Merrill Lynch Gives Larry Another Break

Is it karma, a charmed life, or just amazingly ruthless power wielding that has put Larry Silverstein back in the perfect position to protect his interests? And with plenty of extra time to get all his balls lined up. Here's the news from Crain's Business News:

Merrill Lynch renews talks for move to WTC
Merrill reopened talks with developer Larry Silverstein to move into Tower 3; Mr. Silverstein received a six-month extension to complete the tower by August 2012.
May 22. 2008 10:57AM By: Theresa Agovino
Merrill Lynch & Co. is negotiating with developer Larry Silverstein to move into one of the office towers to be built on the World Trade Center site. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on Thursday paved the way for talks to continue when it voted to grant Mr. Silverstein a six-month extension so he can delay completing construction of the building, known as Tower 3, until August 2012. Mr. Silverstein requested the extension so he will have time to redesign the building to accommodate the large trading floor Merrill Lynch requires. Under an agreement Mr. Silverstein reached in 2006 with the site’s landlord, the Port Authority, he is supposed to deliver the completed buildings by February 2012.
“While we fully expect to complete World Trade Tower 3 in 2012, the six-month schedule adjustments approved today by the Port Authority clearly makes sense,” said World Trade Center Properties president Jano Lieber in a statement. “This extension gives us the time to design and construct a modified building foundation that could accommodate Merrill’s specialized requirements.”
If Merrill Lynch opts to move to Tower 3 it would be an enormous boost for the site, which has yet to attract many private sector tenants. Merrill Lynch is currently located at the World Financial Center, where its lease expires in 2013. A spokeswoman for Brookfield Properties, which owns the World Financial Center, says it is still negotiating a five-year extension with Merrill.
Last year, Merrill Lynch came very close to signing a deal to move its headquarters to the site of the Hotel Pennsylvania in midtown. However, the plan was shelved after its major proponent, former Chief Executive Stanley O’Neal, left the firm amid massive losses stemming from the credit crunch.

http://www.crainsnewyork.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080522/FREE/547438548/1048/information/

I wonder how much tax money will be "forgiven" for Larry to pull this swift move? The rich get richer...

Mike & Eliot

The Attorneys General ... and then some.
Maybe the day will come when we'll know if or what went on between these two, other than criss-crossing the halls of New York [in]Justice but for now, let's just check out some visuals.
Mukasey in 3/4 left. I like the shadow over his left side.

Michael Mukasey — federal judge in New York; presided over 1993 WTC bombing case; active in 9-11 cases, including Larry Silverstein’s insurance claims; oversaw the detained material witnesses of 9-11, including five dancing Israeli Mossad agents apprehended by FBI; recently appointed by Bush to be the next Attorney General; radical Zionist of Russian Jewish parentage; “dual citizen” of US and Israel.
http://www.whodidit.org/cocon.html




Here's Spitzer in black and white. Flawed skin but set jaw. No wrinkles on this dude's face.

What does it mean? Time will tell. Or not.

The Many Sides of Eliot Spitzer

First, Scott Horton's post in today's The New Republic:
Spitz Out, by Scott Horton
Was the investigation of Eliot Spitzer politically motivated?
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
On Monday a friend gave me a copy of a memorandum (pdf) that Attorney General Michael Mukasey had circulated inside the Justice Department admonishing staff about how to deal with politically sensitive cases. "They must be about to bag another big-time Democrat," my friend said, jokingly. Perhaps it wasn't a joke. Within hours the wires were burning with reports that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer had been linked to a prostitution ring.
[...] All of this makes for excellent copy, particularly for the cable news networks and other outlets that feed off just this sort of tale of personal fall. But there may well be a story-behind-the-story. How did the case against Spitzer get launched? Was he brought down by a politically motivated investigation?
The integrity of our criminal justice system rests on the notion that we investigate crimes, not people. As Robert Jackson, probably the greatest attorney general of the last century, put it:
If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.
[...] The story emerging around the fall of Eliot Spitzer suggests that the case did not start with the report of a crime. Rather it started with a decision to look into Spitzer and his financial dealings. In the course of an open-ended investigation, information about a prostitution circle surfaced. That looks abusive. An investigation like that provides no basis to acquit Spitzer. But it suggests that when his case is done, the public should be pressing some tough questions about why this investigation was launched and pushed forward.
[...] The Los Angeles Times reports that Spitzer asked that his name be taken off the money wires, which reportedly aroused suspicion. The bank submitted a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) to the IRS. The payments which totaled up to $80,000, looked suspicious, we are told, and were examined on the basis that they might be an effort to money-launder bribes. This was reported to the IRS in Hauppauge, Long Island, which in turn involved the Public Integrity Section in the Department of Justice.
[...] Spitzer is an extremely wealthy man, and his channeling of payments at the level suggested can hardly be viewed as something that raises legitimate suspicion. As money laundering goes, $40,000 to $80,000 is peanuts--not the sort of thing that would normally raise an eyebrow. Here it is not the sum involved that triggered suspicion; it is the person who made the payments.[...] Several reports about this case have suggested that it is somehow routine for prosecutors to go through the financial records of public officials to look for evidence of corruption. But in the absence of specific grounds justifying the investigation (for instance, an informant complaining about a bribe) prosecutors have no such authority. In this case, the basis for action is extraordinarily weak. Most importantly, the investigators do not appear to be looking into a crime, they appear to be investigating Spitzer in the hopes of finding something compromising.
Scott Horton teaches law at Columbia University and is a legal affairs contributor to Harper's.
http://tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=c5005f31-237e-4f9d-bca1-891c7aa2b7b2
So, are you interested enough to continue? Using the wayback machine, let's move to to a previous post from Sander Hicks about Spitzer’s love affair with Larry Silverstein and “relationship” with 9/11:
September 11, 2007, Sander Hicks Hits a Home Run!
9/11 Spitzer Scandal Scoop!
Spitzer's Real Scandal
“Eliot Spitzer is like the good-looking bouncer in a bar, who is secretly dealing drugs,” explained forensic microbiologist Mike Copass. We were in a San Diego bar this July, down near the water in Ocean Beach. Copass had acted as a facilitator of San Diego’s 9/11 Citizen’s Grand Jury, an extra-legal group which mounted a mock trial in April.
Copass has degrees from Stanford and Harvard, and an eager glint in his eye. Despite his preppy appearance, Copass makes some pretty radical allegations: that Eliot Spitzer acted as a firewall, preventing public disclosure of his friends’ roles in the anthrax attacks that occurred shortly after 9/11, in addition to facilitating his associates’ windfall from the bloated insurance pay-outs at the World Trade Center. He even accuses Spitzer of covering up the real perpetrators of the 9/11 attack itself.
http://nymegaphone.com/node/24

WTC: 15 Years After Attack

Larry Silverstein got a huge chunk of $$$ (actually made a PROFIT) for each individual building that collapsed on 9/11/01 by holding lower Manhattan hostage to future construction. So what can we learn from this? Check out Don Paul's research at 9-11Research.wtc7.net. Here's his summation of what happened, with my bold emPHAsis:
In February of 2002 Silverstein Properties won $861 million from Industrial Risk Insurers to rebuild on the site of WTC 7. Silverstein Properties' estimated investment in WTC 7 was $386 million. So: This building's collapse resulted in a profit of about $500 million. 8
A Parable
To put these events in perspective, imagine that a person leases an expensive house, and immediately takes out an insurance policy covering the entire value of the house and specifically covering bomb attacks. Six weeks later two bombs go off in the house, separated by an hour. The house burns down, and the lessor immediately sues the insurance company to pay him twice the value of the house, and ultimately wins. The lessor also gets the city to dispose of the wreckage, excavate the site, and help him build a new house on the site.
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/background/owners.html
Blame for 1993 Attack at Center Is Still at Issue
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
Published: January 10, 2008
One of the most painful parts has been the wait, a lawyer for victims of the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center told an appeals court on Wednesday.
Next month will be the 15th anniversary of the Feb. 26, 1993, terrorist strike in the trade center’s underground garage, an event that has almost been forgotten in the glare of the attack that brought down the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001.
It was only two years ago, though, that its victims won a major victory, when a Manhattan jury found that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the trade center, was more to blame for the bombing than the terrorists.
This was the sixth appeal in the case, one of the victims’ lawyers, Victor A. Kovner, told the judges’ panel, and “the fourth time I personally am before the court.” In nearly 15 years, he said, “there hasn’t been a single damages trial” to determine how much the victims should receive for the pain and suffering they endured and for their financial losses.[…] The 50 percent figure is important because if the authority is more than 50 percent liable for the attack, then it must pay 100 percent of any damages for pain and suffering, the victims’ lawyers said later. The authority is responsible for financial damages regardless of how the blame is apportioned, the lawyers said. […] At the trial, the plaintiffs focused on a 1985 report commissioned by the Port Authority, warning that the underground garage was vulnerable to a car bombing and recommending that it be closed to public parking.
[…] the [Port] authority asked a five-judge panel to throw out what it called the jury’s “bizarre” verdict declaring that the agency was 68 percent responsible for the bombing and the terrorists bore only 32 percent of the responsibility.
[…] Originally, hundreds of people and companies sued. By early 2005, many still had lawsuits, while others had dropped out or settled. Victims’ lawyers said yesterday that there were 47 cases remaining, including 43 personal injury cases.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/nyregion/10wtc.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Sander Hicks Hits a Home Run!

9/11 Spitzer Scandal Scoop!
Spitzer's Real Scandal

“Eliot Spitzer is like the good-looking bouncer in a bar, who is secretly dealing drugs,” explained forensic microbiologist Mike Copass.

And so begins Sander Hicks’ investigation into the weird world of Spitzer, taking you down the rabbit hole through all kinds a stinky shit until he reveals, surprise! Larry Silverstein, WT7 and INSURANCE MEGABUCKS!

EXCLUSIVE! "The Real Spitzer Scandal" a 9/11 Spitzer Scandal SCOOP!

Brooklyn Newspaper Delivers the Goods: Spitzer Filed Legal Brief, Helped Silverstein Win $4.5 Billion WTC Insurance Windfall
Contact: Sander Hicks, Publisher, NY Megaphone
718 940 2084 sander@voxpopnet.net
http://nymegaphone.com