Seabrook and Huberfeld and Platinum – WE CALLED IT!!!

 

Platinum Funds- WE CALLED IT!!! –

David Bodner was the subject of one of our first articles regarding a house sold in Monsey and the questionable transfer of the title. He connected us to Platinum and while we have not focused on Black Elk, all of the events regarding that fund have irked us and our contributors and sources for months.

And then Mark Nordlicht... His moral compass may be missing the “N” as the directional. He makes money betting on nursing home patients who are on the verge of death, with the help of a California Rabbi. We have our suspicions as to that Rabbi’s identity, a “philanthropist.”

The article we have posted below this one has been our Bible for exploring this fund and its activities, if for no other reason but the numbers simply don’t make sense. The patterns are wrong. There is much more to this than meets the eye.

We are still waiting on the connections to illegal diamond smuggling, the event-driven nursing home dead/undead life insurance investment schemes and so many collateral issues to come to light. For now…. Seabrook and Huberfeld are a very good start.

See below for Articles on Platinum Partners, cited in our previous articles.

LostMessiah June 8, 2016

 

FBI Arrests Correction Union President Norman Seabrook For Wire Fraud

http://gothamist.com/2016/06/08/fbi_arrests_correction_union_presi.php

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s corruption investigation into NYC officials has now landed another big fish: Correction union president Norman Seabrook was arrested this morning, on wire fraud charges. Seabrook is accused of receiving kickbacks in exchange for funneling millions of union retiree benefits and operating funds to a hedge fund run by Murray Huberfeld.

Huberfeld, who gave start-up capital to the fund Platinum Partners, was also charged with wire fraud.

In April, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Jona Rechnitz, a Brooklyn real-estate investor, referred Norman Seabrook, the president of the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, to Platinum Partners, the people said. The investment put a large percentage of the union’s money in a firm that has had a mixed stretch. Platinum generally has reported steady returns. Last December it blocked investors from withdrawing some of their money in one fund that contains hard-to-sell assets, according to people familiar with the matter. Such moves have been rare in the hedge-fund world since the financial crisis.”

The criminal complaint notes that members of the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association (COBA) pay $45 in union dues during each two-week pay period, resulting in $1,000+ of union fees a year; there are more than 9,000 union members. And Seabrook’s power over the union’s board was immense; from the complaint:

Rechnitz is one of the two businessmen at the center of the federal probe into corruption, with Rechnitz and Jeremy Reichberg using cash and jewels to allegedly get favors from city officials. Both were major donors to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s election efforts. Numerous high-ranking police officials have retired or been demoted, for giving escorts or helicopter demonstrations.

The NY Times notes, “The relationship between the mayor and Mr. Seabrook has been close in the past. At a 2014 fund-raiser for a union charity, Mr. de Blasio referred to Mr. Seabrook as a ‘friend’ and a ‘great leader.'”

Bharara is holding a press conference at 12:30 p.m. to discuss the charges.

 

 

No Blow Up Is Big Enough to Tarnish Platinum Partners’ Returns

WHO IS THE RABBI – SEE BELOW IN RED…

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-21/no-blow-up-is-big-enough-to-tarnish-platinum-partners-returns

The main fund, Platinum Partners Value Arbitrage, has returned about 8 percent this year, according to the investor presentation. Nordlicht said that the fund has made good bets in biotechnology and on a planned chain of mini-marts in rural China. Another winner has been a startup electricity retailer called Agera Energy, he said.

The investment connected with terminally ill patients shows the lengths Platinum will go to find a can’t-miss bet. Insurance companies were offering variable annuities — a type of guaranteed investment contract — with bonuses that only applied when the investor died. A broker approached Platinum in 2007 with an idea, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission: Find people who were near death and buy contracts with their names using the fund’s money. With the bonuses, the fund could earn 5 percent, risk-free, as soon as each person died.

Platinum set up a company called BDL Group to invest in the annuities, eventually putting up more than $56 million, and Nordlicht brought in a friend to oversee the process, the SEC said in an administrative order. A rabbi in Los Angeles found the hospice patients and tricked them into providing their personal information so that BDL could take out annuities with their names, according to the SEC.

Nordlicht’s friend, the rabbi and BDL agreed last year to pay about $4 million in settlements with the SEC, without admitting doing anything wrong. Neither Platinum nor Nordlicht were accused of wrongdoing.

“We definitely were exploiting a loophole, but it was fully vetted by legal counsel,” Nordlicht said. “A principal-protected piece of paper backed by an A credit with an expected annualized return of 30 percent proved too difficult to resist for a risk-adjusted return hawk.”

‘Red Flags’

Nathan Anderson, founder of hedge-fund researcher ClaritySpring Inc., was asked last year by potential investors to look into Platinum. He said that while returns were about the steadiest he’d seen, the rest of what he found raised questions.

“When you see nearly flawless returns, it’s intriguing, but also potentially worrying,” Anderson said. “Even cursory due diligence showed that a number of their dealings ended in death, litigation or handcuffs. Those are the kinds of red flags you can see from outer space.”

Nordlicht said the research couldn’t have been thorough, because he doesn’t remember Anderson contacting Platinum.

The oil company that’s now facing criminal charges, Houston-based Black Elk Energy, was Platinum’s biggest investment as of March 2014, worth as much as $186 million, according to a Platinum valuation report. Black Elk is now in bankruptcy, two months after prosecutors in Louisiana accused it of negligence in the explosion, which occurred on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. In a lawsuit brought by an injured worker, the company blamed outside contractors and said it wasn’t responsible. Matt Chester, a lawyer for Black Elk, declined to comment.

The valuation report, dated March 2014, shows that illiquid, hard-to-value assets make up much of Platinum’s portfolio. The second-biggest holding is a group of oil fields in California. The valuation agent, Murray Grenville, didn’t respond to requests for comment. The fund’s auditor, CohnReznick LLP, a New York-based accounting firm with 2,500 employees, declined to comment.

Cotton Options

Nordlicht, 47, rarely attends the investing events or charity balls where other hedge-fund titans mingle. He works out of a midtown Manhattan office and recently started splitting his time between New York and Israel. He and his relatives have about $250 million invested in Platinum, according to calculations based on disclosures the fund provides investors. He wouldn’t confirm the amount.

Nordlicht started his career as a trader on the noisy floors of New York’s commodity exchanges, where his father also worked. Another trader from the cotton-options pit remembers him biding his time until big swings hit the market, then betting big and usually winning.

He opened the hedge fund in 2003 with $25 million from his earnings, and from family and friends, according to an investor presentation. The initial investors included a pair of penny-stock dealmakers named Murray Huberfeld and David Bodner, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

Bodner and Huberfeld pleaded guilty to misdemeanors in 1992 for sending others to take their brokerage-licensing tests and were ordered to pay $4.7 million by the SEC in 1998 for illegally selling restricted stock. They also made a lot of money on Internet-related stocks in the 1990s, according to Irwin Gross, a lawyer who worked with them and later invested in Platinum.

Payday Lending

Huberfeld opened a credit-focused fund in the same building where Platinum had its office, and it was absorbed by Nordlicht’s firm in 2011. That $500 million fund has reported gains in 118 of the 119 months since it was founded and an average annualized return of 13.5 percent, according to another investor presentation. Huberfeld didn’t return calls, and Nordlicht declined to comment on their relationship. Bodner also declined to comment.

While Platinum took off, another Nordlicht venture was collapsing. He co-founded a commodities brokerage called Optionable, and in 2007 its biggest customer, a trader at Bank of Montreal, was revealed to have hidden about C$680 million ($524 million) in losses from his employer. In 2012, Optionable’s chief executive officer was sentenced to 30 months in prison in New York for helping the trader conceal the losing bets. Nordlicht, the company’s chairman, wasn’t implicated in the scheme.

One strategy the credit fund has used is financing payday lenders, many of which have been engaged in a decade-long cat-and-mouse game with regulators trying to enforce state interest-rate limits. Payday lenders are willing to pay hedge funds 15 percent a year or more to borrow money they use to make the costly loans, according to people who work in the industry.

CashCall Inc. is one of the lenders that borrowed from Platinum, California records show. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is suing CashCall, saying it collected on loans that violated state interest-rate caps. CashCall has argued that federal agencies can’t enforce state rate limits and in any event the rules don’t apply because the loans were made by an American Indian-owned company. The case is pending.

 

“There’s going to be arguments on both sides as to whether some of the loans we finance are beneficial or harmful to society,” Nordlicht said. “But to us, what’s incontrovertible is that when you take on the responsibility for managing other peoples’ money, you have a duty to go all out to protect capital and produce returns.”

Leiby Kletsky – Shaya Lichtenstein, Forever Linked by Murder

“Thou Shalt Not Kill” – Each and Every Member of the Shomrim The Night that Kletzky Disappeared is Complicit in His Brutal Murder and Subsequent Dismemberment

 

פיקוח נפש

The Saving of One’s Life

“The preservation of human life takes precedence over all the other commandments in Judaism. The Talmud emphasizes this principle by citing the verse from Leviticus [18:5]: “You shall therefore keep my statutes…which if a man do, he shall live by them.” The rabbis add: “That he shall live by them, and not that he shall die by them.” (Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 85b)”

http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/saving-a-life-pikuach-nefesh/

The case of Leiby Kletzky (zl.) is one that has haunted many of us for years. He is the victim of a system that prides itself on secrecy beyond all else. That system cares not for the safety of its children, the sexual abuses,  the deplorable conditions in which many children learn, the abuses of women who want a divorce from their husbands and so many other things, because such things are trumped by the obsessive need for secrecy. There is a measure of hypocrisy in a system of beliefs that can set aside the life of a child to protect a community’s secrets. There is a measure of complacence and even complicity. 

Leiby Kletzky (zl.) is also the victim of a system built upon a foundation of corruption, a corruption that runs so deep it is like the blood flowing through the veins of a community that seems to know nothing different. The Shomrim are supposed to be the “protectors” from the Hebrew root Shin Mem Resh – Shmer – protection or Shomer protector. A Shomer Rosh is a body guard. Lshmor is to protect. In the Leiby Kletzky case, the Shomrim did not protect Kletzky but rather destroyed him. Kletzky’s face is the portrait of a boy whose life was a tool within the greater passing around of the spoils of corruption and high finance that pervade Borough Park, CB12 and the NYPD responsible for that precinct. May that beautiful, special and innocent child be forever a lesson to the community of Borough Park, the devout Jews who follow the Torah not necessarily in letter but in spirit; and a lesson to those Jews who call themselves devout but who bastardize the tenets of Judaism for their own personal gain. Leiby Kletzky flies in the face of the spirit of G-d’s laws and represents the perversion some have made of it.

In the case of Leiby Kletzky (zl.), a young boy who had a whole life to live, suffering a brutal death was at the hands of his community, each and every person who refused to get the civil police department involved, who refused to report the situation and perhaps get more hands on deck. His parents are victims also. They must live a life forever altered by the death of a child. Parents are not supposed to outlive their children. To them we offer our unending condolences, our everlasting hope for peace of mind and spirit.

For Leiby Kletzky (zl.) we hope one day to be a part of a vindication we believe you so desperately deserve. You deserved better from your insular community. You deserved to live a long and happy life. We hope to ensure that those who have been prey to the wrongs of your community also get the vindication they deserve: the children who are abused, the children who study in deplorable conditions,  the children who are denied an education that might offer them choices, the parents who are often denied their children in rigged custody battles, the elderly who suffer abuse at the hands of unscrupulous nursing home owners drugged by dollar signs ringing through their heads. May you know, may they know, that we are trying to make a better world.

EXCLUSIVE: Brooklyn security patrol, organized by man indicted in NYPD gun permit scandal, delayed in notifying cops of boy’s 2011 kidnapping

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/security-patrol-delayed-notifying-nypd-boy-kidnapping-article-1.2662714

In the hours after 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky disappeared in Borough Park, Brooklyn, a key figure in the heavily Jewish neighborhood’s security patrol coordinated the effort to find him.

Shaya Lichtenstein, 44, wrangled some 2,000 civilian volunteers as a member of the Borough Park Shomrim in a desperate attempt to locate Leiby, who was kidnapped as he walked home from a day camp on July 11, 2011.

He was found dismembered two days later, and Levi Aron was charged with his murder.

After Leiby’s family reported him missing, the Shomrim did not notify the NYPD for three hours. Despite the tensions stemming from that delay, the long-cozy relationship between members of the Orthodox community, including the Shomrim, and the NYPD remained intact.

Another NYPD high-ranking cop punished in corruption probe

Lichtenstein was indicted in April on allegations that he bribed police officers to obtain gun permits for clients who paid as much as $18,000 for his services. He was able to get permits within a few weeks, when it usually takes more than a year.

Borough Park Shomrim bypassed the NYPD for three hours as they searched for Leiby Kletzky, who was found dismembered two days later.

In some instances, Lichtenstein paid off the cops in the very offices of the gun licensing division with thousands of dollars hidden in copies of the newspaper, a source familiar with the case said.

“That’s partly how it was done, right in their faces,” the source said.

The NYPD declined to comment.

Lichtenstein’s ties with ranking police officials extended well beyond his close relationship with cops in the gun licensing unit, sources said. He parlayed that access into the ability to do favors for members of the Jewish community.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/security-patrol-delayed-notifying-nypd-boy-kidnapping-article-1.2662714