Lack Of Banker Indictments Are Because The Government Is Afraid Of An OJ Simpson Style Trial

Steve Dibert, MFI-Miami

Since I started MFI-Miami, I have heard from thousands of people who are appalled by the fact that no one has been convicted in the financial crisis for mortgage servicing fraud, robo-signing, filing false documents, foreclosure fraud, etc.  However, contrary to what the loony mortgage activists and armchair foreclosure experts will tell you it’s not because of some mass conspiracy with the banks, the government or even the Illuminati.

It’s about money and how much it would cost the various government agencies to convict nearly 100 billionaires.  After all, justice is not free and someone has to pick up the tab.  The federal government and the states, like homeowners who are in foreclosure, have to make the tough call about rolling the dice.  Do they spend tens of millions of dollars fighting for the convictions of billionaire bankers and run the risk of being publicly humiliated or do they go after the one homeowner with no money who overstated his income on his mortgage application?  Prosecutors weigh the monetary cost  to the taxpayers for a conviction against the likelihood of a conviction.  I call this the OJ Simpson Litmus Test.

The OJ Simpson Litmus Test

Most people don’t know that while OJ Simpson was on trial for murdering his wife and Ron Goldman back in the mid 1990s, there was another trial going on in the courtroom next door.  Like OJ Simpson, a black man was accused of murdering two people.   The difference was, this black man had a public defender for a lawyer while OJ Simpson had a multi-million dollar legal dream team assembled by Kim Kardashian’s late father, Robert Shapiro (who now pawns his website for legal forms on TV) and famed criminal defense attorney, F. Lee Bailey (who has since been disbarred in two states).

OJ Simpson was acquitted and until his conviction in 2008, spent the next 13 years drinking mojitos, playing golf and picking up bar hoes in Florida while the guy in the courtroom next door went to San Quentin and everyday clutches a bar of soap in the shower as if his life depended on it.

The Simpson acquittal was an embarrassment for a lot of people and almost cost former LA District Attorney, Gil Garcetti his re-election in 1996.  One of the main reasons the Garcetti’s team lost was due to his legal team being outsmarted and outmatched at every turn by Simpson’s elite million dollar dream team.

What most people don’t understand about the legal profession is that there are two types of attorneys that go work at a prosecutor’s office.  The smart and ambitious ones go there to gain trial experience where the rest go there because their performance in law school didn’t attract the attention of any high power law firms.  The smart ambitious attorneys tend to leave and form their one firms after about ten years and use their experience to become skilled litigators demanding top dollar.

Wall Street lawyers tend to have excelled in Ivy League law school and got noticed by the big law firms representing the major players in finance or the law firms hire the aforementioned prosecutors.

The finance industry takes the same attitude I do when it comes to good attorneys and that is, I can’t have enough of them.  Like the finance industry, I am willing to pay top dollar and train good lawyers in the intricacies of mortgage finance to get the results I think my clients are entitled to.  The only difference is financial companies have hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal to train these attorneys.

Because of this, state or federal prosecutors fear a criminal case against the banks would be the OJ Simpson murder trial on steroids.  Prosecutors would be outmatched and smarted by attorneys who have two things prosecutors don’t have, the ability to simplify complex financial practices to a jury of twelve people and clients willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to cast reasonable doubt.  After all, a criminal case is not about guilt or innocence, it’s about proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

OJ Simpson started a trend by the wealthy in this country of spending whatever it cost to produce that reasonable doubt.  So next time you want to bitch to your congressman or to a member of your state legislature because they lack the testicular fortitude to demand justice,  send a  letter to OJ Simpson instead.  Here’s his address:

OJ Simpson C/O

Lovelack Correctional Center

1200 Prison Rd,

Lovelack, NV 89419