I’m in Chicago, watching,writing and covering the Blagojevich trial.
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Former HealthSouth CFO’s, convicted felons and cooperating witnesses Aaron Beam and Weston Smith have parlayed their notoriety into a second career, and found a way to make fraud pay off in the end. For followers of this story, it might be worth noting which of the conspirators have joined hands to make this ersatz fraud-fighting team. Beam rode his night-school CPA on a magic carpet ride that would make him a multi-millionaire before his small startup medical rehab company became too unwieldy for his talents and he accepted the HealthSouth fraud-laced golden parachute, and then sat it out in high-living style until the Feds came calling. And Smith was over-promoted into service only when HealthSouth was running out of fraud-aware accountants in the CFO pool. He then blew the whistle only when things became too hot after he had accepted a deal that would have allowed him to be the head of a “clean” division of HealthSouth while still being able to pocket his fraud-inflated earnings. Smith was presumably OK with the fraud until Sarbanes-Oxley kicked the legs of deniability out from under him. He also had the unenviable task of keeping his Family-member wife off the list of indicted conspirators. So he talked and cried a little bit on the stand, and now, along with Beam, he has a new career. Once a week or so, I make a scan of the latest articles on the Siegelman-Scrushy situation. And then I go on to look at the most recent editorials and make a quick check to see if there is any movement in the involved Federal Courts. And in making this sweep, I’ll usually take a detour down the Internet’s back-alleys, from the seedy bars and pubs of the Net to the more up-scale sophisticated cigar rooms, and finally to the Internet version of graffiti-strewn restrooms, where I’ll read what is written in all of these places as text messages stuffed in bottles and cast adrift across disparate forums. There’ll be wide spectrum of scrawled notes, from almost-informed impassioned arguments, to factual news blurbs, to the exposed raw nerves of hatred and the blind invectives of anger. The latter encompasses everything from small lives that have been bowed by a failing economy, from the ever-fresh frustration of stolen Southern Honor, to the embarrassment of Bull Connor’s dogs splashed across Life Magazine, to a still-simmering racial divide that quietly and quite voluntarily segregated itself in the aftermath of the 60’s, to the moral high-ground afforded by the close almost gang-like association to a political party. And to fear. Simply fear. And crisscrossing this uneven landscape is the perception of shady politicians from Bush to Clinton to Obama, and from Blagojevich to Jefferson to Cunningham to Sessions. |
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