Quote:
Originally Posted by calvindog
Lastly, of course people can change their minds. I've always appreciated how you changed your mind about Mike O'Keeffe, the NY Daily News reporter who you and others blasted for his purportedly unfair coverage of the Mastro fraud. And how you changed your mind about me after we bickered constantly out here years ago when I was loudly critical of Mastro and Allen -- and I was being roundly criticized for it.
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Hey, Leon even reached out and unbanned me! That's good mind-changing.
In all seriousness, I think he's shown real growth in the last seven or eight years in terms of his ability to acknowledge the mountain of evidence (and common sense) against the Mastro/Legendary guys as sufficient to conclude they were crooks, but at the same time he obviously hits the same wall of mental disconnect (separate a person from their actions?) that drove him to so ferociously defend those guys in the first place.
Part of it, I would imagine, is personal relationships and part of it may be some psychological reasons that we'll never understand that contribute to a sort of selective blind spot that causes him to make seemingly incompatible and completely contradictory conclusions while he tried to overlook or explain away or compartmentalize they're bad deeds. I will agree though that even after all of this, it's like one step forward two steps backward to see that Leon was actually considering writing a letter in support of Mastro. Growth yes, but that's just crazy at this point in time (these guys are convicts now!) and goes to the point that we will never understand the psychology here and what drives the reasoning for his need to absolve these guys.
As far as the appropriateness of the penalties, I'm assuming that Mastro was completely cooperative with the feds, and that should warrant some leniency, but I think 7-10 years would have been more appropriate, not 30 months. And understanding just how hard it would be to determine and then distribute a restitution figure, it still would have been appropriate to add a $3M - $5M flat figure as additional punishment.
Otherwise, I'm just happy that these guys were proven to be the frauds they are and so overwhelmingly so -- by federal convictions, plea deals, and real jail time. It should close the books on a very dark episode in the hobby's history when so many were the unknowing victims of significant fraud that undercut what was supposed to be a "hobby".