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New York lawyers love Wolfe’s book since it is a reasonably accurate portrayal of New York’s chaotic, colorful and Dickensian criminal justice system in the 1980s. The seemingly wealthy McCoy, a bond trader, and his expensive mistress take a wrong turn into the crime-ridden South Bronx, where they accidentally kill a young man with McCoy’s Mercedes.
Soon McCoy is sucked into and ground up by a criminal justice system he had previously experienced only in the pages of New York’s then-vibrant tabloids.
Manafort’s “South Bronx” is the world of foreign tyrants and dictators and the political consultants who help them to perpetuate their regimes of misery. Like McCoy’s junk bonds, the money is good until your luck runs out or the law (in Manafort’s case, Robert Mueller) finally catches up with you.
She at first depicted Manafort’s rise to riches, but Washkuhn ended her testimony with grim details of his financial collapse and desperate efforts to borrow from banks to stay afloat. By the end of day three, prosecutors were already turning to the bank-fraud counts in a fast-moving trial that may end even sooner than the three weeks originally estimated.
Manafort’s trial judge, the crusty and irascible T.S. Ellis, has pushed the trial ahead at breakneck speed, an honored local custom in the Northern Virginia federal district known as the “rocket docket.” He has criticized both prosecutors and defense attorneys for describing some of Manafort’s Eastern European and Russian clients as “oligarchs.” He said the word carries unfair and unproven criminal connotations suggesting that Manafort was “associated with despicable people.”
Prosecutors allege that these clients paid his consulting firm an estimated $90 million in fees, often wired into offshore accounts to deceive American tax authorities. The accounts, prosecutors say, were used to avoid US taxes and to fund Manafort’s lavish lifestyle.
But what Ellis gives with one hand he takes away with the other. Though he warned prosecutors, “We don’t convict people because they have a lot of money to throw around,” the judge had already permitted the now chastened prosecutors to introduce into evidence a cornucopia of lavish and seemingly reckless Manafort spending sprees.
The WASPy Sherman McCoy had a $3 million Park Avenue co-op, but — as jurors discovered this week in Alexandria — he couldn’t hold a candle to Manafort. Before he worked for Trump, Manafort spent $3.3 million renovating such properties as his Trump Tower condo, a Brooklyn townhouse and a vacation home in Bridgehampton on Long Island. He bought a $1.9 million home in Arlington, Virginia, for his daughter Andrea that included a $104,000 “concept garden.”
Prosecutors have described the tax case against Manafort as a “lifestyle” case. It is proven in part by adding up the cost of items Manafort purchased over a set time period to demonstrate that sufficient income was not reported to the Internal Revenue Service before or during that time frame to cover the cost of the items. Manafort’s gift to the prosecutors was the staggeringly extravagant nature of his purchases. Did his wife really need a $9,500 ostrich vest and an $18,000 python jacket? With her husband walking around in his own ostrich coat, apparently either he or she thought so.
Manafort might reflect on the wisdom of Sherman McCoy if he finds a way to escape jail and rise from the ashes of his financial ruin. “The Bonfire of the Vanities” is remembered not just for its piercing analysis of the greed and hypocrisy of the ’80s, but also for that reflection from Sherman on how easy it is to lose everything. “I’m already going broke on a million dollars a year!”
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