A handwritten note

Discussion in 'Justice for JonBenet Discussion - Public Forum' started by koldkase, Feb 22, 2006.

  1. koldkase

    koldkase FFJ Senior Member

    This is only indirectly related to this case, but the forum is slow and lord knows I'm about dried up with things to say on this case, as well, so I thought it might interest some of you.

    Here's a link to a handwritten note. It's actually a suicide note written by a man named Baxter associated with the Enron bankruptcy. The two top men who ran that company into the ground are on trial now in Texas, Ken Lay and Jeffry Skilling, if you don't know. I've been reading a book about Enron's downfall for about two months, but it's so complicated, I have to read a little a day, otherwise, I get confused with the complex financial descriptions and the cast of thousands....

    But in reading a news site reporting on the trial, I found a copy of this note. It was written by one of the executives from Enron, Baxter, who shot himself one fine day after the jig was up and indictments were coming down the pike. He left a wife and kids, so it's sad. But you cannot believe the level of greed and arrogance these people displayed, destroying the entire life savings of hard working people to make themselves not rich, but filthy rich. Enron executives did so by basically creating absurdly complex and barely legal, and sometimes not legal, financial deals of buying and selling stock, companies, commodities, and assets back and forth and back and forth and lying and cheating and lying and lying and lying. For over a decade. Heck, Enron even sold their DEBT. Oh, yeah they did. They were practically printing money. Do you have ANY IDEA how many obscenely rich people and politicians saw all, knew all, and helped them on their way--for a piece of the deal? OH YEAH, THEY DID!

    I feel like a naked babe in the woods, paying my little bills on time like a fool....


    But I digress. Here is the suicide note Baxter left for his family that fine day he decided he wasn't going to pay for what he'd done, just let his family hold it for him. Coward.

    Oops. I digress again. So this handwritten note just reminded me of what a RANDOM HANDWRITING SAMPLE might look like. Because what the RST doesn't seem to get, or doesn't WANT to get, is that looking at Patsy's handwriting sample of the ransom note, it's SO SIMILAR IN SO MANY WAYS to the ransom note, it's amazing that anyone could even give it a quick look and not see it merits a closer comparison.

    And since we have the five star analysis of Cherokee, it's a NO BRAINER: Patsy wrote the note.

    http://images.chron.com/content/news/photos/02/04/11/letter/letter2.jpg

    (OK, cllick on the note and it jumps up in size.)
     
  2. Elle

    Elle Member

    Thanks for this interesting post, KK. I remember the downfall of Enron. It was sad to read Clifford Baxter's last words to his family. It's amazing when people are put into these executive positions, and then blow it by thinking they can
    do better for themselves, by criminal acts, which they think they can cover up.

    Greed gets the better of them, but it's the thought of one person making the first move, and before you know it he/she has managed to rope in more colleagues. This is what intrigues me. The chain reaction of becoming millionaires, rather than for the good of the company who trusted them with this executive position n the first place.
     
  3. Greenleaf

    Greenleaf FFJ Senior Member

    Poor Cliff!

    Sob, sob. Poor Cliff.

    He mentions himself six times; i.e., including "I, myself and me."

    He mentions "you" only twice.

    He is such an arrogrant wimp.
    His "Great pride is gone." Boohoo.

    "The pain overwhelming."

    Yea, HIS pain.

    Damn! He is so Ramsey-like.
    :devil:
    Goodbye, poor, poor, poor Cliff.
    No doubt, Mr. Devil has a special place reserved for the likes of you.
    Maybe it will be near the Ramsey cave. Wouldn't that be a hoot?

    GL
    :leaf:
    Hello there, KK, and thanks for that tear-jerker post. LOL.
     
  4. Elle

    Elle Member

    Oh my, Greenleaf, did you fall out of bed this morning with a thump? :) He was still the children's father, but I know where you're coming from.
     
  5. Greenleaf

    Greenleaf FFJ Senior Member

    Elle 1

    Elle, I know that I'm a bit dense, but I do not understand. What do you mean, "He was still the children's father?"

    And, no, I did not fall out of bed with a "thump." I got up, as usual, and marched down the hallway to the bathroom where I fell with a thud. There is a difference, you know, between a thump and a thud. LOL.

    :leaf:
    GL
     
  6. Elle

    Elle Member

    I'm trying to squeeze some sympathy out of you, here, because I know you're such a nice sweet person. :)
     
  7. koldkase

    koldkase FFJ Senior Member

    Oh, sorry, Elle, maybe we're fresh out of sympathy for criminals whose families and victims have to live with their crimes while they bail out, one way or another.

    I actually wrote this long post about the facts of what these Enron crooks have really done, how many billions of dollars of hard working people's money they straight out lied and cheated and deceived to steal, and then because my new keyboard's keys are smaller than my old one, I hit a stroke that wiped it all out.

    If you're looking for a post full of kindness, good thing I hit that key, too.

    Here's the thing, Elle. If any of them actually do a little time, and many WILL NOT, they and their families will always be filthy rich from all the money they stole, while many aged, retired persons and their families now struggle to live off of small pensions and social security because these Enron executives and their rich peers and politicians robbed thousands down to the last penny they had, put thousands out of work, and destroyed many formerly viable and healthy companies. All for money.

    Did I mention Enron was behind the California blackouts back at the first of this century, the one where people didn't have electricity at times? Enron orchestrated it to pump up prices. Oh, yeah they did. They took many companies in many industries and raped every single one, promising them the moon and giving them dirt. All the while, all they were doing was moving numbers around to cover up that they were insolvent and had been for a very long time. That's because the executives were taking all the cash for themselves and their partners in crime. OH, yeah they were.

    There was an old man on tv the other night, and he said he retired with somewhat over a million dollars he'd worked and saved all his life, investing in Enron because of their fraudulent representation of their stock value, propped up by a decade of convoluted and deliberately faked accounting records. This man said after Enron crashed into bankruptcy, his stock ended up valued at about 5 thousand dollars. And he now can't afford to drive to the county line, much less enjoy his retirement.

    But guess what, Elle? When the executives and their buds saw that Enron was going down, they actually locked in their stockholders'/employees' stocks so they couldn't sell them. Then THE EXECUTIVES SOLD THEIRS AND MADE A MINT BEFORE ANYONE ELSE COULD GET THEIR MONEY OUT. How soulless is that? These are the same men who had been robbing the company for YEARS, inflating salaries and bonuses and stock options for making deals that were not even risky, but completely DESIGNED TO LOSE MONEY FOR ENRON. Why? Because they had themselves set up with unimaginable conflicts of interest, running their own companies outside Enron which they created to buy and sell assets with Enron. The sole purpose of these private companies was buy loser Enron assets to hide Enron's losses at the end of the quarter, when the company stock value would be set by Wall Street based on what was on Enron's books as profits made that quarter. The upside for these Enron executive's own private companies, in which they would actually be negotiating with their own subordinates at Enron while representing THEIR PRIVATE COMPANIES in contract negotions, was that they knew Enron's financial problems and were actually in charge of BOTH ENRON'S DEAL MAKERS AND MAKING THE DEAL FOR THEIR COMPANIES. So they would commit Enron to more losses for the quick fix of making the quarterly losses of Enron disappear with the sale of an Enron losing asset to their own company, but with the agreement that Enron would buy it back in the near future, sometimes only a couple of months, AT A LOSS TO ENRON and a GAIN OF MILLIONS TO THE PRIVATE COMPANY. This mainly accomplished the Enron goal of having the Enron company stock falsely rated higher on Wall Street than its true value; so the price of the stock would rise because they had covered the asset's losses on the books and booked the sale as pure profite. So it looked like they'd made money. But they had agreed to actually lose more money for Enron when they bought the losing asset back in sometimes only a few months. In the meantime, the private companies owned by Enron's own executives would cut those same executives checks for millions upon millions from all the money they made RESELLING the loser asset back to Enron, because the deal was Enron would buy it back for however many millions more than it was worth and sold to the private company for.

    Here's a simple measure of how much they were robbing Enron with these deals: one Enron employee who invested less than $6,000 in the privately owned company of Enron executive Andy Fastow, got a check for over a million dollars for that investment...only weeks later, after Fastow's private company had bailed Enron out at the end of the quarter, buying a loser asset from Enron, which Enron then booked in its accounting records as a profiit of so many millions from the sale, rather than a loss which the asset originally had booked. The Enron stock met its Wall Street stock projections for the quarter and its stock gained in value. Then, as per the original deal, Enron bought back the same asset from Fastow's private company weeks later, at the amount agreed upon in the original deal, with a built in LOSS TO ENRON, because the asset was already a loser and nobody else would buy it, much less for MORE than Enron had sold it: the millions more Enron paid to buy it BACK only weeks/months after it was sold at a cheaper price went straight to Fastow's pocket and the pockets of his private company's investors. And they did these deals by the dozens.

    CONFLICT OF INTEREST. Fastow was an Enron executive negotiating deals AGAINST Enron with his private company. He was getting paid on both ends of the deal. And the top dogs, CFO Jeff Skilling and CEO Ken Lay, signed off on all this, totally aware of the conflict of interest, knowing full well they were deceiving the Enron Board of Directors, Wall Street, their investors, their employees, banks--you name it. When Enron finally collapsed from the load of debt held up by not much but a shell game of lies and bravado, the result was Enron stock fell to worthless.

    See what I mean by convoluted? Oh, I'm barely touching the tip of the iceberg. They may as well have been printing money. And the sad part is that their practices were so widespread in the company, with so many other companies involved, so many "friends of Enron" in on the deals, so many bankers and auditors and accountants and traders and government entities, all of whom turned their heads as long as the money landed in their hands, it's all so convoluted and impossible for even professionals in the business of international finance and marketing to even understand, and DELIBERATELY SO, that no jury will probably ever be able to grasp it. Like I said, I'm two months into a book on it, and I'm only half way through and wondering how anyone can figure the trail these jackals left.

    But do you think any of these MBA ivy league crooks give a rip? No, they do not. Believe me, none of them are giving it back. NONE. Skilling is actually trying to tell the jury Enron was in GOOD SHAPE when it went bankrupt! Go figure. The way Texas juries feel about rich people, I wouldn't be surprised if they give him a medal.

    If you want to see for yourself how greed and immorality was bred and rewarded at Enron, robbing millions of people, literally, then read The Smartest Guys in the Room.

    But I warn you, it will make you heartsick.

    And Cliff Baxter was up there at the top, picking every pocket he could along with the others, fighting every day for the opportunity to bleed every penny, frank, pound, and Euro dollar out of every unsuspecting Enron stockholder. It was an exercise of capitalism at its absolute worst case scenario. They were ruthless and without conscience and make no apologies. They awarded every luxury, bonus, and extravagance to the worst of the worst among them, admired and promoted the biggest thief among thieves, and everybody knew it, and nobody even pretended to care because they all wanted in on the deal.

    So...no, I'm not feeling any sympathy for these crooks. I'll save my sympathy for those victims who have to figure out how they're going to pay for their old age, if they'll have anything to leave for their families after a lifetime of honest work and savings robbed from them by people who still have tens of millions in banks waiting for them when they get out of a jail after a few months or years of more rest than they've had in a decade. Stealing on that level requires little sleep, so I'm sure they're just happy to rest finally and plan their long retirements in comfort and high style.

    OK, I"m going to post this and come back in a while to proof read, gotta' run, so please forgive typos. Typing as fast as I can here.... :idea:
     
    Last edited: Feb 23, 2006
  8. koldkase

    koldkase FFJ Senior Member

    Oh, and did I forget to mention that THEY BROKE THE LAW? They lied to defraud their stockholders, and they manipulated the books to defraud Wall Street. Against the law.

    Not that it matters. Because like the Ramseys and their Lockheed Martin mega defense company, Enron crooks have friends in very high places.
     
  9. Elle

    Elle Member

    Of course I know they're all the worst kind of crooks. KK. I was thinking only of the children. You were the one who mentioned "kids" therefore they have to be young, and it's sad for young children to lose their father that way. I'm not condoning what he did, for Gawd's sake!
     
  10. Greenleaf

    Greenleaf FFJ Senior Member

    Elle 1

    Yes, Elle, there is the question of the children. And, I do feel sorry for the children he left behind. However, I also think of all the children of all the people he hurt. Altogether, he left behind a wasteland of sadness.

    When I read his note to his wife, I was struck by the "me, myself and I" mode of his last known thoughts. There was no remorse or any expression of love for his wife or family. His obvious state of denial is what reminded me of the Ramsey's. I apologize if my post offended you. I was just letting off some steam.

    :leaf:
    GL
     
  11. FreeFalling

    FreeFalling Banned for Stupidity

    Thanks for the post on Enron, KK. You simplified it enough for me to actually begin to understand what happened. At this time in my life, I sometimes choose to just put some things on the back burner, rather than engage the brain energy to fully understand them.

    Do you think that after the first ten million or so secured by these crooks that it becomes a game just to see who can secure the most money or what? Ten million dollars is ENOUGH money, I would think. These demented idiots probably turn it into a competition among themselves just for the "fun" of it.

    I saw the interview with the man who had planned to travel and see America after retirement, too. He seemed almost broken himself thanks to these crooks. Hope Bubba pays every one of them a visit while they are resting behind bars.
     
  12. JustChillun

    JustChillun Member

    Bubba? And Cletus, and Tyrone, and Willie Wayne, and Tio Sancho.

    It's not worth my even reading about Enron. I don't care to know how the badness was orchestrated, just the "Bad man/Must Punish" mindset will do for me.

    Some things are better left alone.

    I haven't seen any ex-Enron bigwigs on the corner hawking the Chronicle or holding a sign during my travels through the Houston region. I have only noticed the signs under freeway overpasses which warn against consumption of alcohol on those premises.

    Meanwhile, on the ransom note, sometimes the obvious is just that...the obvious.

    As for the double "B" ramblings of one "I Know" (yeah, right), all I can say is that it is a true "internut", one of those that wants so much to be a part of an event for self aggrandizement for some deranged, nay, pathologic reason, that they concoct a fictitious pathway of self-involvement which becomes their own personal reality, although it lacks verity. Otro mentiroso.


    I just laughed when I saw that sh'bookie they were posting. I suppose next I'll see them on the FVZA, telling all how they crave blood and are nocturnal.
    It knows, all right. Terrell, Rusk, and Bedlam are full of "knowers", and Richard Illes knew it all, too.

    Can we not continue in our sanity and functionability without being accosted with reminders that persons on psychotropics do occasionally own computers?

    :nuts: :nuts: :nuts: :nuts: :nuts: :nuts: :nuts: :nuts: :nuts: :nuts:
     
  13. Elle

    Elle Member

    No,no, no! Greenleaf. I wasn't offended by you or anyone else. I was just drawn to the family and the suicide note, and thinking how awful it must be to be confronted with something like this in general. I don't take offence to anyone having a different point of view, Greenleaf. It was unbelievable what
    these Enron execs did. I know the story very well.
     
  14. koldkase

    koldkase FFJ Senior Member

    Sorry, Elle, I didn't mean to come off so bombastic. I didn't know if you knew about what Enron execs really did. I certainly didn't until I started reading the book I mentioned. I've been reading it for two months and it's very tough going. This was the first time I've written about it because it's so complex, it's hard to write about it for someone like me.

    I know there are victims enough to go around in this debacle.

    What has me shaking in my boots is that one of the "stories" of Enron's characteristic sham business dealings was with...DUBAI.

    Yeah, the same country now about to take over six of our major ports.

    I see the exact same tactics that Enron used to ram through lucrative deals...FOR THEM PERSONALLY, NOT FOR ENRON. Enron always lost, but the execs got HUGE bonuses for making deals, no matter if Enron lost tens of millions in the reality of actually following through for the length of the deal. Enron tried to build a power plant in Dubai in the late ninties and it went so badly, at the point I'm at in the book, it has so far ended up being just a lot of expensive facilities on site sitting unused for years. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent and no return for Enron. Or Dubai.

    Who PAID for this, for the bad Enron deal? The country of Dubai, the World Bank, etc. And who REALLY PAID for it? The poor people of that country who couldn't afford the darn energy bills ANYHOW!

    But the execs who worked on the deal and made all the mistakes: they got huge multi-million dollar bonuses up front. That's how Enron execs were rewarded. Long term losses were for Enron and the losing investers to pay for in the long haul.

    It's scary, what these people do and get rich doing and get away with because they know how to skirt the law.
     
    Last edited: Feb 24, 2006
  15. koldkase

    koldkase FFJ Senior Member

    You got it exactly right, FreeFalling. That was the whole thing. Jeff Skilling's entire management style was to bring in the brightest, most intelligent employees he could and then turn them loose, pitting them against each other to see which cut-throat came out on top. Enron had the worst possible employee evaluation set up one can imagine. It was ALL ABOUT THE MONEY. No ethics. No morals. The meanest one who could come up with the most money...WON. That meant bonuses, promotions, and bragging rights. They prided themselves on stomping on tried and true business conventions, rules, and guidelines. Their task as they saw it was to get AROUND every obstacle to make the deal, no matter who they burned in the process. All in the name of making the almighty buck. In that kind of competitive and unchecked business environment, it was inevitable that sooner or later, the biggest "stars" would find a way to subvert the law, even break it, to keep the shell game going.

    And the bottom line was they HAD to keep the shell game going, because once the actual assets of Enron met the debts of Enron...it was all over.

    That happened in 2001, and that's when it all came crashing down around the investors ears. But not those who screwed them to the wall. No, most of them have never looked back. Of the few who have actually been indicted, many pleaded guilty and got little time and a comparatively small financial penalty. Some were tried and ended up acquitted on most charges, with the jury hung on others. A few will spend a little time in jail or prison. We're talking a few years at best.

    I have said it before: where do I sign up to go to prison for a few years and reap $10 to $60 million for my troubles? I'll be there with bells on.

    But I could NEVER do what these people did to get there. That's the difference between the very rich and most of us. Conscience.
     
    Last edited: Feb 24, 2006
  16. koldkase

    koldkase FFJ Senior Member

    Well, I got all off on a tangent. Sorry. Like I said, every day for a long time I've been reading about this company and I guess it was all pent up.

    Anyhow, to get back to the relation to the Ramsey case, it struck me that if the actual ransom note writer were just some schmuck off the street, his handwriting style, form, spacing, etc., would not look anything like Patsy's, and vice versa. That Patsy's sample is so like the ransom note says it all: the odds of it being so similar to a complete stranger's handwriting are too remote, IMO.

    It's so absurd to keep making excuses about why PATSY'S WRITING CANNOT BE EXCLUDED AS WRITER OF THE NOTE based on Hunter's NON-EXISTENT HANDWRITING ANALYSIS SCALE of 4.5 for Patsy, 5 being EXCLUDED, made up by Hunter on the spur of the moment on LKL to make his limp point.

    Many handwriting analysts have stated THERE IS NO SUCH SCALE, for starters.

    Somehow, that never breaks through the RST's consciousness. Or they just ignore the facts to keep their spin going.
     
  17. Elle

    Elle Member

    Not to worry KK, Honestly, I was just thinking of the children being without their father, if they were young children. Yes, I know all about the Enron execs. My own husband was in management before he retired, my sons are up at the top too, so Enron was well discussed. It's hard for me to jump in, but I do ask them a lot of questions. :)
     
  18. Cherokee

    Cherokee FFJ Senior Member

    It's hard for me to understand that kind of moral void and the lack of empathy for others, but I know it exists. I also believe we would be devastated to know what goes on in the rarified air of the well-heeled and well-connected among us.

    Someday, I hope the whole Haddon-Hunter-Ramsey web is exposed so we can see how it all worked. I'm sure the six degrees of separation is so interconnected that we'll need an indexed reference manual just to follow the trail.

    Maybe we could turn it into a board game, or Bob could design a computer game to go with it. Amoralopoly. Who Wants To Be a FREE Millionaire? BoulderDash. Gin Ramsey. CLUE - The Ramsey Edition ... with Patsy as Miss Scarlett. The possibilities are endless.
     
  19. Elle

    Elle Member

    Cherokee,
    I made a similar suggestion relating to some kind of computer plan/game - reenactment deal, to Bob a few posts back. He just ignored me and went to Houston. :) Maybe he might read your post today. Fingers crossed. :)
    Enjoying your posts!

    Seriously, I doubt anyone would be allowed to produce anything close to this case. The RST would be after us. :)
     
  20. Cherokee

    Cherokee FFJ Senior Member

    Oh sorry, Elle, I didn't mean to steal your thunder. :shutup:

    The past couple of weeks I've barely had time to check in and read, so I might have missed something in my scanning. I've been up to my eyeballs in preparations for my parent's 50th anniversary celebration ... plus, Zotto is due to arrive soon, so I've been busier than a funeral fan in July. (I just realized that particular saying doesn't work for those who live in the Southern Hemisphere. :))
     
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