-By Warner Todd Huston
Alexi Giannoulias is well known as the “Mob Banker” for the fact that his family bank lent $20 million to two mobsters while Alexi was an officer of the bank. The Illinois Democrat’s Senate candidate has finally answered to this loan a bit more directly than he has in the past and his answer is simply a bit hard to take.
On NBC’s Meet The Press on Sunday, October 10, Giannoulias uttered the laughable claim that he “didn’t know the extent” of the criminal activities of his mobster borrowers at the Broadway Bank.
This is a bit hard to take. Giannoulias seemed to act as if the two mobster’s activities were not as well known in 2005 as they really were at the time his bank gave these ne’er-do-wells multiple loans. Both Michael “Jaws” Giorango and his pal Demitri Stavropoulos were well known criminals by the time they were being served at Broadway Bank.
The Chicago Tribune is just as incredulous at Giannoulias’s claim as I am, too.
As the Trib says:
It’s probably true that Giannoulias was not fully briefed on their illegal activity, which is the sort of thing felons rarely publicize even to their financial enablers. But he and his colleagues did know — or should have known — enough to show these clients the door. Not only had Giorango served prison time in the 1990s for his involvement in illegal bookmaking, but he and Stavropoulos had been convicted, in 2004, of new felonies for which they later served prison time.
How is it that men looking for official, normal loans from a bank didn’t have their criminal activity flagged as problematic when the bank did its due diligence on back ground checks? It really is impossible to believe that all these facts just slipped right past the officials at Broadway Bank and Alexi Giannoulias.
Surely the criminal background of these mobsters was well known by the bank and its officers. Yet these loans were made anyway.
The question is, why were these loans made?
Why, Alexi? Why did you loan up to $20 million to known mobsters?
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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