When you hear “fugitive from the feds for 3 years,” you picture a guy in a Third World country living under an assumed name.
This nigga was just hanging out in a Seattle suburb.
A former CNBC financial pundit and CEO-turned-fugitive accused of defrauding millions from his investors following a failed “bet against” the US economy in 2020 has been nabbed after being on the run for nearly three years.
James Arthur McDonald Jr., 52, was arrested by the FBI in Port Orchard, Wash., on Saturday and will be extradited back to California to stand trial “in the coming weeks” for his alleged crimes, according to the United States Department of Justice.
McDonald had been a fugitive since November 2021 after he failed to appear before the United States Securities and Exchange Commission to testify regarding accusations of defrauding investors.
He was the former CEO and chief investment officer for two Los Angeles financial companies: Hercules Investments LLC and Index Strategy Advisors Inc.
Along with his companies, McDonald “frequently appeared as an analyst on the CNBC financial television news network,” the DOJ reported.
…
In 2022, while on the lam, a United States District Judge found McDonald liable for $3,810,346, representing his net profits gained because of the alleged conduct, according to the SEC.
…
If found guilty, the alleged con artist could face up to 20 years in federal prison for each securities fraud and wire fraud count, 10 years for each count related to using investor funds for his benefit, and five years for one investment adviser fraud.
I could talk about the guy being black or whatever it is he did. But the whole notion of “just dip out and chill in Seattle” when wanted on what are apparently serious federal fraud charges is what seems a lot more interesting here.
The article doesn’t say how he was caught, but it was presumably by doing something obviously retarded.
It seems like something has changed here.
I remember liking the film Alpha Dog (2006), though I think it was pretty dark (so I don’t want to recommend it – people shouldn’t really watch depressing films). It has middle-class white kids doing gangster shit, which, for whatever reason, doesn’t happen in films anymore.
Anyway, it was based on a true story where a drug dealer who was owed money kidnapped and ended up killing the brother of the Jew who owed him money.
The real guy the film was based on, Jesse James Hollywood (that was his real name, lol), fled to Brazil and lived under an assumed name in a really complicated way for five years before the feds picked him up in 2005 and put him in prison forever. Killing someone over a drug deal is a lot, lot less important to the feds than a multimillion dollar financial fraud case, and hiding out in Brazil is a lot more serious than just chilling in Seattle.
I’m also going to go so far as to say that Hollywood was probably a lot more careful in the ways he contacted his family than this black guy would have been. (Maybe I’m wrong and this nigga was a straight-up mastermind. It seems unlikely that a mastermind wouldn’t flee the country, however.)
I don’t know if this means anything. I guess you could bring the racial hierarchy element in – the murder victim was a Jew, his killer white, and the financial fraud guy above is black. But it would still seem to imply that these fed agencies have become less serious.
Probably, a lot of resources have been transferred from domestic law enforcement to these international spy/war organizations.
But it’s just really wild to me that this nigga was just chilling in Seattle for three years.