Mariah Blake digs deep into the mega-crimes of Tom Petters and his political connections:
At the time, the Petters Ponzi scheme—which, all told, brought in more than $36 billion—was vastly larger than any known Ponzi scheme in U.S. history (although it was soon eclipsed by Bernie Madoff’s). … The fallout from the scam moved through the Twin Cities like a slow-motion tsunami.
Businesses went bankrupt. Charities slashed staff and walked away from half-built offices. Among them was Minnesota Teen Challenge, which lost $5.7 million and had to lay off 22 employees. Countless people also lost their homes or watched their retirement savings dry up. The tight-knit evangelical circles in which Vennes moved were among the most devastated. "If only a few had gotten hit, the faith community could have stepped in to help them," explains Carolyn Anderson, the attorney representing evangelical investors. "But everybody got hit. The safety net was ripped out."
One of the top fundraisers for the Ponzi scheme, Frank Vennes, a convicted money launderer and cocaine dealer turned evangelical Christian, was a major donor to Michele Bachmann. Minnesota blogger Karl Bremer has more on the Bachmann connection. Scott Lemieux zooms out:
Among many other things, the Petters tale is an object lesson of the value inherent in being a responsible looking white guy in a suit. While Maddoff’s Ponzi scheme at least grew out of a legitimate operation, Petters was never anything but a con artist. And in the beginning, not a very sophisticated one — his basic strategy was to sell things he didn’t own and keep the money. And, yet he was able to get away with a more elaborate and lucrative fraud for more than two decades, while accruing many of the markers of social respectability up to and including many powerful friends. There are too many examples of our fundamental regulatory failures to count, but this one is a doozy.
The Dish 