All Blog Posts from Crimesider

NEW YORK - Two former Bear Stearns hedge-fund managers have been acquitted of lying to investors.

The case centered on the implosion of the subprime mortgage market, and is a government defeat in the first attempt to hold Wall Street criminally accountable for the housing market meltdown.

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MIAMI - Lured by easier money and shorter prison sentences, Mafia figures and other violent criminals are increasingly moving into fraud involving the government's Medicare health insurance program for the elderly.

Around the U.S., federal investigators have been threatened, an informant's body was found riddled with bullets, and a woman was discovered dead in a pharmacy under investigation, her throat slit with a piece of broken toilet seat.

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HOUSTON - Four Hurricane Katrina evacuees are charged with wrongfully obtaining federal rental assistance after buying new homes financed by the "Oprah's Angel Network" charity, authorities announced Wednesday.

"The response to natural disasters brings out the best and worst in people," U.S. Attorney Tim Johnson said in a statement. "Generous acts of charity are tarnished by those who despite the generosity of others, fraudulently make claims for government relief funds."

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DALLAS - The jig might be up for Texas billionaire R. Allen Stanford, who has been under investigation for a multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme centered around certificates of deposits.

A phalanx of black SUVs filled with FBI agents was waiting outside his Virginia residence Thursday, according to his attorney, Dick DeGuerin.

“He walked out and asked if they had a warrant,” DeGuerin said. He said Stanford told them to arrest him if they had a warrant and said if they didn't he would go back to Houston Friday to turn himself in. Stanford surrendered, said DeGuerin.

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Video Courtesy of New York Daily News

NEW YORK - Seventy-seven-year-old Irene Prusik died in 2003. But earlier this year, surveillance video caught her walking into a New York Department of Motor Vehicles office to renew her driver's license.

The elderly woman, wearing a red cardigan and lipstick, was in fact her 49-year-old-son, Thomas Prusik-Parkin, impersonating her as part of a daring fraud scheme that netted $117,000 in social security payments and rent subsidies, according to Kings County District Attorney Charles J. Hynes.

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