fanghella's] then-girlfriend, a one-time porn star named Kelly Cook.

They shored up the missing principal and the guaranteed returns by recruiting new investors, using their antes to pay off the old, and round and round we go until it all collapses and the investors are left holding the bag.  In this case a very big bag.  A very big, very empty bag.

The Ponzi schemes Norman Hsu is accused of running are massive, weighing in at a combined $63 million.  But at $330 million, PinnFund was a monster, possibly the second largest in history, behind only the Bennett Funding scheme in the mid-1990s.

Samuel Kelsall does not appear to have been charged with any crimes in connection with the PinnFund scam (and he certainly isn't disbarred).  According to the SEC, as reported by San Diego Union-Tribune, both Kelsall and his boss's ex-porn star girlfriend "exercised their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination."  Fanghella made out worst, with 10 years in prison, while others convicted in the case received somewhat shorter sentences.  A press release from the prosecuting U.S. Attorney's office at the time the indictments were handed down offers additional details of how the scam worked.

Bearing in mind the aforementioned caveats (the messy handwriting, my first guess having been "Kefsal", the up to IV other Sam Kelsalls out there (including Sam V's father, an estate lawyer in Phoenix), and the fact that the substance of the letter could have been about anything), at this point, this boils down to a connection with a fairly low certainty, but a very high salaciousness quotient.  Multiple them together and you get an expected salaciousness value of "just high enough to warrant spending this much time on."

More on that one as pieces fall into (or out of) place.

In the mean time, there are a bunch of new threads that have just frayed on the big fuzzy sweater that is Norman Hsu.  If you've got the time and inclination to help pull on them, follow the links above and feel free to avail yourself of the resources below.  Let me know if you see any errors, if you fit any interesting pieces together, or if you're mentioned or know someone or something mentioned herein that you want to clarify or correct.

Political contributions made by suspected Hsu-connected donors
(Google spreadsheet)

• Recipient totals
• Contributor totals
• By individual transaction

Political contributions made by individuals possibly indirectly connected to Hsu
(Google spreadsheet)

• Marwood Group officers and employees
• Lillian Vernon, Fred and David Hochberg (see this post for LV/Hochberg background)

Inventory of Items Seized from Hsu's Wooster Street Apartment
(Google spreadsheet)

• Paper records, electronic media and storage (and fabric swatches?)
• Wine collection

FBI Seizure Warrants and Handwritten Inventories
(PDFs)

• Paper records, media, and storage (warrant not included)
• Wine collection
• Metrobank Personal Account
• Bank of America Corporate Accounts

(To get at the older posts, please to enjoy the Norman Hsu category page.)

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Update:  An alert reader points out another California lawyer named Samuel Keesal, a major Democratic contributor, the spelling of whose last name is a little easier to divine from the inventory-taker's handwriting than "Kelsall".

Clinton Shrine Seized From Norman Hsu's Apartment

As with so many Clinton scandals, the Hsu story has a sax angle.

Federal agents searching the Manhattan apartment of Democratic fund-raiser Norman Hsu this week seized a saxophone autographed by President Clinton, along with about 200 bottles of fine wine and Champagne.

Mr. Hsu purchased the instrument at an auction for $26,000 in October 2005, according to a representative of the American Red Cross. The auction was held during the centennial celebration for the charity's New York chapter, where the former president was also honored.

E.M. Winston, the maker of the saxophone, donated the instrument. And President Clinton, who attended the event, signed it. Mr. Clinton owns an E.M. Winston saxophone that was given to him by the late David Ginott, the company's president.

The saxophone purchase was part of an embrace of the Clintons that acquaintances said Mr. Hsu liked to display. He had a collection of photos on exhibit in his apartment, as he rose quickly to become a top supporter of Hillary Clinton and other Democrats, ultimately raising more than $1 million.

This is the Red Cross auction we're talking about.

On Thursday evening, October 20, The American Red Cross in Greater New York (ARC/GNY) celebrated its 100th Anniversary and honored former President William J. Clinton at a gala Centennial Celebration Ball in the World Financial Center Winter Garden in lower Manhattan.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Jon Stewart of "The Daily Show” spoke at the event, which featured a special performance by critically acclaimed jazz trumpeter Chris Botti and Grammy winner Paula Cole. Daniel Rodriguez, former NYC police officer, sang the National Anthem.

Top government and business leaders joined together to commemorate ARC/GNY's Centennial year. Guests included Congresswoman Nydia M. Velázquez and Councilwoman Gail Brewer, Katie Couric, Elisabeth Rohm and Vera Wang.

According to a New York social scene blogger in attendance, Clinton mentioned in his keynote not only that he and Chelsea get their news from the emcee's "The Daily Show" (shocking, I know), but that he sees China as an example of the world trending toward democracy, citing as evidence a content-regulated call-in radio show he did with the mayor of Shanghai (back in July 1998, when he and the Mrs. lit out for a 9-day tour of China as a grand jury was hearing from a woman named Linda Tripp).

If my roster is accurate, less than a week before the Red Cross event, several of Hsu's donors gave Hillary Clinton at least $17,700 (not including the 200+ Hsu-connected donors we don't yet know about).

According to the Red Cross, the event raised more than $2.3 million, including the live and silent auctions.  I wonder what else Hsu might've picked up.  Me, I would've gone for the autographed Sopranos pinball machine.

In any event, the gala must've left Hsu in a generally charitable mood, because over the next few days, he bundled nearly $14,000 for Ted Kennedy and the DNC.

FBI Seizure Warrants Reveal New Hsu Financial Details

Two seizure warrants signed by a federal magistrate in the $63 million fraud case against Norman Hsu offer some new information about the finances of the Democratic fundraiser, convicted felon, and serial fugitive.  The warrants authorized the seizure of funds in four bank accounts in the name of Hsu and three of his companies at Bank of America and Philippines-based Metropolitan Bank and Trust.

• Metrobank Warrant (pdf)
• Bank of America Warrant (pdf)

An attachment to the Metrobank warrant shows the bank recently turned over an official check for just under $73,000, a small fraction of the tens of millions of dollars investors are hoping to recoup (and slightly less than the $83,000 said to be in one of Hsu's Bank of America accounts).  They must be feeling a little like Geraldo, circa 1986.

Bank of America has yet to supply the FBI with the funds in Hsu's three accounts at that bank or a statement of their contents, but the warrant does yield an interesting bit of information - a new business entity controlled by Hsu.

Searches of campaign finance reports and other records have already unearthed several corporate names used by Hsu in connection with his alleged investment scams and his political fundraising, including Components, Ltd., Next Components, Ltd., Because... Men's Clothing, James Stone Ltd., and Dilini Management.  Joining that list is newcomer Side B, Inc.

According to the NY State Department, Side B was incorporated in May 2005 (the same week as Next Components) and both give their address as 561 Seventh Avenue in midtown Manhattan.  I visited that address last month and neither company is listed on the building directory, nor had the front desk attendant heard of Components or Next Components.

Side B is unique among Hsu's business entities, both in terms of its form of incorporation ("Inc." typically indicating a U.S. corporation vs. "Ltd." generally indicating a U.K. limited company; Dilini is a U.S. LLC) and in that we've never seen the company cited as an employer by a Hsu-connected campaign donor or listed elsewhere in connection with Norman Hsu.

There is a "Side B Apparel" in Boulder (which caters to multiple outlets in Denver, the city en route to which Hsu was apprehended in September), but it appears to be a small silk screening boutique, which makes it unlikely to be connected to Hsu (if only because they appear to do actual business...).

Side B, Components, and Next Components, are the three names attached to the Bank of America accounts, which will hopefully prove to contain more of the missing funds than did the Metrobank account in Norman Hsu's own name.

A checkbook found on Hsu at the time of his arrest in Colorado showed a balance of $6 million.  A day earlier, he forfeited a $2 million bond by failing to appear for his court appearance in San Mateo, California.  We know of roughly $2.5 million that made its way into the campaign coffers of Hsu's favored political candidates and once we're able to see the 3rd quarter campaign disclosures later this month, that number could more than double.  That puts us in the neighborhood of $13 million accounted for.  If we assume Hsu's lifestyle was lavish enough to burn through a million dollars a year (one of his two Manhattan apartments goes for $8,000/month), dating back to his earliest deals with the New York investment group in 2001, the total might push as high as $19 million.

Between the New York and Orange County groups, investors say they entrusted a total of $63 million with Hsu, leaving $44 million unaccounted for, estimating conservatively.  Hsu's corporate accounts may yield a more meaningful chunk of the missing funds, but given that these assets weren't frozen until September 18th (13 days after Hsu gathered his things and skipped bail), they may well have been cleaned out.

If so, the accounts' transaction histories at least ought to show where the money went next.  And in either case, they ought to give investigators a much clearer picture of how Hsu's vast network of alleged straw donors operated.

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I'll update this post when details of the Bank of America accounts become available.  For all previous coverage, rollick in the convenience of the new Norman Hsu category page.

Meet Mr. Hsu: Politically Connected Apparel Magnate, Fraud Indictee, Billionaire

I wanted to vet this a little more thoroughly before posting on it, but I've run into a bit of a brick wall, so I thought I'd throw it out into blogworld to see what the army can dig up.

In a continuing effort to piece together the Norman Hsu backstory (where he came from, where he got his money prior to the recent alleged investment scams, how he learned to ply the phony apparel trade, etc.), I've come across a man who bears an uncanny circumstantial resemblance to Mr. Hsu.

Meet Douglas Hsu, Chinese apparel magnate, educated in the U.S. (Columbia and my alma mater, Notre Dame), and recently indicted for forgery and breach of trust in a case that involved the First Lady of Taiwan.

Hsu is also a billionaire.

Ranked #31 on Forbes' Greater China's Rich List, Douglas Hsu is worth an estimated $1.4 billion, his primary asset being his equity in Far Eastern Group, the Chinese apparel company this first-born son inherited from his father Yu-Ziang Hsu upon his death in 2000.  Since then, Hsu has transformed Far Eastern into a multi-billion dollar conglomerate with interests in energy, telecom, construction, hospitality, financial services, and of course, apparel.  Hsu's profile in Business Week offers additional board affiliations and other resume details.

Douglas and at least four other Hsus with Anglican names serve in senior management or on the board of directors of Far Eastern Textile Group, namely Raymond, Peter, Tonia, and Alice.  Douglas, Peter, and Tonia were all educated in New York or California (Norman's primary stomping grounds).

At 64, Douglas Hsu is eight years older than Norman Hsu.  What I'm positing here is the possibility that Douglas, as Y.Z. Hsu's eldest son, may be Norman Hsu's brother or half-brother (and that the other Hsus running Far Eastern Group may be other close relatives).  You can decide for yourself whether one looks sufficiently like the other for this to be feasible.  I have no particular facial comparison skills, but one shared feature that jumps out is the notably sunken eye sockets.  Yu-Ziang Hsu wore thick-rimmed glasses and lived his primary picture-taking years in an era of fuzzier photography, so the paternal comparison doesn't offer much insight.

Norman Hsu disappeared in 1992, following his felony swindling conviction in San Mateo.  The Journal has him starting a couple of thinly-documented companies in Hong Kong that year, but for the most part, this chapter in Hsu's life is fairly opaque.  Hsu's lawyer contends he returned to the U.S. in 1996, making a series of successful investments in California, which equipped him with the financial wherewithal to begin making his generous political contributions.  If my speculation about Hsu being Ysu-Ziang Hsu's son (albeit perhaps one subjugated by birth order and possibly renounced, given his criminal ways) is correct, then Norman could've also seen a financial windfall in 2000, when Yu-Ziang's bequest made at least one other Hsu a very wealthy man and rendered him a powerful apparel baron.

While Norman Hsu's lawyer says he was back in California by 1996, his timeline doesn't come back into independently confirmable focus until 2001 - a year after Yu-Ziang Hsu's death - when Norman began doing deals with New York investor and Woodstock co-founder Joel Rosenman (a business relationship at the center of Hsu's current legal troubles).  It was two years later, in 2003, that Hsu launched his career as an ATM for the Democratic party.  Hsu would continue on this path unabated until August 2007, when his fugitive status and his orchestration of an apparent ring of illegal straw donors came to light.

Over this same roughly 6-year period, Douglas Hsu was building an empire.  By 2006, Far Eastern Group included 191 companies, eight of which were publicly traded.  It employed 45,000 people, recorded more than $10 billion in annual revenues, and held assets valued at more than $32 billion.  Much like Norman Hsu, however, Douglas ran into a spot of trouble involving alleged fraud, the apparel trade, and political intrigue.  From a Google-translated story in the Taipei Times last October:

It was a dark day for 64-year-old business tycoon Douglas Hsu last Monday when he was charged by the Taipei District Prosecutors' Office in a department store's management takeover scandal that involved First Lady Wu Shu-chen.

Along with several other businessmen, Hsu -- chairman of Far Eastern Group and a man who is proud of and known for his exquisitely forged ties with political heavyweights -- was indicted for two years and six months for forgery and breach of trust over the Pacific Sogo Department Store scandal.

Douglas Hsu is also renowned as a charismatic showman, who put his magnetism and high-level political connections to good use in his business career.

At press briefings, unlike many other bosses who stand still and give speeches in a flat voice, Hsu grabs the microphone, moving around on the stage like a singer talking jubilantly whipping up the crowd. Reporters are entertained by his "performances." "A shrewd businessman "is the comment most frequently used to describe him. This includes his efforts to build up relations in political circles.

After Far Eastern Group took over the management of Pacific Sogo early in 2003, Hsu invited current Presidential Office Secretary-General Mark Chen, former presidential office deputy secretary-general Chen Che-nan and the first family's former doctor Huang Fang-yen, who all maintain close ties with President Chen Shui-bian, for a banquet.

He then announced in front of them the appointment of Chung Chin, former Cabinet spokeswoman, as the department store's first chairwoman. Giving the impression that the government was on his side, at Christmas the same year, Wu Hsu invited to switch on the Christmas tree lights at the Far Eastern Plaza Hotel.

As far as I can tell, Douglas Hsu has not yet received any prison sentence, but his Forbes profile indicates he may face jail time in connection with his indictment for forgery and breach of trust.

While there are several interesting circumstantial parallels between Norman and Douglas Hsu (including their names, their line of business, their leverage of political connections as business assets, their fraud allegations, their approximate age, their American educations, and a vague similarity of facial features), tying them together definitively as siblings is where I've hit the wall.

I've discussed this with a few people, including one of Hsu's Orange County investors and one of the Journal reporters who broke the Hsu story, and details about the man's family (not including his ex-wife and son) appear to be few and far between.  This is where you come in, should you be interested in helping to ferret out the missing pieces.  The links above ought to be decent starting points.  If you come upon anything that seems to shed light on Hsu's family background, his time overseas between 1992 and 2000, or anything that connects him to Douglas (or Peter, Raymond, Tonia, or Alice) Hsu, give me a shout.

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Housekeeping note:  For easier reference of previous Hsu coverage, I've created a dedicated Norman Hsu category, rather than continuing to paste the increasingly ungainly list of links to prior posts.

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Update:  Many thanks for the flurry of tips that have already came in.  Among them (courtesy of Kurt) was this online photo album from the Asia Society's 2004 annual dinner, honoring Douglas Hsu and featuring Hassan Nemazzee (Iranian-American banker and failed nominee as Ambassador to Argentina under Bill Clinton) and Richard Holbrooke (Bill Clinton's Assistant Secretary of State, former U.N. Ambassador, current foreign policy adviser to Hillary's Presidential campaign, and rumored presumptive Secretary of State under a Hillary White House).

Hillary Razzles, Dazzles In Q3

Bucking the trend and "defy[ing] the skeptics", Hillary Clinton's campaign announced this morning that it raised a whopping $27 million in the third quarter.

Hillary wanted you to know that this was our best quarter yet. More than 100,000 new donors. A total of $27 million raised -- and $22 million for the primary -- substantially more than any other candidate in the race.

The candidate even penned a handwritten note to thank the country for its collective largesse.  This is an enormous haul - slightly more than she brought in during the second quarter and far better than any other candidates did in the third.  Allah notes Hillary raked in more than the top three Republican candidates combined.

To give you an idea of the scale of Hillary's collections, $27 million is nearly half the amount her superstar fundraiser Norman Hsu is accused of stealing from investors in order to fund his political disbursements.

Cheap shot?

Clinton is inviting them each day that passes without her divulging her list of 260 Hsu-connected contributors (roughly 200 more than we currently know about), such that her less diligent colleagues on Hsu's dole can more thoroughly quantify and disgorge themselves of all Hsu-connected funds.  Dozens, possibly hundreds, of people are hoping that tens of millions of dollars that were allegedly coerced or outright stolen from them may eventually be returned and Clinton has an opportunity not only to help facilitate such restitution, but to restore our full faith in the idea that her financial dealings are transparent and in good faith.

The only good excuse for not disclosing the details about her enormous Hsu windfall would be that she's given the information over to one or more of the federal agencies investigating the matter and has been asked not to make those details public.  And if that's the case, then she needs to say that.  If not, then she needs to make with the list.

We're going to piece it together eventually anyway.  If Clinton stays mum, we'll be able to see many of the relevant details (notably, who received the $850,000 worth of refund checks at the end of September) once the third quarter reports are filed with the FEC on the 15th.  But today's fanfare suggests the campaign is eager to make public disclosures about the quarter before that filing deadline, so spilling the rest of the beans about her felonious fundraiser seems like a no-brainer.

Where's Winkle?

While we no longer need to worry about the whereabouts of the habitually slippery Norman Hsu, there's another central figure in this Democratic fundraising/investment fraud scandal that may have slithered away amid the sensational hubbub.

Winkle Paw, Hsu's most delightfully named associate, seems to have turned up missing.

According to campaign finance disclosures, Paw has served as everything from project analyst to CEO at a handful of Hsu's companies, including Components, Ltd., Next Components, Next Electronics, and CoolPowers (though that last one could've been a poor transcription of the word "Components" by a Tom Harkin campaign staffer).  Paw was actually CEO of Next Components (one of those companies I couldn't seem to locate in my tour of Hsu's facilities) nearly two years before becoming a business analyst at the firm this summer, according to the filings, which is an interesting career trajectory.

Up through 2005, Paw also listed the (legitimate) investment management firm Franklin Templeton as his employer on more than two dozen filings, where he was also variably a "project analyst" or a "business analyst" (never making it to CEO though).  A visitor from the firm's San Mateo office visited this site yesterday, linking in from a search on "Winkle Paw", possibly a concerned cube-mate wondering if she can stop watering his plants.

In all, Winkle made more than $150,000 in political contributions to at least 40 Hsu-favored candidates and committees since 2004.  6 other members of the Paw family (all holed up in that cozy green house in Daly City) gave another $143,000.  Khin Mon, who may or may not be related to the Paws (but who, as reported here first, also resides in the Paw house), gave another $12,000 over the same period.

In addition to Winkle Paw's association with Hsu-owned businesses, I'm told that Hsu reportedly indicated to Martin Waters (the manager of the Orange County investment fund that Hsu is now accused of defrauding out of $23 million) that he had designated Paw an authorized signatory on his bank account, such that their business dealings could continue should anything happen to Hsu.  According to an individual with knowledge of the situation, the day before the San Mateo court appearance that Hsu would fail to make, Waters (still presuming Hsu's business dealings to be legitimate) offered to step into Hsu's... well, shoes during any period of incarceration that might follow.  When Hsu balked, the fund manager reportedly told him he preferred to pull out of the pending deal under the circumstances, leading Hsu to threaten to lock him out of future deals in retribution.

Around that same time, Hsu was apparently Fed Exing off a bunch of copies of what appeared to recipients to be a suicide note. By the next morning, he had vanished, his lawyers left feckless in a San Mateo courthouse.  While Hsu would be nabbed the following day, half naked and "freaking out" aboard a Denver-bound train, Paw may have slipped away cleanly.

As far as I'm aware, no state or federal charges have been filed against Paw.  But plenty have been filed against Hsu, relating both to alleged illegal contribution reimbursements and to the alleged ponzi schemes in New York and California.  And if Paw is Hsu's #2, as is suggested by the financial disclosures and the prospect of Paw having signing authority on Hsu's accounts, then it seems plausible that serious charges could be in Paw's future.

We also don't know for sure that Winkle has deliberately vanished.  It could simply be that the authorities aren't looking for him (he's not listed as wanted in California).  But if they're not hunting for him, maybe they ought to be.  The Orange County investors haven't been able to reach him since the morning Hsu lit out for Denver.  That was three weeks ago.  If - let's say - Paw was on that train too, keeping his cool a bit better than his pill-popping partner, and if he had access to even a small fraction of the millions in liquid assets at Hsu's disposal, Winkle just may have winked out of this story for good.

And if Paw was a trained and semi-legitimate professional investment manager who had signing authority on Hsu's accounts, he likely has more than a passing familiarity with the inner-workings of his shadowy dealings.  If the 100 or more investors in the funds that Hsu is alleged to have defrauded are to have a shot at recovering some of their lost investments (which may exceed $60 million), determining Winkle's whereabouts would seem to be a crucial next step.

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I'd post a picture if I had one handy, but I don't know that I've ever come across a picture of Winkle.  A Google Image search for "winkle paw" not surprisingly fetches mainly precious kittens and teddy bears.  If anyone's got a link to a reliable picture of Mr. Paw, let me know and I'll point it out.

And if you are Mr. Paw, or his cube-mate or whathaveyou, and want to solve the "Where's Winkle" puzzle for us, I think there are a lot of ticked off investors that would appreciate it.

[Hsu archives after the jump.]

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Previously:

• Hsadows Of Hillary Throughout Hsu's Benefaction
• Correction re: Lillian Vernon, Fred Hochberg, Norman Hsu
• Hsocking Hsu Secrets Revealed!
• Runaround Hsu: The Music Video
• Hillary, Truth Not At Peace Over $850,000 Said Refunded [Update: Feds File Charges]
• Another Clinton Bundler Accused of Reimbursing Donors
• Hsu, Recobbled
• Some Oddities About Hsu's Ostensibly Unwitting Woodstock Backer
• Mesa County DA: $4 Million Bond Not Enough To Cage Hsu [Update: $5 Million Is?]
• Dems Lowballing Hsu Fundraising Totals [Update: Hsu Offsets?]
• Hsu Sent Suicide Note [Update: Blaming Obama]
• Federal Agencies Unofficially Probing Hsu Scandal Number [At Least] 4
• Hsu's Financing Source Revealed
• Hillary's Massive Hsu War Chest: Abramoff Parity Nears
• Photoblog: Touring Norman Hsu's New York
• Hsu Captured! (Drugged?)
• Hsu Still A HillRaiser In Good Standing?
• Knock, Knock, Knockin' On Norman's Door.
• Hsu Reclaims Fugitive Status, Forfeiting $2 Million Bail
• Hsu vs. Abramoff
• New Hsu Review: Following [the Rest Of] the Money
• A Really Big Hsu...
• Hillary Vows To Give [At Least Some Of] Hsu Contributions To Charity
• From Now On, When the Phone Rings You Say, "Vandelay Industries."
• Hillary's Magwitch?

Hsadows Of Hillary Throughout Hsu's Benefaction

Hillary Clinton certainly made off the best from Norman Hsu's political bounty, reeling in roughly one third of his $2.5 million in sketchy fundraising thus far uncovered.  But a piece in today's Boston Globe ponders whether even Hsu's non-Hillary-bound cash had covertly Hillary-friendly aims.

Disgraced fund-raiser Norman Hsu did a lot more than just pump $850,000 into Hillary Clinton's campaign bank account: He also raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for local, state, and federal candidates who have endorsed Clinton or whose support she courted.
...
In at least some cases, Clinton or her aides directly channeled contributions from Hsu and his network to other politicians supportive of her presidential campaign, according to interviews and campaign finance records.
...
[I]n February, when former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack ended his own White House bid, he was about $450,000 in the red. A month after dropping out, Vilsack endorsed Clinton, and Clinton agreed to help him retire his debts. (Both insisted there was no quid pro quo.)

Over the next few months, some of Clinton's biggest fund-raisers gave Vilsack checks, including Hsu, who kicked in the maximum allowable contribution, $2,300, on May 3 after attending an event organized by Clinton's campaign, Newsweek reported this month. An associate of Hsu's, Paul Su, chipped in $1,000 on the same day.

And the next day, Susan Chilman chipped in $500.  Yes, Chilman (aka TV actress Susan Pari) is on only my suspicious donor list and not yet widely accepted as a Hsu associate by the dead tree crowd, but for posterity, I'm pegging Vilsack's total known take at $3,800, not $3,300.

In other cases, Clinton helped direct Hsu's money to influential politicians who have yet to endorse her but hail from key presidential primary states. Clinton raised at least $6,000 from Hsu and his network last year for Governor John Lynch of New Hampshire, according to Lynch aides. Lynch has no plans to endorse anyone before the state's crucial January primary, aides said.

Interesting.  I've only got $2,000 going to Lynch - all of it from our buddy Winkle Paw.  Part of the difficulty here is the fact that New Hampshire's campaign finance disclosure is, well, lacking.  Governor Lynch has an opportunity to do the public a great service by disclosing who contributed the other $4,000, so they can be added to the roster of Hsu bundlees.  This is my e-mail address.

And at least some of the $17,000 that Governor Jennifer Granholm of Michigan collected from Hsu and his associates in 2005 and 2006 stems from a Nov. 29, 2005, fund-raising reception for her hosted by Steven Rattner, a New York investment firm executive and major Clinton donor seen as a candidate for US Treasury secretary if Clinton wins.  Granholm's office said she has not made an endorsement decision.

In this case, "at least some" equals $11,700, all pitched in on November 30, 2005, by Hsu, Danny Lee, Susan Chilman (the TV actress), Suzanne Raffaelli (a Broadway actress), and Youn Kim (a former Broadway actress).  In total, Granholm tips the scales at better than $42,000 if I don't have any false positives on my roster.

Campaign finance records show numerous contributions from Hsu and his associates to Clinton supporters.

In New Hampshire, Senate President Sylvia Larsen's Democratic Caucus committee received $5,000 from Hsu in September 2006; Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan collected more than $20,000 from Hsu and his associates;Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas took in about $11,000; and Senator Dianne Feinstein of California received at least $17,000.

Hsu and his network also gave nearly $50,000 to Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa. Harkin has not endorsed anyone, but his wife, Ruth, is a major Clinton backer.

(Stabenow: $34,000; Pryor: $12,000; Feinstein: $22,000; Harkin: $60,000.)

In addition, Hsu and his associates have contributed tens of thousands of dollars to state and local Democratic Party organizations and candidates around the country, including more than $100,000 to Governor Eliot Spitzer of New York and Attorney General Andrew Cuomo of New York, both of whom have endorsed Clinton. On Feb. 21, Hsu dipped into Chicago city politics, giving $3,500 to Alderman Danny Solis, the brother of Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton's campaign manager.

Blogging this elsewhere: Jammie Wearing Fool, Hot Air, American Pundit

Correction re: Lillian Vernon, Fred Hochberg, Norman Hsu

In this post on September 21st, I inaccurately referred to Fred Hochberg (Dean of Milano at the New School, HillRaiser, financier of many of Norman Hsu's favored Democratic candidates and committees, and member of Bill Clinton's cabinet), as the current CEO of Lillian Vernon and his brother David Hochberg as an executive at the company.

Fred Hochberg is not (nor was he ever) CEO of Lillian Vernon, but rather is the company's former president and COO, while David Hochberg is the former VP of public affairs.

Fred and David are both sons of the company founder, chairman emeritus, and former CEO Lillian Hochberg (later renamed Lillian Vernon), but neither son currently serves any role in the organization, nor does either maintain any ownership in the company.

Fred departed the company in the early 1990s, not long after Hsu first became a fugitive from justice and several years before the apparent onset of his current political imbroglio.  David left the company more than two years ago, according to Lillian Vernon's public relations specialist, who e-mailed to alert me of the error.

In the context of the previous post, I called attention to Fred Hochberg's identity as a Lillian Vernon executive (former executive) and offpsring of the founder, given the odd fact that the company is listed as the official intermediary of one of Norman Hsu's own direct political contributions (a singular distinction, so far as I've seen).  Hochberg's multiple linkages to Hsu (Hillary's A-list, the New School, their political contribution patterns) seemed to render Lillian Vernon's identity as the intermediary of that Hsu contribution all the more relevant.

The fact that neither son is currently involved in (nor owns any of the equity in) the company seems to refute any resulting suggestion of a relationship between Hsu and the company (though certainly not between Hsu and Hochberg).

The resulting question mark, as concerns Lillian Vernon, is then: Why is the company listed as intermediary of one of Hsu's contributions as recently as June 2007 (to NY City Council Speaker Christine Quinn), given that Fred (the one whose linkages to Hsu are well-documented) departed 14 years prior?

Occam might suggest mega-bundler Fred Hochberg is simply still using the Lillian Vernon name when filling out his bundling forms (of which he's filled out quite a few, based on the records from the NYC Campaign Finance Board, one of the few bodies that reports intermediaries).  Oddly though, Fred hasn't listed himself as an intermediary on any filing with the NYC CFB since 2003.

"Lillian Vernon", on the other hand, is the intermediary of record not only for Hsu's June 5, 2007 contribution to Quinn, but on precisely one other contribution - also to Christine Quinn, also on June 5th, 2007, made by Cathy Lasry.

Cathy's husband Marc is a member of a list that you're likely becoming increasingly familiar with.

So while this correction (as egregious and regrettable as the underlying error was) tends to sever the indirect connection between Hsu and Lillian Vernon, by way of Hsu's apparent association with Fred Hochberg, it renders all the more puzzling the fact that the company is listed as the bundler of these two very recent contributions, made by Hsu and a fellow HillRaiser's spouse - on the same day to the same candidate.

I've asked the public relations specialist who wrote in about this and will update this post with any insights he's able to offer.

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Update:  The PR rep indicates that the bundler in question here is "Lillian Vernon the person [not] Lillian Vernon the company."  In the 1990s, Lillian Hochberg did formally rename herself after the company that she'd partially named after herself, so were she to set to bundling, I suppose that's how her name would appear.

Hsocking Hsu Secrets Revealed!

[An important correction to certain details in this post is available here.]

If there's one thing that can be said about Clinton financial scandals, it's that they tend to be complex.  And thus far, the Norman Hsu debacle is living up to the archetype.

This rabbit hole is proving to be a fair bit deeper than anyone might've guessed and we're about to plumb its depths.  If you're reading this, it means you're taking the red pill.

Two of the biggest open questions were always 1) where is Hsu - a convicted con man and fugitive with no documented ability to turn a legitimate buck - getting these gobs of money, and 2) why is he squandering it on all these Democrats?

These specific Democrats.

We seem to have gotten at least part of the answer to the first question, as Hsu has recently been accused of swindling investors out of as much as $70 million in a variety of Ponzi schemes and other bogus investments.  The second question though, has been naggingly impenetrable.  After all, if Hsu was simply buying his way into the inner circles of various celebrity politicians, whether for his own ego or to project more credibility and gravitas to his marks (or both), why would his fundraising have been so unwaveringly partisan - targeting only members of the minority party and only very specific members of that party.  Hsu's network finance the campaigns of more than 80 Democrats - from Presidential candidates to state legislators and town supervisors.  From the newest newbies (including a majority of the first-time candidates who became Senate freshmen this year) to some of the body's dustiest relics (Kennedy, Biden, et al).

Yet Chuck Schumer, for example, Hillary's senior counterpart in New York, never saw a dime.  Fellow New York politicians Eliot Spitzer, Andrew Cuomo, Anthony Weiner, Kristen Gillibrand, and others received hundreds of separate contributions, totalling many hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Schumer: bubkes.

Debbie Stabenow (D-MI): $29,613...  Carl Levin (D-MI): squat.  Jay Rockefeller (D-WV): $23,000...  Robert Byrd (D-WV): zilch.

You get the idea.  The points is that Hsu's specific slate of favored candidates (itemized here) seemed to be deliberate and predetermined and was not satisfyingly explained away by any of his speculated motivations.  This has actually been helpful in ferreting out Hsu's donor network though - when you happen on an individual with a huge string of contributions not only to Clinton and Obama, but to several specific Democratic committees and to specific Democrats like Tom Harkin, Patrick Kennedy, Kristen Gillibrand, Dianne Feinstein, and Hsu's other favorites, you've found someone worth looking into.

The mystery of Hsu's candidate slate is a vexing one.  Enlightenment, however, appears to be tucked away in a single transaction listed in a  NYC Campaign Finance Board disclosure.

Contributor: Norman Hsu
Employer: Next Components
Candidate: Christine Quinn
Amount: $4,950
Date: 6/5/07
Intermediary: Lillian Vernon

This is peculiar.  As an A-list Democratic fundraiser, Hsu is typically the bundler in these transactions, not the bundlee.  So what gives?

Lillian Vernon is a trinket catalog company, perhaps best known for its constant lampooning on Mad TV.  It was founded by Lillian Hochberg in Mount Vernon, NY (clever, eh?) in 1951.  Lillian's son Fred is the current CEO and his brother David is an executive at the company.

If you run a search for Fred Hochberg's own federal political contributions, the telltale Hsu pattern once again emerges.  The same goes for Lillian Vernon's corporate contributions.  From all the federal and state records, as well as the municipal filings in New York, L.A., and San Francisco, I've compiled a full accounting of the donations made by both the company itself and Fred and David Hochberg and updated the Google spreadsheet with a separate Hochberg tab.

Two points are crucial here.

1)  Ever since Hsu became a major fundraiser, there have been notable similarities between his and Hochberg/Lillian Vernon's contributions that strain the limits of coincidence.  Not only is there significant overlap among several far-flung candidates who wouldn't typically be of much interest to New York businessmen, but the size and timing of many of the transactions further suggest the efforts are coordinated.

10/24/05: Fred Hochberg contributes $2,000 to Ted Kennedy.
10/24/05: A Hsu donor in California contributes $2,100 to Ted Kennedy.

6/6/06: Lillian Vernon contributes $25,000 to Eliot Spitzer.
6/7/06: Norman Hsu contributes $25,000 to Eliot Spitzer.

1/26/07: Fred Hochberg contributes $2,300 to Hillary Clinton.
1/26/07: Hsu and various Hsu donors across the country make a total of 8 contributions to Hillary Clinton ranging from $1,900-2,100 each.

3/28/07: Hsu and various Hsu donors make a total of 11 contributions to Clinton, totaling $23,400 (most at the $2,300 maximum).
3/31/07: Lillian Vernon makes 2 contributions to Clinton, totalling $4,600.

5/3/07: Norman Hsu makes 2 contributions to Mark Pryor, totalling $2,500.
5/3/07: Fred Hochberg contributes $2,300 to Mark Pryor.

6/5/07: Norman Hsu contributes $4,950 to Christine Quinn, his first and only direct contribution to Quinn.
6/5/07: Lillian Vernon contributes $110 to Chrinstine Quinn, for the first time in 4 years.

Here, the Hsu-slighted senior Senator from New York pitches in by serving as the exception that proves the rule.  Schumer actually used to enjoy regular financial support from Hochberg.  He and his company made several sizable contributions to Schumer's campaigns between 1997 and 2003... then the gravy train came screeching to a halt.  Not a single contribution after March 2003.  It's anyone's guess why, but if Chuck did something to sour Hochberg, it would explain his conspicuous absence among both Hochberg's and Hsu's bountiful largesse heaped on just about every other notable Democrat in New York State over the following 4 years.

These are all anecdotal observations of course, but I've made the whole data set of Hsu-related transactions available, so you can go exploring for additional interestingly timed contributions.

2)  Hochberg's political benefaction predates Hsu's by several years.  While Hsu didn't get his start until 2003 and didn't really hit his stride until late 2004, Lillian Vernon and the Hochbergs contributed more than a half million dollars to Democrats in the decade prior to Hsu's political foray (and more than a quarter million more since).  This suggests the slate of candidates whose palms Hsu has chosen to cross with silver these last few years was not the product of either Hsu's own ideology or any specific partisan motivation.  It seems more likely that the pols Hsu began to grease were simply co-opted from Hochberg's list of favored candidates.

The fact that the Hsu pattern predates Hsu's career as a Democratic booster means the original architect of the candidate slate is likely near the nexus of Hsu's political awakening, which makes that architect pivotal to the Hsu story.  To be clear, this doesn't necessarily imply that Hochberg's contributions (or the many individuals that he bundles) are tainted the way contributions from Hsu's donor network are.  Hochberg may well have gone on making these same contributions had Hsu never entered the picture.  The significance of the Hsu pattern actually being a borrowed Hochberg pattern is that it strongly implies a close and ongoing association between Hsu and Hochberg.

The contribution patterns alone are sufficient to draw that inference, but as you might guess, we're not done descending the rabbit hole.

But wait... there's more.  Some cursory digging on Fred Hochberg reveals something interesting.  He's a fellow HillRaiser.  Thanks to a bit of alphabetical kismet, you can see his name directly above Hsu's on Hillary's official HillRaiser roster. [Update: Hillary finally removed Hsu from her list, but there's the screenshot.]

But wait... there's still more.  Hochberg is also a dean at the New School, where Hsu was a trustee until this scandal broke last month and the school hurriedly removed his name from their website.  Also on the New School board is Bernard Schwartz, one of Bill Clinton's biggest financial backers and the central figure in Clinton's scandal involving the sale of missile technology to China.

And the lily gilder:  Fred Hochberg was a member of President Clinton's Cabinet.

Yes, Fred Hochberg, a dean at the school where Hsu served as a trustee, one of Hsu's fellow HillRaisers, CEO of the company that officially bundled at least one of Hsu's direct contributions as recently as this summer, and the apparent architect of Hsu's favored candidate slate, was installed as one of the country's senior-most federal policymakers by Bill Clinton.

Hochberg was tapped to become the SBA's deputy adminstrator in 1998 and some time thereafter became the acting administrator.  The SBA administrator is not a current Cabinet-level position.  Clinton elevated the position to Cabinet rank, a move Bush has undone.  Not long before his executive appointment, Hochberg had enjoyed another kind of Presidential access, as a member of Clinton's bescandaled "White House Coffee" guest list.

So.

Where does all this leave us?  There are still a lot of details yet to emerge that will undoubtedly shed additional light on these linakges, but it seems quite clear that Norman Hsu and Fred Hochberg are and have for some time been closely associated.  It's abundantly clear that the Clintons and Hochberg are quite intimately associated.  This seems to draw Hsu and Clinton uncomfortably close to one another.

And while the complexity and duplicity that saturates this whole affair may offer Hillary a bit of confusion cover that she can use to equivocate when pressed, it's now becoming increasingly far-fetched that Hillary took Norman Hsu for no more than a kindly, deep-pocketed fan.

Let's just say it requires a willing suspension of disbelief.

---

For those of you waiting for the newest data update, it's all polished up and uploaded to the Google doc.  A couple notes about this iteration:

• The grand total is now $2.56 million (within 1% of the Abramoff threshold)
• 3 new contributors have been added since the last update
  • Khin Mon
    Homemaker, Daly City, CA
    Total contributions: $12,100 from 2005-2006
    Contributed to Hillary: $4,200
  • Solange Sandy
    Actress, New York, NY
    Total contributions: $35,450 from 2005-2007
    Contributed to Hillary: $4,200
  • Suzanne Raffaelli
    Model, New York, NY
    Total contributions: $86,250 from 2004-2007
    Contributed to Hillary: $7,800
• Exciting note about Khin Mon - according to the campaign finance disclosures, she lives with the many Paws who occupy that cozy green house on Shelbourne Avenue in Daly City, CA.
• Recipients of Hsu-connected funds: 85 Democratic candidates and candidate PACs, 22 Democratic committees and state parties, 1 Republican candidate
• Cooling their heels on the periphery, awaiting further review of their contribution patterns and relationship to Hsu and his business interests are 3 possible Hsu family members (not including his ex-wife), accounting for more than $200,000 in contributions; a group of law firm employees, accounting for more than $100,000 in contributions; two individuals, accounting for a combined $60,000 in contributions; and the New York family referenced in the last update, accounting for up to $700,000 in contributions.

Also blogging this today:

Ace of Spades (who hauled out the flaming skull for the occasion), Instapundit, Allah (praise him), LGF, Power Line, Captain Ed, Flopping Aces, Blue Crab Boulevard, JammieWearingFool, Right Voices.  Together, they're bathing this site in a terribly agreeable traffic flood.

Previously:
Runaround Hsu: The Music Video
Hillary, Truth Not At Peace Over $850,000 Said Refunded [Update: Feds File Charges]
Another Clinton Bundler Accused of Reimbursing Donors
Hsu, Recobbled
Some Oddities About Hsu's Ostensibly Unwitting Woodstock Backer
Mesa County DA: $4 Million Bond Not Enough To Cage Hsu [Update: $5 Million Is?]
Dems Lowballing Hsu Fundraising Totals [Update: Hsu Offsets?]
Hsu Sent Suicide Note [Update: Blaming Obama]
Federal Agencies Unofficially Probing Hsu Scandal Number [At Least] 4
Hsu's Financing Source Revealed
Hillary's Massive Hsu War Chest: Abramoff Parity Nears
Photoblog: Touring Norman Hsu's New York
Hsu Captured! (Drugged?)
Hsu Still A HillRaiser In Good Standing?
Knock, Knock, Knockin' On Norman's Door.
Hsu Reclaims Fugitive Status, Forfeiting $2 Million Bail
Hsu vs. Abramoff
New Hsu Review: Following [the Rest Of] the Money
A Really Big Hsu...
Hillary Vows To Give [At Least Some Of] Hsu Contributions To Charity
From Now On, When the Phone Rings You Say, "Vandelay Industries."
Hillary's Magwitch?

Runaround Hsu: The Music Video

The Ventilators' new single drops today.

Hillary, Truth Not At Peace Over $850,000 Said Refunded [Update: Feds File Charges]

I've been musing over whether the $850,000 in Norman Hsu-bundled contributions Hillary Clinton pledged to return to donors 10 days ago would wind up being too high or too low.  On the one hand, she might be overshooting in order to sweep up every red cent that might possibly have been intermediated by Hsu, leading to an overestimate.  On the other hand, she might be undershooting simply to limit the financial and PR fallout (despite it being wholly out of character for the normally forthright and transparent Clintons to try to pull a fast one on us - at least once published reports render that impossible).  Some of her colleagues seem to be lowballing their Hsu estimates, so why not Hillary?

Of course the actual amount Hillary refunded is little more than an academic exercise, since the campaign announced (to wide stupefaction) that it would ask the Hsu-connected "donors" to return their refunds to Senator Clinton immediately.

But now it seems Clinton may never have intended to refund all of its Hsu-connected money in the first place, judging by an e-mail sent in by a reader just this morning.

I thought you might be interested in learning that contrary to a statement by Howard Wolfson on September 10th 2007 “an estimated 260 donors this week will receive refunds totaling approximately $850,000 from the campaign” this money still has not been returned – at least not to me.  I know this because I was a donor who had my arm twisted to make a contribution to Hillary Clinton’s campaign on behalf of Norman Hsu and I haven’t seen a dime returned.  It’s very easy to see my contribution as I completed a form which had “Hillary for President” at the top and “Contact/Code, if any: Norman Hsu” at the bottom.  I made the donation through American Express making it easy to trace and easy to return.

After three calls to the Hillary Campaign (703 469 2008) no one knew who was responsible for returning these donations. Now that seems strange as the press appear to believe Howard Wolfson is a senior representative of the Clinton campaign as they quote him frequently.  It seems to me that if Hillary Clinton cannot deliver on the small things how can we believe she will deliver if she becomes President?

Just a thought but is it worth investigating whether any of the $850,000 has been returned, and to which charity did Hillary Clinton donate the $23,000 she received from Norman Hsu?

Yes it is.

The disclosure filings confirm that the reader in question did contribute $2,300 to Clinton during the current cycle.

So how about it, Senator - it's been 10 days since Wolfson said the refunds would be received "this week".  Are the checks in the mail?

Asked about his connection to Hsu, the reader explained he was among the investors in Joel Rosenman's Source Financing Investors, the vehicle that invested $40 million with Hsu in a series of presumably bogus deals.  And it sounds like he's not alone among his co-investors in wondering if that refund check is ever going to arrive.

Out of all of us who invested in SFI and were "asked" to contribute to Hillary Clinton's election campaign I have only heard one person say he was told "the check was in the mail" when he called the Hillary Campaign offices to complain.  As far as I know he has not received it yet.

I wonder if they'll ever see that money again (their SFI investments or their contributions).  Maybe Hillary's having trouble letting go of so much delicious, filthy lucre.  Kind of like the trouble she's having trouble letting Hsu go from her official list of HillRaisers.

Update:  The reader has e-mailed again to report that Jessica McBroom at the Clinton campaign called this afternoon and told him "the check is in the mail."  That's good to hear, though I have to wonder if the less squeaky wheels among those 260 contributors will get their checks as promptly.  If the campaign is able to stall for another 10 days, those refund transactions won't be detailed in the October 15th filings and the world will have to wait another three months before getting a look at the list (at which point one might expect the heat on this story to have died down). 

---

Update:  Looks like Hsu will be criminally charged with fleecing SFI (perhaps among others) later today.  And not just out of $40 million.  Press conference at 1 pm.

Criminal charges will be filed in Lower Manhattan Thursday against disgraced Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu as part of a $60 million "Ponzi Scheme" that is strikingly similar to another one he allegedly perpetrated in California.

Authorities say the charges against the 56-year-old Hsu stem from money he took from a New York investment group in nonexistent business deals with the likes of Nordstrom, L.L. Bean and Abercrombie & Fitch.

U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia and FBI officials are expected to further discuss the charges at a 1 p.m. news conference.

(HT: The Freepers)

---

Update:  The press conference is underway.  Sounds like the federales have Hsu dead to rights.  Some highlights:

• Hsu is charged with perpetrating a "massive investment fraud" upon victims nationwide, in a classic Ponzi scheme (i.e. a pyramid scheme in which the assets involved are cash, as distinct from stocks, real estate, or other holdings).
• He is also charged with using individuals (including some of his alleged investment fraud victims) as "straw donors", instructing them to make political contributions to specific candidates, then reimbursing them in order to circumvent campaign finance laws.
• The charges were unsealed earlier today, clearing the way for federal investigators to seize 4 bank accounts used by Hsu in these activities.
• The early investors in Hsu's pyramid received their principal investment back plus their "guaranteed returns", encouraging them to recruit friends and associates to invest with Hsu.  A number of seed investors even formed whole new funds (this may be explain the recent creation of Rosenman's Source Financing Investors) strictly to invest with Hsu's companies - Components, Ltd. and Next Components, Ltd., neither of which appear to have conducted any legitimate business activity.
• The charges allege Hsu pressured his investment fraud victims into making contributions to political candidates, in some cases with their own funds and in others cases on behalf of Hsu, who would later reimburse the donors.
• This past Monday, a search of the items recovered during Hsu's arrest in Grand Junction revealed a laptop, a Blackberry, thousands of dollars in cash, hundreds of thousands of dollars in checks from alleged victims, bank receipts showing millions of dollars in Hsu's accounts, and hand-written ledgers detailing the many illegal contributions that authorities say Hsu instructed his straw donors to make.

Hot Air will likely have the video eventually.

Another Clinton Bundler Accused of Reimbursing Donors

Brody Mullins, the Wall Street Journal reporter who first broke the Norman Hsu story, turns over another rock in the consecreated HillRaiser garden (where Hsu's name remains, by the way).

When Hillary Rodham Clinton held an intimate fund-raising event at her Washington home in late March, Pamela Layton donated $4,600, the maximum allowed by law, to Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign.

But the 37-year-old Ms. Layton says she and her husband were reimbursed by her husband's boss for the donations. "It wasn't personal money. It was all corporate money," Mrs. Layton said outside her home here. "I don't even like Hillary. I'm a Republican."

The boss is William Danielczyk, founder of a Washington-area private-equity firm and a major fund-raising "bundler" for Mrs. Clinton. Mrs. Layton's gift was one of more than a dozen donations that night from people with Republican ties or no history of political giving. Mr. Danielczyk and his family, employees and friends donated a total of $120,000 to Mrs. Clinton in the days around the fund-raiser.

Read it all.  The rabbit hole runneth deep.

The Journal reported yesterday that the SEC has launched an investigation into the Hsu scandal, in response to the discovery of the involvement of a New York investment firm.

You, as an alert Suitably Flip reader, knew this a week ago.

Hsu, Recobbled

I've just uploaded an updated master data set of the contributions made and raised by Norman Hsu from 2003-2007.  I've replaced the Google spreadsheet in the same spot, so the old links should take you to the new data.  As before, the contributions are organized by recipient, by contributor, and by individual transaction.

This data isn't necessarily infallible, as it's culled from a variety of sources and undergoes a series of iterations, compilations, and aggregations on its way from the source documents to this uploaded format.  If you're looking to confirm a specific transaction, try the Center for Responsive Politics for federal, the National Institute on Money in State Politics for state, and the NYC Campaign Finance Board, the LA City Ethics Board, and the San Francisco Ethics Commission for local.  The NYS Board of Elections and the California Secretary of State records fill in some of the state-level gaps left by NIMSP.

Some notes about this update and what's changed since the last master data set upload:

• New total:  $2,438,510 (previously: $1,594,622)
• Recipients of Hsu-connected funds: 84 Democratic candidates and candidate PACs, 22 Democratic committees and state parties, 1 Republican candidate
• Average contributions per day (weekdays June '04 - July '07): 1.02
• New contributors:
  • Raymond Chan
  • Aurelia Chang
  • Hsin-Ping Chang
  • Yau Cheng
  • Joshua Hadar
  • Youn (Kim) Hadar
  • Joel Rosenman
  • Molly Rosenman
  • Ned Rosenman
• Existing contributors:
  • Susan Chilman
  • Norman Hsu
  • Oliver Hsu
  • Wilfred Hsu
  • Yu Fen Huang
  • Danny Lee
  • Soe Lee
  • Stanley Lim
  • Alice Paw
  • Dimiple Paw
  • Marina Paw
  • Nelson Paw
  • Vivian Paw
  • William Paw
  • Winkle Paw
  • Lelawattie Su
  • Paul Su
  • Peter Tan
• Names requiring further review (not included in data):
  • Corey Chen
  • Daniel Frisch
  • The Hadar family (Allison, Anna, Eric, Gualum, Lisa, Margery, Mica, Olga, and Richard)
  • Ex-wife Patricia Hsu
  • The San Francisco Hsus (Mark, Joyce, and Ta-Lin)
  • Nay Oo
  • Henry Rosenberg
  • Karen Tan
  • Noah Yago
  • The Zabels (Deborah (nee Miller) and William)
• Additional candidate PACs have been combined with their respective candidates (Hope Fund: Barack Obama; Unite Our States: Joe Biden; PAC For a Change: Barbara Boxer)
• The data include $613,000 in unknown Hsu-related contributions to Hillary Clinton (equaling $850,000 disclosed by the campaign minus $237,000 uncovered to date).

The Leaderboard:

A couple of changes to the leaderboard are worth noting.  Most notably of course, Hillary expanded her lead over Eliot Spitzer from $100,000 to nearly $800,000.  Also trending higher is Barack Obama, who jumped from 8th place to 4th, in light of the new contribution data and crediting contributions to Obama's Hope Fund.  And joining the top-10 for the first time is Joe Biden, whose total more than doubled upon incorporating the new data and crediting contributions to Biden's Unite Our States.

Bear in mind that these totals may have a lot of room left to swing - up, down, or both - in coming weeks.  If and when Hillary discloses her list of 260 Hsu-connected contributors who accounted for the $850,000 she's returning (shortly before she asks for many of those contributions back), we may find either that many of these donors also gave significantly to Hsu's other favored candidates (pushing the totals far higher) or that Hillary has grossly over-(temporarily)-refunded to contributors who were not in fact Hsu-connected (pushing her own total far lower).  If the Clinton campaign elects not to disclose this list, we'll just have to wait until the third quarter filings (due 10/15) are made public, to piece it together ourselves.

There's also always the possibility that one or more of the individuals currently counted in the Hsu fundraising totals could be removed if new information argues compellingly against their inclusion.

Battle for Ultimate Scandal Supremacy update:

As a result of the fairly conservative inclusion criteria I'm using to sort out the above-listed names, Hsu is still lagging Mr. Abramoff's total by about 5%.  Still, wouldn't count old Norman out just yet - the excluded names undergoing further review account for roughly $700,000 in uncounted contributions, a fraction of which would put Norman on top.  More significantly, if the iceberg/tip ratio suggested by the gap between Hillary's $850,000 disclosure and what we've uncovered independently ($237,000) holds for the rest of Hsu's beneficiaries, there could be another $4 million or more still out there.

Open Issue Bleg:

If you look through the transaction-level tab of the spreadsheet, you may notice a peculiar transaction on October 8, 2004, when Hsu himself contributed $26,600 to the California Democratic Party - the second largest contribution made by anyone during the whole sordid affair.  What makes this one odd is the fact that the party later returned the entire sum (the refund was dated "Unknown" on the campaign finance disclosure).  Alert Hsu-trackers will remember that the California Democratic Party was tipped off this past June about Hsu's shady dealings and that the party went on to forward that tip to the Clinton campaign (though Hillary wouldn't make a peep or pledge any refunds until after the glaring improprieties became front page news two months later).

The timing of Hsu's $26,600 contribution to the California Democratic Party and their subsequent, leanly detailed refund of that donation during the 2004 cycle suggest that the state party may have had good reason to disassociate with Hsu more than 2.5 years earlier.  There is, of course, any number of reasons a contribution might be refunded, but unfortunately, my attempts to clarify when and why this huge donation was returned have thus far been fruitless.

I've emailed Chairman Art Torres and the general info e-mail address, and by CC the California Secretary of State's Elections Division, thus far to no avail.  As this may turn out to be the first instance of documented recognition of Hsu-related campaign finance irregularities, you may be starting to feel a creeping urge to e-mail Chairman Torres and the general info e-mail address, and by CC the California Secretary of State's Elections Division too.  If so, you'll want to call their attention to this transaction, dated 10/8/04 - a $26,600 contribution made by Norman Hsu and returned in full on an unknown date for an unknown reason.

Summary tables for the updated data set are available after the jump.  The data files themselves are available here.

---

Update:  O.J. confirms: Hillary has the serial criminal vote locked up!

Previously:
Some Oddities About Hsu's Ostensibly Unwitting Woodstock Backer
Mesa County DA: $4 Million Bond Not Enough To Cage Hsu [Update: $5 Million Is?]
Dems Lowballing Hsu Fundraising Totals [Update: Hsu Offsets?]
Hsu Sent Suicide Note [Update: Blaming Obama]
Federal Agencies Unofficially Probing Hsu Scandal Number [At Least] 4
Hsu's Financing Source Revealed
Hillary's Massive Hsu War Chest: Abramoff Parity Nears
Photoblog: Touring Norman Hsu's New York
Hsu Captured! (Drugged?)
Hsu Still A HillRaiser In Good Standing?
Knock, Knock, Knockin' On Norman's Door.
Hsu Reclaims Fugitive Status, Forfeiting $2 Million Bail
Hsu vs. Abramoff
New Hsu Review: Following [the Rest Of] the Money
A Really Big Hsu...
Hillary Vows To Give [At Least Some Of] Hsu Contributions To Charity
From Now On, When the Phone Rings You Say, "Vandelay Industries."
Hillary's Magwitch?

---

Some Oddities About Hsu's Ostensibly Unwitting Woodstock Backer

On Wednesday, we learned that a major backer of Norman Hsu's shadowy Democratic fundraising spree appeared to be Joel Rosenman, co-creator of Woodstock and currently head of a New York investment firm called Source Financing Investors.

Rosenman wrote to his investors on Monday to alert them that the $40 million the firm had invested with Mr. Hsu might not be recovered, what with Hsu's legal troubles and the fact that the checks he was sending Rosenman had started to bounce.  According to The Wall Street Journal, Rosenman stated in the investor letter that he first became suspicious of Hsu over the three prior weeks, as the details of his suspicious political activity and fugitive status came to light.

I'm not going to say it's impossible that Rosenman and the other principals at Source Financing had no prior suspicions of Hsu, but it seems somewhat improbable that any but the least diligent investment manager could carry on a 5-year professional relationship with the man and execute dozens of deals for at least tens of millions of dollars (at least some of which belonged to Source's outside investors), all the while doing such scant due diligence and asking so few questions as to fail to realize that Hsu's business interests were little more than shell companies.  I can attest from recent experience that this isn't difficult to figure out.

True, I happen to live just 0.9 miles from Hsu's cluster of apparently bogus business addresses, so it was easy for me to stroll glibly across town and hunt for Hsu's offices myself.  The trip from Source Financing Investors' office, on the other hand, would have been a solid mile.

If this style of laid back investing appeals to you, you may be wondering how you too can invest some cash with Source Financing.  Unfortunately for you, it doesn't seem so easy.  While the web domain sourcefinancing.com is registered to Joel Rosenman (and earlier investment vehicle JR Capital, which he co-founded in 1967 with Woodstock co-creator John Roberts), all you'll find there is one of those web hosting placeholder pages.  While the State Department does acknowledge existence of Source Financing Investors, there doesn't seem to be much to it, other than its Madison Avenue address.

All this is in stark contrast to the long-established JR Capital, which not only boasts an internet domain, but a working website.  By "working website" I of course mean "a splash page with 5 missing image files and a password prompt."  In fairness, there is an e-mail address, so if you're interested, you might want to drop them a line.  I don't know if anyone's receiving them, but a test message sent to the address didn't bounce.

Because of the password protection, there's not much else to glean from the JR Capital website.  Happily, courtesy of the Wayback Machine, we can be whisk ourselves back to a simpler time.  A time before the site's content was password protected (HT: LibertyPost).  The most recent unprotected site update was archived on - coincindentally and of no particular relevance to the matter at hand - my 29th birthday.  So let's fire up the Wayback Machine for 1/25/05.

Some of the image links are still broken, but from the ones that are in tact, it's clear we're not missing much.  There are only a few pages on the site and only one with any real content, which is the About Us page.  Here, we learn a handful of interesting things.

1. The firm's relationship with Norman Hsu's bogus clothing company Components, Ltd. began in 2002 (hence the 5-year professional relationship noted above).
2. The firm appears to have closed no real transactions with any legitimate counterparty (excluding consulting) in the last 7.
3. The most recent deal, executed in 2000 was a $12 million private placement with Idealab.  They were presumably part of the incubator's pre-IPO investor syndicate, most of whom lost their shirts when the IPO was scrapped later that year, leading to protracted investor lawsuits.
   More on this later.
4. The transaction preceding Idealab involved the "Sale of Carlton Stuart Corp. [sic] to United Technologies" in 1998.
5. It cost $3 million to produce Woodstock (that's just interesting trivia).
6. The firm has 5 principals: Josh Rosenman, Yau Cheng, Deborah Miller, George Saunders, and Daniel Frisch (as of the latest available page update on 6/12/04).

Finally armed with a bit of information, we're able to start jamming a few jaggy pieces together.

• The George Saunders they're referring to is presumably the same one who founded Carleton Stuart, since the firm's managerial CV boasts not only the "sale of Carlton Stuart [sic]" but "CEO of Carleton Stuart".  Two things are odd about this: 1) the typo and 2) the fact that Saunders died in 2001, but they were still listing him as one of the 5 principals nearly 3 years later.
• According to the Journal article, Hsu was introduced to Rosenman by Yau Cheng in 2000, Cheng having met Hsu "while working for an Internet company in 2000."  My guess is that internet company was Idealab, the one that cheesed off so many investors that year when their IPO became one of the first much-hyped internet bubble casualties, and apparently the closest Source Financing has come to making a sound investment in a decade.
• There seems to be very little information about Daniel Frisch, other than the fact that he and Rosenman play squash together (apparently quite well).
• Deborah Miller may be the same Deborah Miller who also goes by Deborah Miller-Zabel and is married to William Zabel.  We've got a few steps to take here, so stick with me.  New York-based Deborah Miller went to Wharton Business School and owns a business named Dewinden.  Deborah Miller and Dewinden have only ever been seen together one other time and it's been in the company of Mr. Zabel.  This is a tenuous linkage, but I suspect it's probably accurate.  If it is, then Deborah Miller-Zabel being a principal at Source Financing is interesting because William Zabel is a trustee at the New School University, a list that included Norman Hsu until he was hurriedly removed a couple weeks ago (here's the cached version showing Hsu and Zabel co-listed).

As for Mr. Rosenman himself, there are a few more dots that probably warrant tentative connecting at this point.  I suspect this is more likely than not coincidental, but Rosenman's identity as a co-creator of Woodstock is perhaps slightly more noteworthy, against the backdrop of the Norman Hsu scandal that funneled such bountiful riches into the pockets of so many dozens of Democratic (and one Republican) polticians.  A reader recently pointed me to the transcript of a recent Rush Limbaugh show that referenced a Des Moines Register article on the topic of a quizzical bit of legislative pork:

"A tax-cut group Tuesday took aim at a bill sponsored by Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, questioning use of federal money for a Woodstock music festival museum, an online herbarium in New York, and a canoe-making program in Hawaii.  Those projects are among more than 1,000 so-called 'earmarks' in a spending bill overseen by [Harkin] chairman of an appropriations subcommittee.
...
Another earmark highlighted by Americans for Prosperity was $1 million for the Museum at Bethel Woods in New York, which according to its Web site seeks in 2008 to interpret the 1969 Woodstock Music and Arts Fair. The money was requested by two New York senators, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer." Then the Jawa Report on July 17th of this year: "Hillary/Schumer want $1 Million For Hippie Museum -- How many Troops will have to go without supplies, armor or food because Hillary and Schumer want to fund a church to hippies?"

Hillary's a Senator from the state where Woodstock was held and Harkin is the chairman of the relevant subcommittee, so it stands to reason that - were one to see spending $1 million in federal tax dollars on a hippie museum as a good idea - those two would likely be the ones to make it happen.  But it's worth pointing out that Clinton and Harkin ranked #1 and #4 (out of 83), respectively, among Norman Hsu's most lavishly endowed politicians.  Among all federal legislators, they were #1 and #2, taking in nearly a million dollars between them.

As for Rosenman's claim in his *oops* letter to Source Financing's investors that he only became suspicious of Hsu when he hit the national stage in recent weeks, that may prove to be the case.  But not only does that lack of earlier suspicion require 5 years' worth of stunning incuriosty about the shadowy custodian of tens of millions of Rosenman's investors' dollars, but it also requires not batting an eye at Hsu's sudden and superlative political fundraising activity beginning in late 2003.  Source Financing went into business with Hsu at least a year before he'd made a single political donation.  One would be forgiven for expecting Hsu's meteoric rise to celebrated heavyweight Democratic booster to give pause to those people who were throwing piles of money at a man they couldn't have known very well.

And we do know with relative certainty that Ronsenman was indeed aware of Hsu's political largesse.  According to a Daily News source, Hsu pressured Rosenman to join him in heaving cash at Senator Clinton, telling him "he'd consider it a 'great favor' if Rosenman filled Clinton's coffers."  The paper notes that "Federal records show Rosenman wrote six checks to Clinton campaigns worth $8,500 in total."

That's true.  But in keeping with the pattern by now familiar to anyone following this story, that sum was just the tip of the iceberg.  I reviewed those records too and found that not only did Rosenman shell out $8,500 to Hillary, but he (or Hsu) seems to have convinced Rosenman's partner Yau Cheng and his son and daughter to follow suit.  Between the four of them, they parted with more than $28,000 in less than 11 months in contributions made directly to Clinton.  What's more, some of these contributions fell in close proximity to some other instances of Hillary-bound generosity from Hsu associates, as previously documented.

Rosenman started off small, but after about a year, had adopted that signature Hsu benefaction whereby he and multiple family members were maxing out their donations to Clinton.  Also in keeping with the familial patterns we've seen before, Ned and Molly Rosenman list Source Financing Investors as their employer in the campaign finance disclosure documents.

Again, I think I'd take an even money bet that Rosenman and Source Financing Investors are victims in this scam (albeit, largely owing to an apparent refusal to do even a mote of due diligence legwork on their mysterious business partner), rather than co-conspirators in or even agenda-driven puppetmasters behind Hsu's political dealings.  But this scandal has a away of making a fool of anyone who expects it to be done getting weirder, so we may as well keep cranking away.

There's a bit more contribution data on the way, which I ought to have checked, formatted, and uploaded by the end of the weekend.  Pending verification, the newly found donations looks to boost the aggregate Hsu-connected total by roughly $150,000 (which would nudge him just past Abramoff).  For the time being, I'm not including the Rosenman or Cheng contributions in that total, despite those transactions being explicitly "Hsu-connected".  Unless and until we learn otherwise, this seems to be one of those rare occasions on which Hsu actually convinced someone to fork over their own money to Hillary.

If you stumble on any records, connections, news stories, or blog posts you think might help shed light on any aspect this fantastically convulated affair, drop me a line.  In the mean time, I'll leave you with this final miscellaneous oddity concerning Josh Rosenman and Source Financing Investors.  It's a message posted on a public mailing list archive, apparently by someone (or some bit of malware) named Gregorio, who (or which) has access to an e-mail account at JR Capital.  It's just text, but if you're not a fan of x-rated spam, it's probably not for you.

The oddity (beyond the subject matter of the post) stems from the fact that lewd spam accounts for fully 25% of the search results for the web domain of a successful investment firm that's been in business for 40 years.

Mesa County DA: $4 Million Bond Not Enough To Cage Hsu [Update: $5 Million Is?]

Yesterday, the Grand Junction Sentinel reported that Mesa County (Colorado) District Attorney Pete Hautzinger, the attorney handling Norman Hsu's court hearing today, planned to ask the judge for at least a $4 million bond.  That's decent walking around money, but given that Hsu apparently didn't think twice about skipping out on a $2 million bond last week, one had to wonder whether even this was a price the serial fugitive would be willing to pay (perhaps with other people's money) for another chance to ride the freedom train.

In response, an alert Suitably Flip reader (who asked that his name not be published) e-mailed the DA, to ask whether he was in fact "nuts" and whether he really wanted "'Hautzinger' to become an Internet adjective."

This was the response he received from DA Hautzinger a little over an hour ago (assuming the time stamp is set to Mountain Time).

From: Pete Hautzinger <Pete.Hautzinger@mesacounty.us>
Date: Sep 13, 2007 1:53 PM
Subject: Re: Bond for Hsu, are you nuts?
To: [Alert Suitably Flip Reader]

Colorado law requires that bond be set in all cases but capital murder, and even then only when proof is evident and the presumptions great.  I am sworn to enforce the law of Colorado.  A $4,000,000 would quadruple the highest bond ever set in this jurisdiction.

That having been said, I am now in possession of a lot more information about Mr. Hsu and his history.  I would very much like to ask for no bond, but such in illegal under the law of my state.  Rest assured, however, that I now will be asking the judge to set it a goo[d] deal higher than the $4,000,000 I had earlier contemplated.

Thanks for your interest,

Pete Hautzinger
District Attorney
21st Judicial District
Mesa County Justice Center

---

Update:   Looks like Hautzinger kept his word.

District Attorney Pete Hautzinger asked for a whopping $50 million bond. Hautzinger cited new allegations from California and New York — where the DA said authorities have indicated their intent prosecute Hsu on new fraud charges — in requesting the high bond.

Hsu's checkbook showed he had access to $6 million when he was taken off a train in Grand Junction last week, he said.

"It's almost like monopoly money at this point," Hautzinger said.

Unfortunately, the judge was more of a trusting sort.

County Court Judge Bruce Raaum on Thursday ordered fugitive political donor Norman Hsu held on $5 million bond — believed to be largest bond ever set in a Mesa County criminal hearing.

"Two million wasn't enough ... we'll see if $5 million is," Raaum said.

Em... 15 years on the lam.  Then arrested, freed on $2 million bond, and he FLEES AGAIN.  Even after forfeiting that $2 million, we know he has access to at least another $6 million.

Even in the Mountain Time Zone, I'm virtually certain $6 million > $5 million.

There seem to be only three ways for this to play out once Hsu posts this bond (assuming Source Financial Investors isn't able to get his assets frozen in time):  1) he flees again, 2) he attempts suicide again, 3) in a repeat of last week's drama, he bafflingly does both.

Then again, other reports out this afternoon have Hsu waiving extradition and patiently awaiting transit back to California, so who knows.

Dems Lowballing Hsu Fundraising Totals [Update: Hsu Offsets?]

Hillary's announcement that she would return $850,000 in campaign contributions that may be connected to Norman Hsu shocked me, given that the sum total of my Hsu hunting efforts to date have uncovered barely more than 1/4 that amount.  And while her Hsu windfall easily outpaced her dozens of Democratic colleagues who also took money from the con man's fundraising network, I had to wonder whether they too would ultimately reveal cash hoards that similarly dwarfed their respective known Hsu-connected funds.

In the wake of Hillary's disclosure, some of Hsu's other beneficiaries have already followed suit, pledging to return not just Hsu's direct contributions, but those ostensibly made by members of Hsu's shady fundraising network.

There's only one problem.  So far, these follow-on pledges haven't been exceeding the known totals - on the contrary, they've come in a little light.

Today's L.A. Times reports that Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY) have pledged to return $34,900 and $20,000, respectively.  It's not entirely clear to me from the phrasing whether those amounts are supposed to correlate to the amounts received just from Hsu's bundlees or from Hsu and his bundlees combined.  In Gillibrand's case, if she's pegging just the non-Hsu money at $20,000, she appears to be right on the money.  If she's including Norman's own donations, she's lowballing by at least 15%.

In Teddy's case, no matter which way you slice it, he's being modest.  Kennedy's acknowledgment is at least 23% shy (and perhaps much more, if - as in Hillary's case - we're only looking at a small fraction of the actual tainted receipts), assuming he's claiming the $34,900 includes Hsu's own direct contributions.

Also noted in the Times piece, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has acknowledged $43,700 in contributions directly from Hsu (which is exactly what I came up with - gold star, DSCC!) and is apparently in the process of "looking into other donations to be sure they were made legally."  Allow me to give them a head start.  They're looking at at least triple that amount when they lump Hsu's associates into the mix.

[Note: the data above reflect ongoing campaign finance disclosure searches, pattern analysis, and other research of public documents and constitute a best-effort attempt to determine those individuals whose contributions appear questionable and likely linked to Norman Hsu's fundraising efforts current under federal investigation.]

---

Update: From the comments, Larry notes quite correctly that Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) has just pledged to return $57,100 in Hsu-connected contributions, in addition to the $4,600 of Hsu-direct funds he said he already returned, for a grand total of $61,700.  My most recent data for Harkin (which include $9,200 from two contributors I hadn't yet found as of last week's soup-to-nuts data upload) pegs his grand total at $59,800.  That was enough to earn him the #4 spot in the Hsu rankings, behind Hillary, NY Governor Eliot Spitzer and NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, but it appears I missed $1,900 somewhere.

Either Harkin has got at least one additional Hsu-connected contributor I'm not aware of (very possible, considering Hillary's apparently got over 200 that no one's yet aware of) or he's over-degifting.  The obvious question here is whether Harkin might be willing to sell these extraneous refunds to, say, Ted Kennedy, enabling him to offset a portion of his own refund shortfall.

If so, we may be witnessing the birth of a marketplace that enables even the slipperiest, most shadily financed politicians to live truly "corruption-neutral" lifestyles.

Harkin spokesman Matt Paul indicated the Senator received contributions from 13 Hsu associates, which would tend to support the missing contributor theory.  If that's the case, I'd hope that Senator Harkin will shortly release that name, so we can help his dozens of Democratic colleagues more accurately tabulate their own refund shortfalls and surpluses.

On the other hand, Paul referred to the Hsu-connected donors' contributions coming in "during an event that Hsu was involved in arranging for Harkin's re-election campaign."  If the $57,100 coming from the 13 Hsu associates did all come in during a single event (presumably on March 12th of this year), then Harkin's office may be forgetting to count those last 10 transactions, in which case the Senator would have as many as 6 mystery donors and up to a $23,000 shortfall in pledged refunds.

Sen. Harkin, Mr. Paul, if you're reading, please let us know which is the case so we can give you proper credit.

Previously:
Hsu Sent Suicide Note [Update: Blaming Obama]
Federal Agencies Unofficially Probing Hsu Scandal Number [At Least] 4
Hsu's Financing Source Revealed
Hillary's Massive Hsu War Chest: Abramoff Parity Nears
Photoblog: Touring Norman Hsu's New York
Hsu Captured! (Drugged?)
Hsu Still A HillRaiser In Good Standing?
Knock, Knock, Knockin' On Norman's Door.
Hsu Reclaims Fugitive Status, Forfeiting $2 Million Bail
Hsu vs. Abramoff
New Hsu Review: Following [the Rest Of] the Money
A Really Big Hsu...
Hillary Vows To Give [At Least Some Of] Hsu Contributions To Charity
From Now On, When the Phone Rings You Say, "Vandelay Industries."
Hillary's Magwitch?

Hsu Sent Suicide Note [Update: Blaming Obama]

From WSJ's Washington Wire:

Before Democratic fund-raiser Norman Hsu skipped a court hearing and temporarily vanished last week, he typed out a suicide note and sent copies to several acquaintances and charitable organizations, according to people who received it.

The one-page note, signed by Hsu, “very explicitly said he intended to commit suicide,” said one of the recipients in an account corroborated by others, including law-enforcement officials. Hsu also apologized for putting anybody “through inconvenience or trouble,” the recipient said.

The letter, which began, “To whom it may concern,” arrived by FedEx at the addresses of several recipients last Thursday, the day after Hsu disappeared.

As the letters arrived, Hsu was on a Chicago-bound train from California. He fell ill and was taken to St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction, Colo., where he was arrested.

After spending nearly a week in the hospital following the apparent suicide attempt, Hsu has been released and booked into the local jail.

Yesterday afternoon, his doctors released him without making a statement on his case, citing privacy laws. About 6:30 p.m. local time he was booked at the Mesa County Jail, the sheriff's office said. He will go before a Mesa County judge this afternoon to hear the charges against him. A separate extradition hearing will follow.

Here's what I don't get - if Hsu was indeed suicidal over the "wave of press in recent weeks that raised questions about his political fund-raising and business activities," and he FedExed the suicide note before getting on the train with a fistful of pills, why the coordinated attempts at suicide and unlawful flight?  Was one backup, in case the other didn't work?

Happily, neither did.  Ironically, each seems to have thwarted the other.  Were he in a hotel room or otherwise secluded, he might not have received medical attention and could well have died.  And were he not hopped up pills, he likely wouldn't have stripped half naked and "freaked out" on the train, calling attention to himself and bringing about his arrest.

And maybe it's foolish to assume he was thinking rationally at the time, but I just don't understand the simultaneous fleeing and attempting suicide, especially given that the letters sent prior to his departure suggest it wasn't a spontaneous on-the-lam desperate act, but something he had planned before he lit out.

I'll go ahead and make the lay-up of a prediction that we haven't heard the full story yet.

---

Update:  Sounds like one of the recipients on Hsu's suicide distribution list went Googling while the fugitive's whereabouts were still unknown.

Update:  According to one of the recipients, Hsu lamented the fact that his recent troubles began when articles (presumably meaning the original Wall Street Journal article that first broke the story two weeks ago) were planted "by a politician who pledged 'hope and change'."  Acknowledging the tacit identification, but denying involvement, an Obama spokesman called Hsu's charge "a sad and baseless allegation."

Federal Agencies Unofficially Probing Hsu Scandal Number [At Least] 4

The Wall Street Journal reported nearly two weeks ago that the Department of Justice was investigating Norman Hsu's three-year fundraising bonanza for Hillary Clinton and dozens of other Democrats for possible campaign finance violations.

If it wasn't already, the FBI got involved when Hsu skipped bail last week, thus reclaiming his fugitive status, and is now investigating Hsu's most recent investment schemes, which are beginning to smell remarkably similar to the swindling that earned him his felony conviction back in the early 90s.

When Hsu was discovered "freaking out" on an Amtrak train in Grand Junction, Colorado the day after he disappeared, a Federal Election Commission official wouldn't confirm that the FEC was investigating the Hsu scandal, "as federal law requires any enforcement measures be kept confidential until they are concluded."  But for our unofficial score-keeping purposes, let's go ahead and assume they've taken an interest.

And if my SiteMeter logs are any indication, the SEC was in the mix by this afternoon, looking closely at Next Components, one of Hsu's apparently bogus business entities (and one apparently at the center of the possible massive investment fraud sketched out just this morning).

There's no other earthly reason to squander an hour on this site.

Hsu's Financing Source Revealed

One of them, anyway.

Today's Wall Street Journal gives us the first answers to the big question that's been burning since the Norman Hsu Democratic fundraising scandal began to crack open two weeks ago: where did Hsu's money come from?

Most dogged by the scandal among Hsu's many dozens of political beneficiaries has been Hillary Clinton, not only because she received a significantly larger sum from Hsu and his shady fundraising network, but because the words "Clinton", "fundraising", "scandal", and "Chinese" tend to be combustible when mixed.  The good news for Hillary is that it appears the upstream source of Hsu's mysterious millions may not be a shadowy arm of the People's Republic of China.  The bad news is that the likely source tends to remind one of that other disagreeable attribute of the Clintonian backstory: that she's a hippie.

A company controlled by Mr. Hsu recently received $40 million from a Madison Avenue investment fund run by Joel Rosenman, who was one of the creators of the Woodstock rock festival in 1969. That money, Mr. Rosenman told investors this week, is missing.

Mr. Hsu told Mr. Rosenman the money would be used to manufacture apparel in China for Gucci, Prada and other private labels, yielding a 40% profit on each deal, according to a business plan obtained by the Journal. Now the investment fund, Source Financing Investors, says Mr. Hsu's company owes it the $40 million, which represents 37 separate deals with Mr. Hsu's company. When Source Financing recently attempted to cash checks from the company, Components Ltd., the investors say they were told the account held insufficient funds.

Readers will recall that last week's field trip strongly suggested Components, Ltd. does not "exist", in the strictest sense.

The limited (if convoluted) details available about the transactions between Rosenman's Source Financing Investors (how appropriate) and Components, Ltd. suggest Rosenman and his investors were victims of a Ponzi scheme similar to those Hsu is said to have orchestrated in the past.  Great profits up front, but hold the bag for too long, and you get wiped out.

Mr. Rosenman's partner, Ms. Cheng, met Mr. Hsu while working for an Internet company in 2000. She began investing in one of his businesses and made a profit, according to someone familiar with the matter. In 2002, she joined JR Capital and introduced Mr. Rosenman to Mr. Hsu. That year, Mr. Rosenman invested and also made a profit. He began telling friends and relatives about the investment opportunity.

Mr. Rosenman described the deal in a pitch letter he provided to prospective investors for Source Financing Investors, which he launched in 2005. The investment pool would "lend to U.S. private label designers that needed interim financing to fill orders for a select group of well-known, high-end U.S. apparel retailers." Since 2001, he writes, "the return of these short-term (typically 4½ months) loans has been no less than 40%."

In a "step-by-step" outline of a typical transaction prepared for investors, Source Financing describes the way a deal worked with Mr. Hsu. Source Financing would agree to provide bridge loans for seasonal high-ticket, high-quality retail goods made in China for exclusive brand names, according to investors. Mr. Hsu told the company that he would obtain from Chinese manufacturers a price quote for apparel production. He would then add a mark-up and give the quote to a high-end buyer in the U.S.

If the U.S. buyer accepted, according to the outline, Source Financing would transfer by wire what Mr. Hsu said was 80% of the necessary loan, with Mr. Hsu saying he would provide the other 20% himself. Mr. Hsu told the investors he would then receive a letter of credit from a Chinese bank and that the manufacturer would ship the apparel to the U.S., where Mr. Hsu would deliver it to the merchant.

Mr. Hsu would give the investment firm a check, post-dated for 135 days beyond the wire transfer, for the amount of the loan plus profit. When the check matured, Source Financing would deposit it and allocate the money to investors. The company that would carry out these transactions, Mr. Hsu told investors, was Components Ltd., set up in 1997.

Last Sunday's New York Times revealed that during a one-month period, Components, Ltd. was a conduit for more than half a million dollars in checks and wire transfers, much of the outbound cash going to members of Hsu's fundraising network.

Hillary has recently pledged to return as much as $850,000 her campaign has received from Hsu's fundraising network.  In addition to Hsu's prior conviction for, unlawful flight from, and new suspicions of investor swindling, he is also under investigation for violations of federal election laws.  Suspicions arose after contribution patterns were observed among several of Hsu's bundlees, who often seemed to be making contributions to Hsu's favored candidates at a pace well beyond their apparent financial means.

Efforts to fully quantify the extent of this possibly criminally fraudulent political support are ongoing, but Hillary's latest disclosure suggests the total will certainly exceed $2 million and could reach millions higher, pegging it at or beyond the scope of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandals.

In addition to the $850,000 taken in by the Clinton campaign, Hsu's suspicious contributions made their way into the coffers of another 80+ Democratic candidates (and one Republican), as well as dozens of Democratic committees, state parties, and advocacy groups.  Among the best-gilded were New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, and Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy.  While most recipients have pledged to return (or donate to charity) at least Hsu's direct support, none of these highest-paid Democrats, to my knowledge, has yet pledged to give up all Hsu-connected funds, with the exception of the Clinton campaign, which has not surprisingly been most severely embattled by the unfolding scandal.

But even as Hillary prepares to haul out her checkbook and re-enact one of the greatest scenes from The Jerk, we're left to scratch our heads as to why Norman Hsu is still celebrated on her campaign site as a HillRaiser...

While Hillary's announcement that she would turn over such a huge sum of money was surprisingly forthright [Too-forthright-to-be-true update below], it may be a while before we know the identity of the 260 contributors associated with those contributions.  If the campaign is protective of those identities (as they may well legitimately be, given that the campaign may cast a wide net among their supporters, in an attempt to err on the side of "over-refunding", knowing they'll inadvertently sweep up some unrelated parties), and chooses not to reveal them, we ought to at latest be able to piece the list together upon the next FEC campaign finance disclosure deadline, as each refund will (or should, anyway) be recorded as a separate transaction.

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin wonders how Clinton can claim plausible deniability about Hsu's colorful legal history, when her Secret Service protection was presumably aware that the convicted felon and wanted fugitive (who was, after all, operating under his real name) was continually gaining very close physical access to the former First Lady.

Previously:
Hillary's Massive Hsu War Chest: Abramoff Parity Nears
Photoblog: Touring Norman Hsu's New York
Hsu Captured! (Drugged?)
Hsu Still A HillRaiser In Good Standing?
Knock, Knock, Knockin' On Norman's Door.
Hsu Reclaims Fugitive Status, Forfeiting $2 Million Bail
Hsu vs. Abramoff
New Hsu Review: Following [the Rest Of] the Money
A Really Big Hsu...
Hillary Vows To Give [At Least Some Of] Hsu Contributions To Charity
From Now On, When the Phone Rings You Say, "Vandelay Industries."
Hillary's Magwitch?

---

Update: Yeah, that sounds more like it.  (HT: See-Dubya)

The [Clinton] campaign is refunding $850,000 to [Hsu’s bundled] donors, viewing the money as tainted. Yet the campaign is also risking another public relations mess by saying that it would take back the money if it clearly came from the donor’s bank account, not from Mr. Hsu or another source. The risk is that Mrs. Clinton will appear to want more cash no matter whether it was once colored by a disgraced donor.

The campaign will try to get most of the donors to give the money back right after the refunds, said a senior Democratic strategist who advises Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. “That’s the plan,” the strategist said.

Right - did they miss the crux of this fundraising scandal?  The suspicion is not that Hsu wrote $850,000 in contribution checks to the campaign, but that he used various friends and associates as straw donors, to be reimbursed by Hsu for "their" contributions, thus skirting the campaign finance laws.  I can save Hillary a lot of time right now and let her know that this money did come from each stated donor's bank account.  But that doesn't pretty up these contributions in the slightest.  That's precisely what's alleged to be happening.

It's difficult to pinpoint the purpose of refunding, then immediately grubbing back all that dirty money - is it A) a hollow attempt to appear candid and decent, without the bother of being candid and decent, or B) an effort to inflate her "gross receipts" stats in her ongoing fundraising battle with Obama by double-counting as many contributions as possible?

Hillary's Massive Hsu War Chest: Abramoff Parity Nears

In a word: yowza.

Hillary Clinton announced today that instead of the $23,000 in direct Norman Hsu contributions she'd agreed to give up, she'll be refunding an astounding $850,000, representing not only Hsu's donations, but the "bundled" fundraising he ostensibly raised from a group of friends and associates, who have come under scrutiny as possible conduits through which Hsu may have funneled additional contributions in order to circumvent campaign finance laws.

In my most recently posted compilation, I'd found roughly $174,000 in Hsu-connected funds.  I've been continuing to trudge through the disclosures in the days since, but to date, I've only come up with a total of $217,200, meaning there's still more than $600,000 in the Clinton coffers yet to be independently connected to Hsu's network.

With nearly 75% of Hillary's total acknowledged haul from Hsu's network coming from sources not known to be Hsu associates (an estimated 260 donors in all), it seems incumbent on Clinton to reveal this list of tainted contributors such that we can more accurately determine the full extent of other candidates' Hsu-related contributions.

The new Hsu fundraising I've compiled over the last few days have lifted my grand total from $1.59 million (as most recently posted) to $1.85 million.  Including the hidden bonanza Hillary's just revealed (and excluding the maximum possible overlap), the total shoots up to $2.44 million.

$2.44 million therefore being the new low estimate, that's the figure I've used to update the Hsu-Abramoff horse race.  To give you an idea of how important it is that Hillary divulge her list of 260 tainted donors, however, if the rest of Hsu's beneficiaries have as much well-hidden Hsu money relative to what's already been found, the grand total would rise to $6.98 million, nearly doubling all of Abramoff's and his clients' problematic lobbying expenditures, to both Republicans and Democrats.

Kudos to Team Hillary for disavowing the entirety of the campaign's Hsu-connected funds.  The next best step toward cleaning up this mess would be for the campaign to release the list of all 260 Hsu-associated contributors so we can help Senator Clinton's less forthcoming colleagues tabulate their own refunds owed.

(Well, okay, maybe the next step would be to finally remove Norman Hsu's name from the official list of HillRaisers (still a vaunted member as of 10 pm Monday), but right after that... divulging the list of 260 contributors.)

Previously:
Photoblog: Touring Norman Hsu's New York
Hsu Captured! (Drugged?)
Hsu Still A HillRaiser In Good Standing?
Knock, Knock, Knockin' On Norman's Door.
Hsu Reclaims Fugitive Status, Forfeiting $2 Million Bail
Hsu vs. Abramoff
New Hsu Review: Following [the Rest Of] the Money
A Really Big Hsu...
Hillary Vows To Give [At Least Some Of] Hsu Contributions To Charity
From Now On, When the Phone Rings You Say, "Vandelay Industries."
Hillary's Magwitch?

---

Update: Allah marks the occasion with a fine addition to the Hsu lexicon: Hsuthanasia.

Photoblog: Touring Norman Hsu's New York

I had such a nice time visiting Norman Hsu's SoHo apartment on Wednesday that I decided to take a stroll this evening and pop in on a few of Hsu's businesses.  My simple goal: to find any evidence of their existence.

Among the various companies associated with Hsu on campaign finance disclosures, there appeared to be three addresses in midtown worth visiting: 110 West 40th Street (James Stone, Ltd.), 1431 Broadway (Components, Ltd.), and 571 7th Avenue (also Components, Ltd.).

I consulted Google Maps before heading out and noticed all three addresses are clustered within a single block (on West 40th between 6th and 7th).  What's more, they're less than two blocks from another apartment building Hsu has occasionally listed as his home address on campaign finance disclosures.  That's a pretty agreeable commute for someone with so many diverse business interests.

Since Hsu's back off the lam, I didn't bother buzzing Hsu's unit at his midtown pad, but I did snap a picture, since it was on my way across town.  Nice looking place.  The view from the 30th floor must be lovely.

Next stop was 110 West 40th, where James Stone Limited Holding (ostensibly a clothing wholesaler) is supposed to occupy the ground floor.  The primary entrance to this building leads to a small vestibule with a desk and two elevators.  Adjacent the numbered door are a Colortek photo processing store and a deli named Hightone Cafe.  Together, these appear to take up the entire first floor of the building.

Across the street, the lobby of 1431 Broadway is where we're told we'll find Components, Ltd. (sometimes alternatively listed as Next Components in the disclosure documents), parent company of Because Men's Clothing.   And the lobby of 1431 Broadway is indeed home to a lot of businesses.  There's a pizzeria, a health food store, another photo processing store, and a WaMu.  But no Components, Ltd.

Undeterred, I took heart in the fact that there was a side entrance also numbered 1431 that led to another tiny vestibule.  I was looking forward to inquiring at the desk inside, but...

...it was unattended.  It stayed this way for several minutes, at which point I moved on.

The final address, 561 Seventh Avenue, is actually just one building over from 1431 Broadway.  This secondary location for Components, Ltd. immediately impresses the passerby with an entryway far more regal than the dingy gray awning next door.

The lavishings didn't end with the facade either, as the lobby of this building actually featured a live attendant.  He was on his cell phone when I entered, but he eventually looked up and asked how he could help me.

"I'm looking for a company called Components, Ltd.," I said.

"The what?"

"Components, Ltd.?  Is there a business by that name here?"

He shook his head.  "No, not here."

He was back to the phone call pretty swiftly, but his diverted attention did offer me the opportunity to snap a couple pictures before leaving the building.  It appears he was right about there being no such company on the premises.

No Components, Ltd. And no Next Components.

You might notice there's a "China Ting Fashion Group" at this location, which is perhaps notable, in that Hsu is not only Chinese, but a reputed apparel magnate.  But a web search suggests that China Ting, while legit, has nothing to do with Norman Hsu.

So having officially gone 0/3, this field trip - much like Wednesday's - yielded precisely diddly.  And of course, that wasn't terribly surprising.  It's not in doubt, after all, that Norman Hsu is a seasoned crook and a con man with extensive shady business dealings.

But the legitimacy of these companies - not just their existence, but their cash flow generation - is central to a crucial unresolved question.  Were the huge sums of money Hsu raised from the likes of the Paws in San Francisco, the Sus on Long Island, and the Lees in Queens and Mount Carmel (sums which wound up in the coffers of Hsu's favored Democratic candidates and committees) authentic contributions made by those individuals, some of whom - most notably Winkle Paw and Paul Su - list one of Hsu's companies as their employer?  Or has Hsu been using these associates to illegally funnel extra cash to these candidates and committees in order to sidestep contribution limits?

If Hsu's businesses are fictitious (or if they're no more than shell entities or mail drops), then it becomes even tougher to suspend disbelief over whether the lofty contributions made by employees or officers of these fictitious companies are on the level.  The extra layer of Hsu taint that then spreads to Hsu's fundraising associates makes it difficult to imagine how a candidate or committee could justify not returning the entirety of Hsu's circumspect bundling.

In Hillary Clinton's case, that's the difference between giving up $23,600 (which she's agreed to do) and $174,000.  (Actually, her grand total is now a ways north of $174k and still climbing, but I haven't had a chance to error-check, format, and post the newest data update yet.)  All told, Hsu's suspicious bundling more than doubles the aggregate sketchy funds, from $787 thousand to $1.6 million (and rising).

Thanks to the spectacular intrigue added by Hsu's felonious history and Runaway Bride-like behavior when it comes to court appearances, this story has gained enough public and media attention that it's not going away any time soon.  Eventually, it's going to force each of his beneficiaries to bite the bullet and either turn over all the dirty money or accept a heaping dose of well-earned public scorn.

---

The roster of Hsu's contributions and fundraising activity since 2004 is here (pending that update).  The details of my previous field trip to Hsu's swanky SoHo loft are here.

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Update:  This morning, two of the papers digging ever deeper into the Hsu story have published some intriguing updates.  The Philadelphia Inquirer peels back another layer on Hsu's east coast fundraising, showing the "Mount Carmel three" are not so dissimilar from the Paw family out west.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal team that initially broke this story has managed to piece together the timeline of Hsu's shadowy past before he got into politics.

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Big Update:  This Sunday's New York Times has a piece that appears to make some headway tracing payments from Hsu's companies to some of his go-to contributors.  If those transactions aren't related to legitimate business activities, they would help provide the missing link needed to demonstrate that Hsu's associates' political contributions were indeed reimbursed, in violation of election laws.

Based on a single month's bank statement for Components, Ltd. furnished to the paper by an unnamed associates of Hsu's,  the Times reports the company paid "more than $100,000 to at least nine people who made campaign contributions to Mrs. Clinton and others through Mr. Hsu."

The statement shows a total of roughly $600,000 cycling through Components, Ltd. that month, enough to suggest the company could have served as a significant money laundering conduit, if the funds were obtained or transferred illegally upstream.

Previously:
Hsu Captured! (Drugged?)
Hsu Still A HillRaiser In Good Standing?
Knock, Knock, Knockin' On Norman's Door.
Hsu Reclaims Fugitive Status, Forfeiting $2 Million Bail
Hsu vs. Abramoff
New Hsu Review: Following [the Rest Of] the Money
A Really Big Hsu...
Hillary Vows To Give [At Least Some Of] Hsu Contributions To Charity
From Now On, When the Phone Rings You Say, "Vandelay Industries."
Hillary's Magwitch?

Hsu Captured! [Update: Shirtless and "Freaking Out" On Train]

Hat tip to Hot Air for this development:

Fugitive political fundraiser Norman Hsu, who skipped out on San Mateo County authorities this week rather than face sentencing in a fraud scheme, was apprehended tonight by federal and local lawmen in Grand Junction, Colo.

Authorities said Hsu was taken into custody at St. Mary's Hospital in Grand Junction at 7 p.m. local time. He had been on the lam for almost two days after failing to appear in a Redwood City courtroom Wednesday to surrender his passport.

Looks like I was wrong about us never hearing from Hsu again.  Instead, he'll be forced to return to California, face the judge, post bail, and light out again.

Allah's tracking updates, as is Michelle.

Two questions:

1) Why in the world is the FBI saying that the "federal charge of unlawful flight will be dropped after Hsu is handed over to California officials"?

2) Was Hsu injured before being apprehended (given that he was found in a hospital)?  If so, how and by whom?  The same Asian gang leaders who were arrested for kidnpping Hsu seventeen years ago?  Dog the Bounty Hunter?  Whoever may or may not have snuffed out Vince Foster?

(Okay, so that's six questions.)

---

Update:  I can empathize.  Amtrak is a miserable means of transit.
(Also via Hot Air)

Hsu was traveling on an Amtrak train when he became ill. Grand Junction paramedics were summoned to the Amtrak station near downtown about 11 a.m. Thursday to treat a patient, Battalion Chief Robert Ferguson said.

Update:  Hsu was "delirious" upon arrival at the hospital?  Was he drugged?  Who gets spontaneously sick enough to require removal from a train and hospitalization, right when staging an exciting getaway?  Maybe he was hopped on something he took himself.  Or maybe he just made the mistake of visiting the dining car.  Either way, I'd put money on a tox screen not coming back clean.

Update:  This kind of behavior is not in the fugitive best practices handbook.

Alberto Dee, 21, who boarded the train in Truckee, said Hsu "freaked out" when Amtrak personnel approached, and was roaming a train car "without shoes and no shirt. ... I thought he had a suitcase full of crack or meth."

Previously:

Hsu Still A HillRaiser In Good Standing?
Knock, Knock, Knockin' On Norman's Door.
Hsu Reclaims Fugitive Status, Forfeiting $2 Million Bail
Hsu vs. Abramoff
New Hsu Review: Following [the Rest Of] the Money
A Really Big Hsu...
Hillary Vows To Give [At Least Some Of] Hsu Contributions To Charity
From Now On, When the Phone Rings You Say, "Vandelay Industries."
Hillary's Magwitch?

Hsu Still A HillRaiser In Good Standing?

Amid the sensational scandal of fugitive-cum-fundraiser-cum-fugitive Norman Hsu, the New School (the Manhattan university where Hsu served as a trustee) was quick to remove any mention of Mr. Hsu from their website (though you can still see a cached version).

That was probably wise, as the whole affair must be more than a little distressing for New School president (and former Nebraska Senator and Hsu Pal) Bob Kerrey.  So kudos to the New School webmaster for acting fast to purge all association with the wanted Democratic financier extraordinaire.

While Kerrey's apparently close affiliation with Hsu is certainly unflattering, no politician is likely more Hsu-addled than Hillary Clinton, who took a whopping $174,000 from Hsu in direct contributions and shady fundraising.

While Clinton has pledged to turn over some of this money (only Hsu's direct contributions, representing roughly 13% of her total haul from Hsu's network) and has professed bewilderment at the man's colorful legal history and recent behavior, she hasn't yet taken the one very easy (and admittedly fairly meaningless, but nonetheless advisable) step of removing Hsu from her list of vaunted HillRaisers.

At least she hadn't as of 2:50 pm on September 6th.  What gives?  If Hsu turns himself in (again) and heads off to prison, is that sufficient contrition for Clinton to welcome him back into the fold?  Is this failure to fully sever Mr. Hsu from the campaign deliberate or just careless (and mildly comical)?

There's your screenshot for posterity.  Let's see how long it takes for Team Hillary to rectify.

---

Update:  8 pm Thursday:  Hsu still a HillRaiser.
Update:  9:30 am Friday:  Hsu still a HillRaiser (and once again in custody).
Update:  8 pm Friday:  Hsu still a HillRaiser.
Update:  2:30 pm Saturday:  Hsu still a HillRaiser.
Update:  3 pm Sunday:  Hsu still a HillRaiser.
Update:  9:30 am Monday:  Hsu still a HillRaiser.
Update:  10 pm Monday:  Hsu still a HillRaiser.
Update:  9 pm Tuesday:  Hsu still a HillRaiser.
Update:  12:30 pm Wednesday:  Hsu still a HillRaiser.
Update:  12 am Friday (9/14):  Hsu still a HillRaiser.
Update:  10 pm Monday (9/17):  Hsu still a HillRaiser.
Update:  5 pm Wednesday (9/19):  Hsu still a HillRaiser (and going back to Cali after waiving extradition from Colorado).
Update:  12 pm Friday (9/21):  Hsu no longer a HillRaiser!

Knock, Knock, Knockin' On Norman's Door...

Well, buzz, buzz, buzzing Norman's buzzer, anyway.

With the well-heeled Democratic fundraiser (and once-and-again fugitive from justice) Norman Hsu skipping out on his court appointment in California this morning, forfeiting his $2 million bail in the process, the smart money seems to be on Hsu having already fled the country.

The Hong Kong native had not surrendered his passport to the court, not because he hadn't been asked to, but because he couldn't seem to find it.

On the off-chance that Hsu was still stuffing clothes in a duffle bag, I took a subway ride down to SoHo this evening and headed toward 160 Wooster Street, the address listed most frequently on the campaign disclosures documenting Hsu's bountiful political contributions over the last few years.

The blinds were closed behind all 10 sets of windows at Hsu's third floor loft (pictured) and the lights didn't seem to be on.  Still, having made the trek, I strolled up and hit the buzzer for Hsu's unit.  After a couple of fruitless buzzings, I went into the lobby and exchanged pleasantries with the doorman behind the desk.

"I'm trying to get in touch with Norman Hsu in 3C," I said.  "Do you know if he's available?"

Only mildly less pleasantly, he responded, "You're going to need to step outside now."

He was perfectly polite about it, but unmistakably resolute, and I couldn't help but wonder whether my doorman would have my back if ever had to lam it.  I'll bet Hsu is a better Christmas tipper than I...

Anyway, the darkened windows and mum doorman were no surprise, I suppose, but making the trip was an i worth dotting.  After all, Hsu had been hiding not just in plain sight, but in a brilliant spot light in recent years, despite being a fugitive on a felony conviction carrying a three-year sentence.  Given that California has been so lax (nay, absent) in their attempts to collect Hsu as he paraded and hobnobbed across the country these last few years, spilling hundreds of thousands of dollars into the pockets of Demcoratic officials along the way, and further, given that California once again managed to drop the ball by allowing this glaring flight risk to slip through their fingers, I figured I'd pitch in a tiny modicum of effort at locating him - namely by jumping on the subway and strolling up to Hsu's very public street address, knowable to anyone with access to a web browser.

That little trip, while cursory and unsuccessful tonight, is all authorities would have needed to do at any time to collar this convicted con man and bring him to justice.  At $4 round-trip, I'd've thought it a bargain.

I have to agree with the smart money that Hsu is likely long gone.  Asked today about whether Hsu may have fled the country, California assistant attorney general Ralph Sivilla commented, "I would imagine he has the capability."

I'll renew my prediction from earlier today: We'll never hear from Norman Hsu again.

Previously:
Hsu Reclaims Fugitive Status, Forfeiting $2 Million Bail
Hsu vs. Abramoff
New Hsu Review: Following [the Rest Of] the Money
A Really Big Hsu...
Hillary Vows To Give [At Least Some Of] Hsu Contributions To Charity
From Now On, When the Phone Rings You Say, "Vandelay Industries."
Hillary's Magwitch?

Hsu Reclaims Fugitive Status, Forfeiting $2 Million Bail

This is one slippery fundraiser!

Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu failed to appear Wednesday for a bail hearing and a judge issued a new warrant for his arrest.

Hsu forfeits the $2 million bail he posted last week.

Hsu's lawyer said he doesn't know where his client is.

Hsu had been a fugitive in California for 15 years during which time he became a top donor to Democratic candidates, including presidential contenders Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

Hsu pleaded no contest in 1991 to a felony count of grand theft, admitting he'd defrauded investors of $1 million in a bogus investment scam. Prosecutors say he was facing up to three years in prison when he skipped town before being sentenced.

Federal Election Commission records show Hsu donated $260,000 to the Democratic Party and candidates since 2004.

Since the judge didn't make Hsu surrender his passport, and judging by the man's astoundingly deep pockets, the Hong Kong native might well be halfway around the world by now.  Or possible hiding in an attic in Chappaqua.

Hey Rendell, Kennedy, you want to reconsider keeping that money now?  And what about you, DSCC, DCCC, and the Democrat parties of 10 states, who took hundreds of thousands directly from Hsu and from his shady fundraising sources - are you ready to disgorge these funds yet?

Michelle Malkin's got more.  So does Allah, including this bit from The New York Times:

On Monday, Mr. Hsu was required to turn his passport over to the court, but he told court officials that he had not been able to find it then. Mr. Brosnahan said they were hoping Mr. Hsu would bring it to court with him today.

Prediction: we never hear from Norman Hsu again.

Previously:
Hsu vs. Abramoff
New Hsu Review: Following [the Rest Of] the Money
A Really Big Hsu...
Hillary Vows To Give [At Least Some Of] Hsu Contributions To Charity
From Now On, When the Phone Rings You Say, "Vandelay Industries."
Hillary's Magwitch?