Doug Band: Is this the man who could bring down Hillary Clinton?
The most embarrassing association of all was Raffaello Follieri. The saga of the Italian striver who duped the Clintons has been unspooled by the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, The Wall Street Journal, and Vanity Fair. But if anything, Band’s role in the affair has been understated, and it offers an illuminating study in the art of relationship leverage. Follieri descended on New York in 2003, 25 years old and exuding Continental glamour. Soon, he started dating Anne Hathaway. He claimed that, through a Vatican connection, he had been delegated to develop some of the Catholic Church’s choicest North American properties, to help the church pay off bills associated with its sex-abuse scandals.
In early 2005, Follieri expressed interest in writing a generous check to Clinton’s foundation. A meeting with Band was arranged, but somehow the conversation turned from a potential contribution by Follieri to a potential investment by Yucaipa in Follieri’s venture. Burkle eventually agreed to put in as much as $105 million.
Follieri courted Band by playing on his taste for the high life. In Band’s early days in New York, a night out meant pizza and beer with old White House pals. Now, he was a regular at Cipriani and frequented A-list nightclubs like Bungalow 8. He wasn’t much of a drinker—he just liked being on the scene. For a while, he had dated supermodel Naomi Campbell. (“He’s never had any difficulty being able to attract quite good-looking women,” says his former colleague from the White House counsel’s office. “He just charmed her.”) He had been eager to obtain American Express’s invitation-only black card for high-rollers, says one person who’s been out on the town with him, and when he finally got one, he would slap it down on the table at group outings. He had been known to carry cash in rolls of $100 bills. He also had a canny method of landing a table at the most exclusive spots, says the former White House colleague. He would make a reservation for “President Clinton” and then arrive with his own entourage—and no Bill. The owner of one downtown restaurant eventually barred Band from its “love list” for pulling this stunt one too many times. “[The owner] comes and says, ‘Fuck, Doug keeps making reservations under Clinton’s name, and half the time Doug shows up with his friends,’ ” says the former White House colleague. “They were like, life’s too short, and wouldn’t take his reservation anymore.”
By the time Follieri arrived in town, Band was seeing Lily Rafii, who was then in mergers and acquisitions at Morgan Stanley. Follieri invited the couple to dine with him and Hathaway at Cipriani, Nobu Fifty-Seven, and Koi, and introduced them to his Euro jet set. “Band was exposed to another universe,” says Melanie Bonvicino, a publicist who befriended Follieri and worked for him at times. “The cosmetics of it worked for everybody.”
With Band’s help, Follieri got meetings with, among others, Clinton himself, Burkle, and Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world, aboard Slim’s yacht in the Sea of Cortez. Slim declined to invest, but another introduction paid off: Through another Clinton contact, Keith Stein, Band hooked Follieri up with Michael Cooper, the head of Toronto-based Dundee Realty Corporation, who kicked in $6 million.
After Cooper invested, Follieri wired $400,000 to one of Band’s SGRD partnerships. Band has said that the money was a finder’s fee that he split with Stein for helping make the introduction and that he only accepted it at Follieri’s insistence. (Stein and Cooper declined to comment.) But March 2006 e-mails show Band seeking the payment from Follieri in business-like fashion. The typo-filled messages also indicate that Follieri viewed it as compensation for Band’s assistance in netting an investment from Slim.
On March 11, Follieri wrote Band: “Tonight I have a boring dinner with the foundation of the queen of Sweden.” Band replied: “Ouch. Going to budakan at 9. Come when your done. In meatpacking district.” On March 22, Band sent a “bill for consulting services for the amount of $400,000.00” to Follieri’s Channel Islands–based subsidiary. The next day, Follieri replied: “The transfer it is done, do you think I call Carlos son in law?” On March 28, Band wrote: “My bank never received the wire.” Follieri’s reply: “I going to call our bank now, end I let you know.”
At the 2006 CGI summit, Clinton announced that Follieri would fund an effort to provide Hepatitis A vaccines to 10,000 Honduran children and a “$50 million commitment to provide free prescription-drug cards to needy Americans.” Neither donation was fulfilled before Follieri’s charade unraveled. In early 2007, Yucaipa sued him for misappropriating $1.3 million of its investment for his personal use. The money had been spent on, among other things, a $37,000-per-month apartment and a $107,000 chartered jet to join the Clintons at Oscar de la Renta’s Dominican Republic estate. “Everyone kept saying, ‘How did he get through to Clinton?’ ” says Don Onyschuk, the vice-chancellor of the Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of Toronto, which was drawn into the Dundee deal. “It was through Doug Band and the pledge made to the foundation.”
Band has said that the Church vouched for Follieri, which its officials have denied. Band has also said he returned the payment from Follieri to Cooper. But he only did so around June 2007, several months after Yucaipa filed its lawsuit and about the same time that Il Sole 2 Ore started calling. In the end, Follieri settled with Yucaipa, but in 2008, federal prosecutors charged him with fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. He pled guilty a few months later, forfeited $2.44 million, and was sentenced to federal prison in Pennsylvania. (Follieri, who was released in May, did not respond to a request to comment.)
Follieri had ties not only with Bill Clinton, but also Paul Manafort and Rick Davis. Rick Davis was Manafort's partner and No Name's campaign manager.
Check this out-
The McCain-Follieri Love Boat
What are we to make of a straight-talking maverick who spends his 70th birthday on the yacht of an A-list con man?
John McCain has been hammering rival Barack Obama for being little more than a vapid "celebrity" and "elitist." But The Nation has obtained a photo revealing just how star-struck a straight-talking maverick can become when offered the chance to celebrate his birthday aboard a yacht filled with celebrities–even if one of those celebrity types turns out to be an A-list con man.
The photograph substantiates reports that in late August, 2006, McCain celebrated his 70th birthday aboard a yacht, the Celine Ashley, rented by A-list con man Raffaello Follieri and his then-movie star girlfriend Anne Hathaway. In the current edition of Vanity Fair, Michael Schnayerson reported that Follieri rented the Celine Ashley for the month of August 2006. Montenegro’s leading daily newspaper, Vijesti, earlier reported that during McCain’s visit in 2006 he celebrated with birthday cocktails and sweets aboard the Celine Ashley yacht.
In the photograph, taken in Montenegro at the end of August, McCain is shown boarding the yacht ramp towards the smiling Follieri and Hathaway. Just ahead of McCain and shaking hands with Follieri appears to be Rick Davis–McCain’s top aide and now co-manager of his campaign, who accompanied him on the trip and advised the government of Montenegro.
A few months after McCain’s yacht party, Follieri strengthened his ties to McCain’s orbit by retaining Rick Davis’s well-connected Washington lobbying firm, Davis Manafort, and offering Davis both an investment deal and help in securing the Catholic vote for McCain’s presidential bid.
Follieri, who posed as Vatican chief financial officer in order to win friends and investments, pleaded guilty Wednesday in a Manhattan district court to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, eight counts of wire fraud and five counts of money laundering. As part of the plea, Follieri admitted to misappropriating at least $2.4 million of investor money and redirecting it to foreign personal bank accounts that were disguised as business accounts.
At the time he met McCain, Follieri was adept at collecting friends in powerful places and using those connections to attract investments in projects which later turned out to be bogus. His ties to Bill Clinton and his entourage have been well-documented; the charismatic Follieri, whom Vanity Fair has likened to an ambitious nineteenth-century protagonist from a Balzac novel, ingratiated himself to President Clinton and aides by posing as a mega-donor to the Clinton Global Initiative. He also formed an investment partnership with California business mogul and Clinton donor Ron Burkle to develop surplus real estate properties owned by the Catholic Church, which Follieri claimed to represent. Burkle later sued Follieri for $1.3 million in misappropriated funds.
Yet Follieri’s ties to McCain’s orbit have been largely overlooked by the media. Follieri first met McCain when the Arizona Senator visited Montenegro from August 29-31 as part of a Congressional delegation that included Republican senators Lindsay Graham, Richard Burr, Saxby Chambliss, Mel Martinez and John Sununu. [We’ll have more on what else McCain was doing in Montenegro in a forthcoming article in the print edition of The Nation.]
What, exactly, was McCain doing aboard Follieri’s yacht? Or put another way, was this McCain’s 70th birthday wish–to spend an evening floating on the Adriatic with one of Hollywood’s top actresses and her smooth-talking Italian beau?
An even bigger mystery is how Follieri’s boat came to be docked in Montenegro on McCain’s birthday. According to a journalist in Montenegro, the yacht had been anchored there for several days before McCain’s arrival, and only sailed away after McCain boarded. According to Vijesti, locals were told that McCain was meeting "friends from Florida" on the yacht.
McCain aides later confirmed the encounter with Follieri, but said it was "entirely social and nothing came of it." Follieri, they told the New York Daily News, was just a "passing acquaintance." (Though the McCain campaign promise to comment on the encounter, it did not respond to The Nation‘s request by the time this article was published.)
It must not have seemed that way to Follieri. According to the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, in January 2007 Follieri sent Rick Davis a packet of information on his companies Follieri Capital and Follieri Media, apparently hoping to get financing from Pegasus Capital Advisors, a hedge fund in Connecticut that Davis represented. "Follieri’s proposal to Davis had two dimensions to it–first, as an investment opportunity for Davis’s fund; but secondly, there was the political dimension, in which Follieri offered to help deliver Catholic votes to McCain," said Claudio Gatti, a reporter for Il Sole 24 Ore, who investigated Follieri for eighteen months.
In February 2007, according to a recent article in the New York Daily News, Follieri retained Davis’s lobbying firm, Davis Manafort. According to the paper, "on Feb. 27, 2007, Davis Manafort partner Rick Gates signed a confidentiality agreement drafted by the Follieri Group. In the contract…Gates agreed not to disclose any information about Follieri’s deal to get Clinton pal Ron Burkle to buy Catholic Church properties." (Gates did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
Two months later, Burkle sued Follieri, who later repaid the $1.3 million owed to Burkle’s Yucaipa Funds. That fall, the Wall Street Journal exposed Follieri’s life as a high-society con man. In June of this year, Follieri was finally arrested and charged. Following his guilty plea this week, Follieri now faces up to five years and three months in jail.
Raffaello Follieri became the fall guy for any accusations against the Catholic Church in the 2007-2008 US housing market collapse. He had links to both Democrats and RINOs, which ensured bipartisan cooperation.
But what happened after the bottom fell out of the real estate market?
The majority of the Roman Catholic dioceses which took out those non-recourse loans from Irish banks declared bankruptcy.
It's worth noting Peter Sutherland had strong ties to and likely influenced the Irish banks to issue those loans in the first place, but, of course, I have no way of proving that.
The fact these were non-recourse loans meant the dioceses did not have to pay them back. They merely had to turn over the real estate they had put up for collateral, which was now worth pennies on the dollar.
So what happened to these Irish banks? They were essentially left on the hook to pay back US victims of Roman Catholic pedophile priests? But wait...
U.S. Bailout Funds Saved European Banks -- Without Much Transatlantic Reciprocity
Doug Band: Is this the man who could bring down Hillary Clinton?
The most embarrassing association of all was Raffaello Follieri. The saga of the Italian striver who duped the Clintons has been unspooled by the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, The Wall Street Journal, and Vanity Fair. But if anything, Band’s role in the affair has been understated, and it offers an illuminating study in the art of relationship leverage. Follieri descended on New York in 2003, 25 years old and exuding Continental glamour. Soon, he started dating Anne Hathaway. He claimed that, through a Vatican connection, he had been delegated to develop some of the Catholic Church’s choicest North American properties, to help the church pay off bills associated with its sex-abuse scandals.
In early 2005, Follieri expressed interest in writing a generous check to Clinton’s foundation. A meeting with Band was arranged, but somehow the conversation turned from a potential contribution by Follieri to a potential investment by Yucaipa in Follieri’s venture. Burkle eventually agreed to put in as much as $105 million.
Follieri courted Band by playing on his taste for the high life. In Band’s early days in New York, a night out meant pizza and beer with old White House pals. Now, he was a regular at Cipriani and frequented A-list nightclubs like Bungalow 8. He wasn’t much of a drinker—he just liked being on the scene. For a while, he had dated supermodel Naomi Campbell. (“He’s never had any difficulty being able to attract quite good-looking women,” says his former colleague from the White House counsel’s office. “He just charmed her.”) He had been eager to obtain American Express’s invitation-only black card for high-rollers, says one person who’s been out on the town with him, and when he finally got one, he would slap it down on the table at group outings. He had been known to carry cash in rolls of $100 bills. He also had a canny method of landing a table at the most exclusive spots, says the former White House colleague. He would make a reservation for “President Clinton” and then arrive with his own entourage—and no Bill. The owner of one downtown restaurant eventually barred Band from its “love list” for pulling this stunt one too many times. “[The owner] comes and says, ‘Fuck, Doug keeps making reservations under Clinton’s name, and half the time Doug shows up with his friends,’ ” says the former White House colleague. “They were like, life’s too short, and wouldn’t take his reservation anymore.”
By the time Follieri arrived in town, Band was seeing Lily Rafii, who was then in mergers and acquisitions at Morgan Stanley. Follieri invited the couple to dine with him and Hathaway at Cipriani, Nobu Fifty-Seven, and Koi, and introduced them to his Euro jet set. “Band was exposed to another universe,” says Melanie Bonvicino, a publicist who befriended Follieri and worked for him at times. “The cosmetics of it worked for everybody.”
With Band’s help, Follieri got meetings with, among others, Clinton himself, Burkle, and Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world, aboard Slim’s yacht in the Sea of Cortez. Slim declined to invest, but another introduction paid off: Through another Clinton contact, Keith Stein, Band hooked Follieri up with Michael Cooper, the head of Toronto-based Dundee Realty Corporation, who kicked in $6 million.
After Cooper invested, Follieri wired $400,000 to one of Band’s SGRD partnerships. Band has said that the money was a finder’s fee that he split with Stein for helping make the introduction and that he only accepted it at Follieri’s insistence. (Stein and Cooper declined to comment.) But March 2006 e-mails show Band seeking the payment from Follieri in business-like fashion. The typo-filled messages also indicate that Follieri viewed it as compensation for Band’s assistance in netting an investment from Slim.
On March 11, Follieri wrote Band: “Tonight I have a boring dinner with the foundation of the queen of Sweden.” Band replied: “Ouch. Going to budakan at 9. Come when your done. In meatpacking district.” On March 22, Band sent a “bill for consulting services for the amount of $400,000.00” to Follieri’s Channel Islands–based subsidiary. The next day, Follieri replied: “The transfer it is done, do you think I call Carlos son in law?” On March 28, Band wrote: “My bank never received the wire.” Follieri’s reply: “I going to call our bank now, end I let you know.”
At the 2006 CGI summit, Clinton announced that Follieri would fund an effort to provide Hepatitis A vaccines to 10,000 Honduran children and a “$50 million commitment to provide free prescription-drug cards to needy Americans.” Neither donation was fulfilled before Follieri’s charade unraveled. In early 2007, Yucaipa sued him for misappropriating $1.3 million of its investment for his personal use. The money had been spent on, among other things, a $37,000-per-month apartment and a $107,000 chartered jet to join the Clintons at Oscar de la Renta’s Dominican Republic estate. “Everyone kept saying, ‘How did he get through to Clinton?’ ” says Don Onyschuk, the vice-chancellor of the Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of Toronto, which was drawn into the Dundee deal. “It was through Doug Band and the pledge made to the foundation.”
Band has said that the Church vouched for Follieri, which its officials have denied. Band has also said he returned the payment from Follieri to Cooper. But he only did so around June 2007, several months after Yucaipa filed its lawsuit and about the same time that Il Sole 2 Ore started calling. In the end, Follieri settled with Yucaipa, but in 2008, federal prosecutors charged him with fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. He pled guilty a few months later, forfeited $2.44 million, and was sentenced to federal prison in Pennsylvania. (Follieri, who was released in May, did not respond to a request to comment.)
https://archive.ph/TGEMy
Follieri had ties not only with Bill Clinton, but also Paul Manafort and Rick Davis. Rick Davis was Manafort's partner and No Name's campaign manager.
Check this out-
The McCain-Follieri Love Boat
What are we to make of a straight-talking maverick who spends his 70th birthday on the yacht of an A-list con man?
John McCain has been hammering rival Barack Obama for being little more than a vapid "celebrity" and "elitist." But The Nation has obtained a photo revealing just how star-struck a straight-talking maverick can become when offered the chance to celebrate his birthday aboard a yacht filled with celebrities–even if one of those celebrity types turns out to be an A-list con man.
The photograph substantiates reports that in late August, 2006, McCain celebrated his 70th birthday aboard a yacht, the Celine Ashley, rented by A-list con man Raffaello Follieri and his then-movie star girlfriend Anne Hathaway. In the current edition of Vanity Fair, Michael Schnayerson reported that Follieri rented the Celine Ashley for the month of August 2006. Montenegro’s leading daily newspaper, Vijesti, earlier reported that during McCain’s visit in 2006 he celebrated with birthday cocktails and sweets aboard the Celine Ashley yacht.
In the photograph, taken in Montenegro at the end of August, McCain is shown boarding the yacht ramp towards the smiling Follieri and Hathaway. Just ahead of McCain and shaking hands with Follieri appears to be Rick Davis–McCain’s top aide and now co-manager of his campaign, who accompanied him on the trip and advised the government of Montenegro.
A few months after McCain’s yacht party, Follieri strengthened his ties to McCain’s orbit by retaining Rick Davis’s well-connected Washington lobbying firm, Davis Manafort, and offering Davis both an investment deal and help in securing the Catholic vote for McCain’s presidential bid.
Follieri, who posed as Vatican chief financial officer in order to win friends and investments, pleaded guilty Wednesday in a Manhattan district court to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, eight counts of wire fraud and five counts of money laundering. As part of the plea, Follieri admitted to misappropriating at least $2.4 million of investor money and redirecting it to foreign personal bank accounts that were disguised as business accounts.
At the time he met McCain, Follieri was adept at collecting friends in powerful places and using those connections to attract investments in projects which later turned out to be bogus. His ties to Bill Clinton and his entourage have been well-documented; the charismatic Follieri, whom Vanity Fair has likened to an ambitious nineteenth-century protagonist from a Balzac novel, ingratiated himself to President Clinton and aides by posing as a mega-donor to the Clinton Global Initiative. He also formed an investment partnership with California business mogul and Clinton donor Ron Burkle to develop surplus real estate properties owned by the Catholic Church, which Follieri claimed to represent. Burkle later sued Follieri for $1.3 million in misappropriated funds.
Yet Follieri’s ties to McCain’s orbit have been largely overlooked by the media. Follieri first met McCain when the Arizona Senator visited Montenegro from August 29-31 as part of a Congressional delegation that included Republican senators Lindsay Graham, Richard Burr, Saxby Chambliss, Mel Martinez and John Sununu. [We’ll have more on what else McCain was doing in Montenegro in a forthcoming article in the print edition of The Nation.]
What, exactly, was McCain doing aboard Follieri’s yacht? Or put another way, was this McCain’s 70th birthday wish–to spend an evening floating on the Adriatic with one of Hollywood’s top actresses and her smooth-talking Italian beau?
An even bigger mystery is how Follieri’s boat came to be docked in Montenegro on McCain’s birthday. According to a journalist in Montenegro, the yacht had been anchored there for several days before McCain’s arrival, and only sailed away after McCain boarded. According to Vijesti, locals were told that McCain was meeting "friends from Florida" on the yacht.
McCain aides later confirmed the encounter with Follieri, but said it was "entirely social and nothing came of it." Follieri, they told the New York Daily News, was just a "passing acquaintance." (Though the McCain campaign promise to comment on the encounter, it did not respond to The Nation‘s request by the time this article was published.)
It must not have seemed that way to Follieri. According to the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, in January 2007 Follieri sent Rick Davis a packet of information on his companies Follieri Capital and Follieri Media, apparently hoping to get financing from Pegasus Capital Advisors, a hedge fund in Connecticut that Davis represented. "Follieri’s proposal to Davis had two dimensions to it–first, as an investment opportunity for Davis’s fund; but secondly, there was the political dimension, in which Follieri offered to help deliver Catholic votes to McCain," said Claudio Gatti, a reporter for Il Sole 24 Ore, who investigated Follieri for eighteen months.
In February 2007, according to a recent article in the New York Daily News, Follieri retained Davis’s lobbying firm, Davis Manafort. According to the paper, "on Feb. 27, 2007, Davis Manafort partner Rick Gates signed a confidentiality agreement drafted by the Follieri Group. In the contract…Gates agreed not to disclose any information about Follieri’s deal to get Clinton pal Ron Burkle to buy Catholic Church properties." (Gates did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
Two months later, Burkle sued Follieri, who later repaid the $1.3 million owed to Burkle’s Yucaipa Funds. That fall, the Wall Street Journal exposed Follieri’s life as a high-society con man. In June of this year, Follieri was finally arrested and charged. Following his guilty plea this week, Follieri now faces up to five years and three months in jail.
https://archive.ph/yuV1e
Part 3 below.
Raffaello Follieri became the fall guy for any accusations against the Catholic Church in the 2007-2008 US housing market collapse. He had links to both Democrats and RINOs, which ensured bipartisan cooperation.
But what happened after the bottom fell out of the real estate market?
The majority of the Roman Catholic dioceses which took out those non-recourse loans from Irish banks declared bankruptcy.
It's worth noting Peter Sutherland had strong ties to and likely influenced the Irish banks to issue those loans in the first place, but, of course, I have no way of proving that.
The fact these were non-recourse loans meant the dioceses did not have to pay them back. They merely had to turn over the real estate they had put up for collateral, which was now worth pennies on the dollar.
So what happened to these Irish banks? They were essentially left on the hook to pay back US victims of Roman Catholic pedophile priests? But wait...
U.S. Bailout Funds Saved European Banks -- Without Much Transatlantic Reciprocity
https://www.europeaninstitute.org/index.php/ei-blog/106-august-2010/1119-us-bailout-funds-saved-european-banks-without-much-transatlantic-reciprocity
Archived link - https://archive.ph/GNrQB
Nope. the US taxpayers funded the majority of those payouts...