Word: altmans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...lawyer Robert Altman won acquittal...
...financial scandal in history, the prosecution of the bank and its operators now seems destined to end with a whimper. Even though as much as $20 billion was stolen, misappropriated and lost outright by B.C.C.I. officers, a mere handful will ever stand trial anywhere. The maddening complexity of the Altman case illustrates the difficulty of even mounting a prosecution of B.C.C.I.'s principals and their associates. The case dragged on through 45 witnesses and reams of documents -- 15,000 pages of transcript in all. The material was so numbingly complex that some jurors fell asleep listening to it. Meanwhile...
...pivot of the trial was whether Altman -- and by extension Clifford -- knowingly helped B.C.C.I. secretly buy an American bank and then lied to regulators about it. The issue was neither their long and intimate involvement with B.C.C.I. nor their huge profits from that relationship. The two men acknowledged making millions of dollars in fees from their roles as legal counsel to B.C.C.I. in the U.S. and reaping additional millions from stock deals as payment for their work running First American Bank, the largest bank in Washington, which B.C.C.I. illegally owned through front investors. Nor did the case address the larger...
...Altman and Clifford are far from absolved in the B.C.C.I. case. In New York City three criminal indictments against Clifford are still pending. In Washington the Federal Reserve Bank has a pending civil suit against Clifford and Altman, who also face a $1.5 billion civil racketeering suit by First American Bank. Though Clifford will probably not be tried in New York, the other cases are expected to be tough fights for the two men, who are likely to be mired in B.C.C.I. legal proceedings for years to come...
...jokes that stray too close to tragic news events or real-life misfortune. Rob Burnett recalls Letterman turned down a gag for a segment called Charts and Graphs -- "Dyslexics' Favorite Beatles," featuring names like ULAP and OGNRI; the host said it made fun of a serious disability. Comedian Jeff Altman, another Letterman pal from the Comedy Store days, remembers a guest appearance on Late Night in which he made a lewd crack that included the word "genitals." Letterman didn't laugh, and Altman complained about it later at dinner. "I said, 'You could have helped me out a little there...