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Let’s start the week off with a brand new asshat, U.S. Attorney Timothy Morrison, from the Indiana Attorney General’s Office. You might think with my ranting about AIG bonus witch-hunts and such that Mr. Morrison might be guilty of making some grandstanding proclamations about nefarious evildoers who, somehow, have failed to commit an actual crime. Au contraire. In this case, as posted up at Writer Beware, we have the precise opposite. We have a set of rather ugly scammers, who have ripped people off for millions, against whom the Indiana Attorney General’s Office has already filed suit to reclaim civil damages for the authors that got ripped off, a somewhat Pyrrhic victory as the principals have filed for bankruptcy and there are no assets left to be had.
To give you some idea what these low-rent Bernie Madoffs were up to, I’ll quote activist Bonnie Kaye from the e-mail she sent to Writer Beware:
The fraudulence of Airleaf went way beyond book publishing; blatant scams included promises to sell books in Europe on trips that were never taken; selling a cruise to authors that was never booked nor the money returned; selling magazine reviews that were never sent to the magazines; promising to make movies out of books but never turning them into films; and continuing to collect royalties (though not pay them to authors) from Internet distributors such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble long after Airleaf was shut down. This is just a small sample of Airleaf’s efforts to steal money from authors. Your readers can read the list of charges, and some of the stories of our victims, at my website at www.AirleafVictims.com.
What, you might ask, is the problem? The problem is that criminal charges, while obviously warranted (I mean, if these guys were in the finance sector someone would be calling to hang them with piano wire) are not very high on the priority list up at the Indiana AG’s office. Apparently Mr. Morrison has better things to do then say, actually pursue criminal charges against, well, criminals. I guess we know the drill huh? Case just ain’t sexy enough, no one will cover it. More bang for the buck if you go after some celebrity, politician, or high-profile CEO, I mean, if it ain’t going to make CNN what’s the point of doing your job. Am I right?
