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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Ingram_(bond_trader)
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Born c. 1958 / Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Alma mater : Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BSc) / Stanford University (MBA)
Occupations :
Bond trader
Investment banker
Criminal status : Released
Spouses
Aleta Hayes / (m. 1983; div. 1984)
Demetra Harrison / (m. 1988; div. 1996)
Deann Absolam / (m. 1998; div. 2002)
Children 2
Criminal penalty
Sentenced to 18 months in federal prison and fined $185,000
Kevin Ingram is an American bond trader, investment banker, and businessman. In 1992 and 1996, he was included as among the top 25 most successful Black Wall Street executives on Black Enterprise. In 2001, he pled guilty to one count of money laundering in a case related to an arms-trafficking sting, launched by Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). He was sentenced to 18 months in prison and fined a penalty of $185,000.[2]
Ingram was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Nathan Ingram, a former United States Army veteran and real estate appraiser and investor, and Doris Ingram, a volunteer nurse. When Ingram was five years old, his father died from suicide. Following his father's death, his mother took over the family's real estate business.[3]
Ingram attended Central High School, becoming a math prodigy. He later attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he majored in chemical engineering. He graduated in 1980, and accepted a Western Electric scholarship to study engineering at Stanford University.[4] In June 1981, Ingram left Stanford to work as an engineer. Meanwhile, in February 1982, Ingram was arrested in Sacramento, California, for passing bad checks and committing misdemeanor property theft. Ingram spent five weekends in prison and was placed on a two-year probation.[5] In September 1982, Ingram enrolled into Stanford's Graduate School of Business after learning from a college friend that Wall Street was interested in hiring math-proficient college students.[5][6] He graduated in 1984.[7]
Goldman Sachs
Ingram started working at Lehman Brothers as an associate. A week after he started, Lehman was acquired by Shearson/American Express and went public. Determined to remain involved in finance, Ingram moved to Goldman Sachs one year later.[4][8]
In 1988, Ingram was promoted to vice president, and in 1992, he headed the collateralized mortgage obligation (CMO) derivatives trading desk, supervising several junior bond traders.[4] CMOs began during the 1980s when the mortgage market was in an economic boom. However, because of uncertainty in case a loan cannot be paid off, mortgage investors began developing CMOs by dividing loan and interest payments into new financial securities.[4] Reliant on the collateral pool of mortgage borrowers, these new securities each carry their own different risk equation.[8]
In 1994, Ingram had hoped to become a partner within the firm, thereby garnering an ownership share. However, his promotion was placed on hold, but during the same year, Steven Mnuchin was made partner as his father had worked as an executive at Goldman Sachs.[9] Bitter over Mnuchin's promotion, Ingram told a colleague: "I guess I'm not the chosen one." By this point, his coworkers began noticing he was taking extended, unexplained absences from the office. In 1996, he was again passed over to become a partner, and subsequently resigned from Goldman Sachs. In one of his final emails there, he issued one questioning the firm's perception of itself as an elite meritocracy.[9]
Deutsche Bank
In April 1996, Ingram was hired by Edson Mitchell to join Deutsche Morgan Grenfell. To help increase the bank's market share in commercial mortgage-backed securities, Ingram served as the Managing Director over the department.[10] His responsibilities were to structure and issue millions in securities lending for an international clientele including banks, insurance companies, and private individuals with a high net worth.[11] To help build the department, Ingram hired several former colleagues from Goldman Sachs, along with several veteran real estate finance personnel.[12]
By October 1996, Black Enterprise reported Ingram had invested $500 million for Fannie Mae and $100 million for Host Marriott, reportedly the first ever for a hotel company.[11] In 1998, then-businessman Donald Trump had called Ingram's colleague Mike Offit requesting a $125 million loan to renovate 40 Wall Street. Ingram then met with Trump at his office to negotiate the loan; while Ingram had personally opposed the loan, the transaction was made in April 1998. A few months later, Trump won another $300 million loan to construct Trump World Tower.[13]
By January 1998, Ingram had run a large derivatives loss, and the bank was forced to take a significant write-down. Nevertheless, in August 1998, Ingram was promoted to head the bank's global asset securitization department in London.[14] In September, the ongoing Russian financial crisis and the fallout from the Long-Term Capital Management had caused a severe market downturn. In the wake of this, Ingram's department had suffered substantial trading losses.[10]
That same month, Mitchell asked for Ingram's resignation, along with a third of his 120 employees within his department. Angered, and demanding a larger severance settlement, Ingram allegedly told Mitchell: "You are going to have to fire me."[10][14] Furthermore, Ingram threatened to file a racial discrimination lawsuit, alleging he was being forced out because of his race. To help negotiate a more substantial severance package, Ingram called in Jesse Jackson. He and Jackson both demanded that Deutsche give the former a settlement of $20 million. Ingram eventually settled for an lower undisclosed figure; according to Jackson's close associates, it was reportedly around $6 million.[15]
Other ventures
In 1999, Ingram ventured into the real estate market, serving as the chief executive of I. W. Development LLC (a real estate developer established in Midtown Manhattan). He announced plans to reopen Minton's Playhouse and to renovate the Wells Famous Home of Chicken and Waffles. Previously, in 1996, one attempt to re-open Minton's, which was spearheaded by celebrities including Robert De Niro and Melba Wilson, had foundered due to the difficulties in securing private investments. The Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation (UMEZ) had offered I. W. Development a loan package deal of almost one million to renovate both businesses, with Ingram only needing to raise the remaining capital.[16] In 2000, the UMEZ withdrew the offer after Ingram had failed to raise the additional capital. At the time of Ingram's arrest, the Wells renovation was in limbo and Minton's was closed.[17]
In 2000, Ingram founded TruMarkets, a start-up Internet-based trading platform designed to trade securities electronically, along with derivatives and mortgage bonds. Ingram and Peter McCarthy, a former Deutsche Bank trader, pitched the platform to Gary Morgenthaler, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist.[18][12] Enthused with the idea, Morgenthaler invested $6.2 million into the platform, with an additional $2 million from Ingram's severance pay from Deutsche Bank. The firm hired over 50 employees, attracting prominent clients such as Jon Corzine and Herbert M. Allison as board members. Ingram leased an office across the street from the Empire State Building. Throughout the summer of 2000, TruMarkets had convinced several major financial firms, including Nomura Securities and BlackRock, to use the platform.[19] However, with over $30 million spent in venture capital, the technology was experiencing software defects. Ingram delayed its initial launch date set for July 2000 to the fall, and then to early 2001.[20]
By March 2001, the dot-com crash had devastated TruMarkets, leading the company to file for bankruptcy protection. Ingram was replaced, and the company was subsequently acquired by MortgageSight Holdings LLC, a consortium owned by Salomon Smith Barney, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Credit Suisse First Boston.[12][20]
Operation Sphinx began in 1998, when a confidential informant informed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) that Diaa Mohsen, an Egyptian national, "was involved in illegal arms deals and purchasing arms for other groups."[21] The informant had introduced Mohsen to an undercover ATF agent, in which Moshen explained he wished to acquire U.S. stinger missiles on behalf of a Pakistani intermediary. He would then plan to traffick the missiles to the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. Other international countries were also mentioned as possible recipients.[21]
Contacts with Randy Glass and Diaa Mohsen
Years earlier, Ingram had met Mohsen in Jersey City. Together, they formed a zoning company called B.I.A. Construction. Mohsen also introduced Ingram to Mohammed Malik, a Pakistani immigrant and deli owner who had been living in the United States. In Atlantic City, Mohsen met Randy Glass, a con artist and jewel smuggler, at the Trump Taj Mahal casino.[22] During his severance negotiations from Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, Ingram was working in the 85th floor on the South Tower within the World Trade Center, in a temporary space offered to him by the law firm Harris Beach. Seeking new business opportunities, Ingram met Glass through Mohsen. In Boca Raton, Florida, aboard Ingram's private yacht the Ingee, Glass presented himself as a wealthy entrepreneur seeking investment advice. Glass stated he had financial partners and businessmen who had "a certain amount of cash coming in every month" that needed cleaning up. Interested, Ingram invited Glass to his office at the South Tower.[23]
In June 1999, Glass and Mohsen went to see Ingram for a follow-up meeting. After discussing preliminary details, Glass handed Ingram over $100,000 in cash to transfer. Ingram then wrote Glass a cheque from a corporate account at Chase Manhattan for $91,000, taking a personal fee of $9,000.[24] Shortly after, Ingram talked about establishing an offshore investment fund with "a minimum investment" of $15 million. Glass replied he and his partners needed to meet with Ingram in order to further discuss future transactions. When Glass and Ingram agreed to become partners, they named their offshore company IAM Global Money Fund.[25]
At the investment pitch in Boca Raton, Glass introduced Ingram to "Ray Spears"—whose real name was Dick Stoltz, an undercover ATF agent. On a whiteboard, Ingram diagrammed how their business would operate, illustrating arrows to display where the monetary transactions would flow from multiple accounts.[26] Ingram proposed launching their business with upwards of between $25 and $30 million, but Glass preferred starting with modest cash amounts. Their next transaction was worth $250,000, in which Ingram helped wire $227,500—subtracting 9 percent for himself.[27]
When Ingram had received his settlement, Glass claimed that Ingram had lost interest when it became apparent that his promises of an imminent investment of millions were, in Ingram's words, "way off." Ingram countered that Glass was "creepy" and untruthful. "When I kind of figured out what was really going on—because they did ask me to launder some money—I stopped talking to them," Ingram stated.[28] For more than a year, Ingram remained unaware that Glass and Mohsen were arms dealers, trafficking Stinger missiles, guns, and grenade launchers stored inside a Florida warehouse.[29]
Arrest and sentencing
In May 2001, Stoltz (who was using the alias "Ray Spears") contacted Mohsen and told him he had sold weapons from Vietnam and had $16 million to transfer. Mohsen was enthusiastic about helping, but noted that he was not in communication with Ingram. Mohsen explained Ingram's financial troubles following the collapse of TruMarkets, and was acting erratic. He also told of how Ingram "screwed him out of money" after he had tried to sell him on a cell phone business venture. Following the meeting, Mohsen left a message on Ingram's voice mail, telling him to contact Spears.[30]
In June 2001, near a Fort Lauderdale hotel, Ingram had met with Stoltz. Stoltz told Ingram he was expecting to bring in $16 million from arms sales within the next year. Ingram switched conversations, preferring instead to talk about the "long-range plans" involving offshore accounts. Suspicious of infiltration by law enforcement, Ingram asked Stoltz if he was wearing a wire. Stoltz assured Ingram that he had done arms deals before, and wondered if Ingram was still interested. Ingram responded, "I'm a professional and I have a reputation, but I don't mind making money."[31] Following the meeting with Stoltz, Ingram paged him stating he would transport the money to the Netherlands through his private jet. He later stated his asking fee was 25 percent of the sale, including reimbursement of transportation costs.[32]
At the Embassy Suites, Ingram introduced Stoltz to Walter Kapij, a business associate and golfing companion, who would pilot a Learjet parked at a nearby private airport. They obtained the $2.2 million contained in two suitcases from Stoltz. Within an envelope, Ingram was handed a paper containing the name and address of the contact, along with his photo, who was staying at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London.[33] On June 12, 2001, Ingram and Kapij were arrested in Fort Lauderdale under suspicions of money laundering. Ingram was later released on a $250,000 bond.[34][17] As part of his bail condition, Ingram surrendered his real estate, his boat, and his 1996 Porsche vehicle.[35]
News of Ingram's arrest had shocked his former colleagues at Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank. Corzine told The New York Times that Ingram's arrest was "a tragedy... When I found out, I was shocked. People recruited him and brought him into the business. I'm disappointed."[31] One banker told the New York Observer: "I literally spat my coffee across the table when I read the story."[10]
In July 2001, Ingram was indicted on federal charges of money laundering. Apart from the attempted laundering of $2.2 million, federal authorities accused Ingram of laundering $350,000 in 1999. Ingram was expected to face up to 10 years in prison.[31] In August 2001, Ingram pled guilty to the charge. As part of his plea agreement, Ingram agreed to reimburse the U.S. government $185,000 and to testify against Moshen and Malik.[36] On November 30, Ingram was sentenced to eighteen months in federal prison, and ordered to pay a $20,000 fine. After the sentencing, Ingram offered a brief apology, stating he was sorry he had disappointed his family.[2] He was released from prison in 2004.[37]
Following his prison release, Ingram returned to working in finance and has made investments in the legalized cannabis industry.[28]
During his studies at Stanford, Ingram married Aleta Hayes, but a close friend recalled the marriage lasted about a year.[5] In 1988, Ingram next married Demetra Harrison, a Goldman Sachs back-office accountant, in which they had one son. They were divorced by 1996. Before he married Harrison, Ingram had another son with a woman he once lived with in Brooklyn.[5] In September 1998, Ingram married Deann Absolam, a fashion model, who was nicknamed "Sparkle".[38] During his trial conviction hearings, the couple had filed for divorce.[35]
By Patrick McGeehanStaff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal / Nov. 20, 1998 at 12:01 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB911528131847598500?mod=Searchresults&pos=1&page=1
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Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. became the latest Wall Street firm to lay off bond-market employees this quarter, letting go 60 workers in its bond operations in New York and London.
The cuts amount to about 4% of the 1,500 people employed world-wide in Morgan Stanley's fixed-income businesses, but they fell especially hard in the firm's residential-mortgage bond group. Morgan Stanley has decided to focus more on securities backed by commercial mortgages, a spokeswoman said.
Separately, Deutsche Bank Securities, a New York-based unit of Germany's Deutsche Bank , laid off 50 employees in its bond operations this week, including the head of its mortgage- and asset-backed securities group, Kevin Ingram, a representative confirmed. Most of the jobs eliminated, about 10% of the bond staff in New York, were in that group, which will cut back on proprietary trading and focus on originating and selling mortgage- and asset-backed securities, she said.
Sustained low interest rates have spurred widespread refinancing of mortgages. The early payoffs of those debts reduce the value of bonds backed by them, weakening the overall market and the profitability of the firms that underwrite, sell and trade them. The layoffs at the two firms occurred after several other securities firm's trimmed their staffs in the biggest staff reductions on Wall Street in several years after world bond markets were roiled starting this summer. Merrill Lynch & Co. and J.P. Morgan & Co. eliminated about 5% of their staffs and other firms, including Citigroup 's Salomon Smith Barney unit and Bankers Trust Corp. have cut hundreds of jobs. Morgan Stanley's layoffs, which a spokeswoman described as "across-the-board," came as a surprise to some analysts who said that the firm's executives had indicated there would be no need for layoffs there. The cuts come with two weeks left in Morgan Stanley's fiscal year and about a month before the firm is scheduled to pay year-end bonuses.
The spokeswoman declined to discuss terms of the severance packages the laid-off workers will receive.
She said that the firm does not anticipate any more layoffs and expects headcount in its bond businesses to remain flat next year. Richard Strauss, an analyst at Goldman, Sachs & Co. said, "They are doing some pruning. This is one segment of the business that isn't rebounding as quickly as some others, such as equities and asset-management, are."
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By Nina Siegal / Nov. 14, 1999
What does it take to resurrect a legend? In Harlem, it takes more than a dash of celebrity.
In 1996, the actor Robert De Niro, the restaurateur Drew Nieporent and Melba Wilson, a longtime resident, announced plans to reopen Minton's Playhouse, the birthplace of be-bop, where Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman and Lester Young played at after-hours jam sessions. The Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone offered a $300,000 loan to help revive the club, in the Cecil Hotel at 118th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue.
But the plan foundered this year. According to Ms. Wilson, it was difficult to secure the necessary investors. Now a new developer is waiting in the wings.
The Empowerment Zone recently offered I. W. Development L.L.C., a developer in Midtown, a $570,000 loan to cover 30 percent of the cost of renovating Minton's. The developer intends to reopen the jazz hall early next year as an upscale restaurant serving nouveau American cuisine and managed by Allan West, who once ran the Boat House Cafe, now Park View at the Boathouse, in Central Park. Plans call for a performance space for jazz, soul and rhythm and blues shows and a basement bar and lounge.
Kevin Ingram, chief executive of I. W. Development, is an owner and developer of Wells Famous Home of Chicken and Waffles on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, a restaurant and nightclub that has received a $375,000 empowerment zone loan to cover part of a renovation.
Minton's and Wells received loans through a $3 million program to help revive Harlem restaurants and clubs. So did the Lenox Lounge on Lenox Avenue and 125th Street, another legendary club, which is being renovated with the help of a $450,000 loan. All three are expected to reopen by January or February. ''We're creating cultural institutions, also bringing in restaurants, and we're creating destinations for residents as well as tourists,'' said Terry C. Lane, president of the Empowerment Zone.
But the final pieces of the financing puzzle have yet to be placed. Mr. Ingram said the New York Community Investment Corporation had agreed to support the Minton's project, though he would not say how much it had pledged. He said he was also trying to obtain a loan from the Empire State Development Corporation, but declined to give the amount. ''With everything else that's going on in Harlem now,'' Mr. Ingram said, ''it's good business sense to finish it now.''
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Published June 15, 2001, 4:00 a.m. ET
https://nypost.com/2001/06/15/biz-big-busted-in-arms-sale-ring/
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A Wall Street hotshot and three other men have been busted in a spy-novel tale of arms smuggling and money laundering aimed at putting high-tech Stinger missiles in terrorists’ hands.
Other elements of the international intrigue include a phony Venezuelan passport bought for $12,000, a secret meeting at Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Grill, an offer to pay for some of the weapons with heroin and a getaway Lear jet, court papers said.
The James Bond-like plot unraveled Tuesday when Diaa Mohsen, 57, and Mohammed Rajaa “Mike” Malik, 52, of Jersey City, were busted on illegal-arms dealing charges after inspecting a Stinger and an M-16 machine gun with a silencer at a West Palm Beach, Fla., warehouse.
At about the same time, Kevin Ingram, 42 – who was named one of the top 25 blacks on Wall Street in 1996 – was nabbed in a Fort Lauderdale hotel after allegedly agreeing to launder $2.2 million for a 25 percent cut.
Busted with him was Walter Kapij, 44, a Connecticut businessman who chartered a Lear jet from Fort Lauderdale to Amsterdam to ferry the cash, court papers said.
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Federal agents refused to say where the arms were going, but experts said the most likely buyers were Pakistan or terror master Osama bin Laden.
“Bin Laden has long-standing contacts with senior Pakistani officials. The CIA has suspected for some time Pakistan and Iraq have been helping to arm him,” said Andrew Pearce of the Rand Institute in Washington.
Malik, a Pakistani native who returned to Jersey City 18 months ago after spending 10 years in his homeland, and the three others were busted after a 30-month sting operation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
The operation began in late 1998, when a confidential informant told the bureau Mohsen “was involved in illegal arms deals and purchasing arms for other groups.”
At the first meeting, Mohsen said he could provide a fake Venezuelan passport for $12,000. The phony document arrived a week later, printed on genuine Venezuelan passport stock.
After that, the informant and an undercover agent posing as an arms dealer met about a dozen times with Mohsen and Malik in Florida, New Jersey and New York.
Eventually, the two presented a list of 19 different items, including night vision goggles, pistols, machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars, TOW anti-tank missiles and Stinger missiles, court papers said.
The men said they were negotiating on behalf of a former military official of a foreign country who was “well known” and wanted to know if he could make a partial payment “in the form of heroin.”
Mohsen and Malik talked about buying 200 to 300 Stingers for $32 million, but the money never arrived. When Mohsen was arrested Tuesday, he said he was planning to buy 200 of the missiles.
Ingram, meanwhile, had been enlisted to launder the money from the sale, court papers said.
Ingram allegedly laundered $100,000 and $250,000 for federal agents, both times taking a 9 percent cut before being asked to launder the $2.2 million.
Bail was set at $250,000 for Ingram and $135,000 for Kapij yesterday. A bail hearing for Mohsen and Malik was rescheduled to next Wednesday.
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By Terry Pristin / June 16, 2001
An undercover investigation into suspected arms sales led to the arrest this week of a man who was once a rising star on Wall Street and a promising player in the resurgence of Harlem.
On Tuesday, Kevin Ingram, who was named one of the top 25 African-American ''movers and shakers'' on Wall Street by Black Enterprise magazine in 1996, was arrested by federal agents in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., after agreeing to launder $2.2 million that had been described to him as proceeds from arms shipments, according to court papers filed in Federal District Court in Miami.
He was charged in a two-and-a-half-year sting operation that also brought the arrest of two suspected arms dealers from Jersey City who inspected a Stinger missile at a West Palm Beach, Fla., warehouse for possible sale to an unnamed foreign country, according to the court documents.
In 1999, according to the court documents, Mr. Ingram and one of the Jersey City men, Diaa Mohsen, laundered nearly $350,000 in two wire transactions by transferring the money from the United States to an account in London.
Last week, after being approached by an undercover agent, Mr. Ingram arranged for a pilot, Walter Kapij, of Weathersfield, Conn., to take $2.2 million to Amsterdam on a chartered Lear jet. On Tuesday, agents handed them two bags of cash at the airport in Fort Lauderdale and arrested them.
Mr. Ingram's lawyer, Richard G. Lubin of West Palm Beach, said Mr. Ingram would plead not guilty at his arraignment next month. He was released from jail yesterday on a $250,000 bond.
According to the court documents, the Jersey City men -- Mr. Mohsen and Mohammed Rajaa Malik, also known as Mike Malik -- said they were acting as intermediaries for foreign buyers. They held numerous meetings with undercover agents posing as arms dealers in New Jersey, in Florida and at the TriBeCa Grill restaurant in Manhattan. During those meetings they promised to buy a laundry list of high-tech military weapons, offering to pay for part of the shipment in heroin, the documents said.
Mr. Ingram ran the mortgage trading practice at Goldman Sachs from 1992 to 1996, when he joined Deutsche Bank as head of its mortgage-backed securities department, making deals involving hundreds of millions of dollars.
Seeking to play a role in the resurgence of Harlem, Mr. Ingram had plans in 1999 to reopen Minton's Playhouse, the birthplace of bebop, and to expand and renovate Wells Famous Home of Chicken and Waffles, a restaurant and nightclub at 132nd Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard that drew an international after-hours crowd in the 1940's.
The Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, an economic development program in Harlem, had agreed to lend Mr. Ingram's development company $570,000 to renovate Minton's, on 118th Street between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Frederick Douglass Boulevards, but it withdrew the offer last year after Mr. Ingram failed to raise additional capital, according to Terry C. Lane, the agency's president. The Wells project is also at a standstill and the restaurant is closed.
The Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, which had agreed to a $375,000 loan for the Wells construction, has begun legal proceedings to recover $200,000, the amount that had been disbursed.
In January 1999, Mr. Ingram was forced to resign from Deutsche Bank under pressure after his division suffered costly losses.
He then helped found TruMarkets Inc., an online bond trading venture that was able to attract some prominent Wall Street figures as board members, including Herbert Allison, a former president of Merrill Lynch. But the company sought bankruptcy protection in March.
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By Terry Pristin (NYT)
Aug. 30, 2001
Kevin Ingram, a onetime star bond trader for Goldman Sachs, pleaded guilty on Tuesday in United States District Court in West Palm Beach, Fla., to a charge of money laundering. Mr. Ingram, of Jersey City, who was arrested in June, was accused of agreeing to launder $2.2 million for agents posing as arms dealers. Under the plea agreement, he will pay the government $185,000 and testify against his two co-defendants. Mr. Ingram's sentencing was set for Nov. 30. His lawyer, Richard G. Lubin, said that Mr. Ingram could face two to three years under the sentencing guidelines but that he was likely to get his term reduced in exchange for his cooperation.
Terry Pristin (NYT)
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/27/business/from-riches-to-relative-rags.html?searchResultPosition=6
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By Leslie Wayne / Oct. 27, 2001
For years, Kevin Ingram lived the Wall Street dream: a multimillion-dollar salary as a top trader at Deutsche Bank; mentors like Robert E. Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, and Senator Jon S. Corzine of New Jersey -- both from his days at Goldman, Sachs; and all the trappings of the good life, including a yellow Ferrari, a silver Porsche and a striking young third wife.
Today, Mr. Ingram is awaiting sentencing on money laundering charges, stemming from his involvement in a scheme with two Jersey City men -- one a native of Pakistani, the other from Egypt -- who were negotiating to buy illegal arms, including Stinger missiles, grenade launchers and machine guns.
It is surely a bizarre end for Mr. Ingram's career on Wall Street, where he had a wide reputation as an up-from-the-streets trader with an aggressive streak and a quick way with numbers. As one of the few African-Americans in the top tier of finance, Mr. Ingram had a prominent profile and a circle of powerful friends. Yet his arrest in June was straight out of an underworld tale -- federal agents arrested him in Florida as he was about to receive a bag filled with $2.2 million in cash and board a private jet to Europe.
Mr. Ingram, 43, is not talking. But his former friends are.
''It's a tragedy,'' said Senator Corzine, the former co-chairman of Goldman, Sachs, where Mr. Ingram worked for 10 years. ''When I found out, I was shocked. People recruited him and brought him into the business. I'm disappointed.''
While Mr. Ingram's actions are serious enough -- he pleaded guilty to money laundering -- they look even worse since Sept. 11 and make it appear to some people that Mr. Ingram was doing something not just illegal but unpatriotic. Government investigators have found no connection between Mr. Ingram's actions and the attacks on the World Trade Center -- which he watched from his Jersey City condominium, where he is out on bail.
He faces up to 10 years in prison when he is sentenced on Nov. 30 in West Palm Beach.
''There is absolutely zero connection between Kevin Ingram and anything remotely connected to Sept. 11,'' said Richard Lubin, Mr. Ingram's lawyer. ''It is outrageous for someone to even mention his name in the same breath as violence or arms sales or terrorism in any regard. Period.''
Mr. Lubin insists that Mr. Ingram, despite the plea, is really guilty only of being a friend to the wrong people. ''It was his trusting nature and sensitivity and concern for others that got him hooked up with these guys,'' Mr. Lubin said. ''He had no idea that they were criminals.''
The ''they'' in Mr. Lubin's statement are Diaa Mohsen, owner of a Jersey City construction business, who came to the United States from Egypt 32 years ago, and Mohammend Raja Malik, a Jersey City liquor store owner. The two men have been charged with violating the federal arms export control law; Mr. Mohsen pleaded guilty last week to conspiracy to launder money but still faces the other charge.
No one knows exactly who Mr. Mohsen and Mr. Malik, who is known as Mike, were buying arms for. Law enforcement officials are continuing to investigate. Mr. Malik and Mr. Mohsen were arrested the same day as Mr. Ingram, in a government sting operation.
These men were a far cry from Mr. Ingram's usual crowd. ''He is very sophisticated,'' said Zoran Chanin, who was once a partner with Mr. Ingram on a project to refurbish a SoHo building. ''He got along with whites and he had a following among blacks. He had a very knowledgable look about him.''
When Mr. Ingram got into a political jam at Deutsche Bank, he called on the Rev. Jesse Jackson to help negotiate. When he left Wall Street in 1999 to help form a dot-com securities trading firm, which later failed, investors poured in $30 million. Among them were Herb Allison, a former president of Merrill Lynch, and Mr. Corzine, who invested $1.5 million. Mr. Ingram had plans, which also failed, to invest in Harlem projects like the refurbishing of Minton's, a legendary jazz club.
Yet at the same time, court documents show, he was leading a double life -- flying off to Florida to meet with Mr. Mohsen and others on laundering money.
''He loves making money,'' said Mr. Chanin, whose business split with Mr. Ingram led to litigation between the two. ''He's a keen individual who knows the system.''
Born into a family of five children, Mr. Ingram was raised by his widowed mother on the gritty streets of North Philadelphia and rose to earn a degree in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was continuing his engineering studies at Stanford when a fellow student told him Wall Street was beginning to prize math skills like Mr. Ingram's. That very day, he switched to the business school, where he got an M.B.A.
His Wall Street career can best be described as lucrative, but rocky. He quickly established himself as a whiz on Goldman's asset-based trading desk, building it into a dominant player. And, while a junior associate, he befriended Mr. Rubin by walking into his office and stating his mind.
''Kevin is very smart and had a very scientific approach to trading,'' said a top African-American on Wall Street, who asked not to be named. ''His engineering background meant he could understand complex mortgage-backed securities and structured transactions in a market-efficient way. And he had loads of support on Wall Street. He had the varsity of the varsity behind him.''
In 1996, while on the partnership track at Goldman, he jumped ship to Deutsche Bank, to lead its global asset-based trading desk. He was given $2 million in annual pay and put in charge of a staff of 100.
But all did not go well at Deutsche Bank. In a suit the bank later brought against him, it said Mr. Ingram's work schedule was erratic, that he failed to show up for days at a time and skipped important meetings.
Like many others on Wall Street, his trading desk suffered millions of dollars in losses after the 1998 collapse of Long-Term Capital Management. Soon he was out of favor and, quickly, out of a job. In addition, the bank claimed he cheated on his expense account, charging for nonbusiness expenses like $45,694 for a canceled wedding.
But rather than accept his firing like a ''good leaver,'' in the words of the bank's lawsuit, he fought back. Mr. Ingram turned to Mr. Jackson, whose Wall Street Project represents blacks facing discrimination. With Mr. Jackson at his side, he and bank officials settled on a severance in 1998, ending the litigation.
''We met with the Deutsche Bank people and we determined that Kevin's grievance was valid,'' Mr. Jackson said. ''That's when we worked out a settlement. I had no idea of these other developments until they were made public. It fills me with a profound sense of sorrow.''
Mr. Jackson declined to disclose the amount of the settlement. A spokesman for Deutsche Bank, Ted Meyer, said, ''I can't touch this with a 10-foot pole.'' But other reports put it at $6 million to $15 million.
In 1999, flush with his Wall Street cash, he helped found a dot-com bond trading firm, TruMarkets, which was to be an electronic version of the desk he formerly ran. Big-name venture firms like BlackRock and Morgenthaler Ventures, along with Mr. Corzine, Mr. Allison and others, put $30 million in TruMarkets -- which was all lost in the dot-com bust.
''Kevin was the consummate salesman,'' said Todd Eyler, an analyst with Forrester Research in Boston. ''He had an extraordinary vision for what he wanted to do, which he articulated well. And he drove a hard sale. If he disagreed with me about a point, he was relentless.''
The government complaint against Mr. Ingram says that during the same period, he was meeting with Mr. Mohsen, who was seeking to turn cash from arms deals into money he could use legitimately. Unknown to either Mr. Mohsen or Mr. Ingram, the operation had been infiltrated by federal undercover agents posing as arms merchants.
According to the government, by June 1999, using his account, Ingram Partners L.L.C. at Chase Bank, Mr. Ingram agreed to launder money -- for a fee of 9 percent of each transaction. Some of his meetings with the others took place in New York, others at the Turnberry Country Club in Florida, where Mr. Ingram kept his boat, the Ingree.
In a meeting with Mr. Mohsen and an undercover agent, court documents state, Mr. Ingram took $100,000 in cash, keeping $9,000 for himself and later returning a check for $91,000 drawn on the account of Ingram Partners. Then, in August, he agreed to launder $250,000 in cash using wire transfers to London, keeping $22,500.
Two years later, after a break in the action, the undercover agents upped the ante: Mr. Ingram was told they needed to launder over $16 million, $2 million of that in the weeks ahead.
Mr. Ingram hesitated, saying he was worried about the risk. Besides, he said, he was more interested in ''long-term transactions'' -- he had proposed earlier becoming a money manager for the arms traders using offshore accounts. He was so worried, in fact, he asked the undercover agent if he was wearing a wire.
But in the end, Mr. Ingram agreed, saying, according to the government complaint, ''I'm a professional and I have a reputation, but I don't mind making money.''
This time he said his fee would be 20 percent, along with 5 percent in transportation costs for a private jet Mr. Ingram had arranged to transport himself and the money to the Netherlands. Yet when Mr. Ingram and his pilot, with the plane waiting, showed up at a Florida hotel to accept $2.2 million in cash, they were arrested.
With his wife, Deann, at his side as he pleaded guilty, Mr. Ingram said he was suffering from depression. And those in court remain as dumbfounded as some of his old friends.
''He was at the top of his world,'' said James Eisenberg, a lawyer for another co-defendant. ''Why was he hanging out with those low-lifes?''
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 27, 2001, Section C, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: From Riches to Relative Rags. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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"HAVE YOU EVER SUFFERED FROM A MENTAL ILLNESS?" asked Judge Donald Middlebrooks in his Orlando-bred drawl.
Kevin Ingram, 42, late of Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, Porsche-driving playboy, disgraced master of the universe, stood in front of Middlebrooks, his hands clasped before him, his broad shoulders slumped inside his double-breasted pinstripes.
"I suffered from depression,'' Ingram replied. For a few seconds silence suffused the small West Palm Beach courtroom. "Mostly after this incident ensued," Ingram e.xplained to the court. Ingram admitted that he had been seeing a counselor and that he was now taking medication.
August 28, 200 I, was a particularly sweltering day in West Palm, but inside the courtroom Ingram seemed remarkably cool as he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to launder $350,000 and publicly declared himself a felon. Behind Ingram sat his wife Deann, a statuesque beauty who took in the proceedings from behind a pair of two-tone sunglasses. Her prim black suit and gilded stilettos rendered her a glamorous anomaly in these dispiriting surroundings.
Ingram's ordeal had begun three months earlier, when federal agents stormed a Fort Lauderdale hotel room after a 31-month sting operation and arrested Ingram and Walter Kapij - an airplane broker who had allegedly chartered a Learjet to help Ingram fly S2.2 million to Holland (Kapij has pleaded not guilty). After Ingram was released on bail, magistrate judge Ann Virunac was tipped off co S 1.6 million Ingram had secreted in a Swiss bank account. Fearing he would jwnp bail, Vitunac remanded him to jail. On August 6 Ingram appeared before Vitunac in handcuffs and leg irons. Satisfied that he wasn't hiding any other assets, Virunac released him.
The arrest of Ingram, a protege of former U.S. Treasury secretary Robert Rubin and one of the financial world's rising stars, has global implications that go far beyond Wall Street. Prosecutors claimed that Ingram knowingly conspired to launder $2.5 million in funds from two alleged arms dealers: an Egyptian-born commodities broker named Diaa Mohsen and Mohammed Malik, a Pakistani native who owns a small grocery store in Jersey City. New Jersey.At one point, in 1999, the government was so concerned that Mohsen was trying to buy arms for theTaliban - "the group presently secreting Osama bin Laden ... the most wanted individual in the world at this time," an agent pointed out in court - that it begged a judge to keep a confidential informant for whom Ingram would launder money out of jail precisely because the government wanted to snare as many people as it could in this sting operation.The charges now seem even more unsettling, given the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. While Ingram's misdeeds pale in comparison with those horrific events, his crime exemplifies how the world terrorist network is supported in part by a web of people and governments mat turn a blind eye to the devastation caused by their profiteering.
In November Mohsen and Malik will go on trial for money laundering; next year they will be back in court for the more serious charge of arms dealing.Though bom men have pleaded not guilty to all charges, prosecutors have more than 500 audio and video tapes that they claim document Mohsen and Malik's efforts to buy a wide array of weapons, from Beretta 9mm pistols to Stinger missiles to an M2020, a nuclear-weapon component. Valentin Rodriguez, Mohsen's court-appointed attorney, says the government believes this hardware may have been destined for the Democratic Republic of Congo and Pakistan. A government agent said in court he was concerned the arms may have been destined for Afghanistan - and Osama bin Laden, the Muslim fundamentalist considered the brains behind a slew of terrorist cells around the world.
As part of his plea bargain Ingram has agreed to be the government's star witness against the pair - even though the fact of the September terrorist attacks may reduce Ingram's chances for a lenient sentence. "It will be very difficult to erase what happened in NewYork in September," says Rodriguez.That's why me Mohsen-Malik trial, scheduled to begin on November 7, promises to be one of me most closely watched court cases of the year.
HOW DID INGRAM - A GENIAL, STANFORD-EDUCATED MBA with more than 13 years' experience at top-tier investment banks and a raft of high-powered friends - come to be implicated in a second-rate scheme to divert arms to third world countries?Though Ingram repeatedly declined to comment for this story, interviews with more than 60 of his friends and colleagues sketch a picture of a man in love with his ostentatious lifestyle, a man who believed that as a black trader in the Wy-white provinces ofWall Street, he had been denied the rewards that were his due. Ingram grew up one of five children in inner-city Philadelphia and made it through college and grad school only to see his high-flying career as a trader flame out in an ugly lawsuit with Deutsche Bank, his last employer. As his financial situation deteriorated, friends say, he scrambled to hang on to a life that included a 44-foot yacht, a Prada-loving wife, and the most expensive Porsche made: a Turbo 911 the color of platinum.
As Ingram built his fortune, he skated effortlessly between two discrete elites, one largely white, the other almost exclusively black. Among the powerful white mentors who helped Ingram in his career were former Goldman Sachs chieftain Jon Corzine (now a U.S. senator from New Jersey) and former U.S. Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, now chairman of Citigroup 's executive committee. Ingram was also plugged into the close-knit circle of affluent black businessmen on Wall Street and in the entertainment world. His friends included Ronald Blaylock of Blaylock Parmers, the leading New York-based black investment bank, and Kevin Cohee, CEO of the Boston Bank of Commerce, the third-largest black-owned bank in the country. He was also close to rap mogul Russell Simmons and his wife Kimora, and in recent years Ingram sometimes traveled in a posse of high-profile hiphop honchos including AndreH arrell and Sean "Puffy" Combs.
Ingram did not restrict his friendships to accomplished blacks. He was "a chameleon," recalls one friend. "He can talk to Bob Rubin about world economic affairs, but he can also talk to the guy sweeping the floor." But in spite of his early success, he came to believe that his career was hampered by racism after he was denied a partnership at Goldman Sachs, and then was fired by Deutsche Bank some years later.
Whatever combination of greed, hubris, and anger compelled Ingram to commit a crime, its impact continues to reverberate on Wall Street, where he had come to be seen as an African-American success story, a role model whose progress was admiringly chronicled in the press. In 1996 his remarkable ascent was celebrated on the cover of Black Enterprise magazine. In 1997 Crain'sN ew YorkB usinessi ncluded him on its influential "40 Under 40" list.
Since his arrest, blacks who have struggled to establish themselves on Wall Street have expressed concern about a backlash, especially in the wake of Alan Bond, a money manager who is awaiting trial on charges oflooting his clients' accounts, and of Joseph Jett, the rogue trader blamed for taking down Kidder Peabody in the early '90s. "Kevin has to accept accountability for taking us back a few years," sighs a black friend of Ingram's who works on Wall Street. "We'll all have to crawl out from the rubble." Some of his former mentors feel betrayed as well: "This guy has had every break in the world," says Paul Jacobson, who worked closely with Ingram at Goldman and later at Deutsche Bank. "So many powerful guys on the Street tried to make up for the lack of progress for minorities in the industry by helping Kevin. He's let a lot of people down."
EVEN AS HE WAS TAKING UP THE CLOAK AND dagger, Ingram kept one foot in legitimate pursuits. One afternoon in mid-1999 he pulled into the driveway of Corzine's white colonial house in the leafy, prosperous suburb of Summit, New Jersey.The two greeted each other warmly; Corzine had been one of Ingram's closest allies at Goldman Sachs since the '80s, when Ingram worked on the mortgage desk and Corzine headed up government bonds. But both men had since moved on: Ingram was busy raising funds for a new Internet company calledTruMarkets, and Corzine, forced out of Goldman Sachs by his partners, had just kicked off what would be the most expensive campaign ever for a U.S. Senate seat.
Joining them at the house was Gary Morgenthaler, a highly respected venture capitalist from California who had invested millions in TruMarkets, Ingram's drawing-board venture.
Corzine listened attentively as Ingram pitched his idea: an eBay-like system that would pair bond buyers with sellers, side-stepping the big Wall Street dealers and thus saving institutional clients billions in commissions.The appetite for dot-coms was then insatiable, and though others were racing to do the same thing, Corzne believed his old colleague had the edge. He ended up tossing about $1.75 million into the business (which was sold out of bankruptcy proceedings in March). Today Corzine doubts he will ever recoup his invesonent. But he says he's more disturbed by Ingram's emotional malfeasance than he is at his own financial loss. "The tragedy is this guy is a role model for what could be," says Corzine sadly, "the model for a lot of folks who have real dreams of making a successful life in American business. He had a unique personality; he could convince other people to believe in themselves. It's a tragic loss of opportunity. It's tragic for his own life."
INGRAM'S EARLY LIFE WAS MARRED BY TRAGEDY as well. One of five children born to a middleclass family, he grew up in a gritty pocket of North Philadelphia. When Ingram was four, his father Nathan, a 43-year-old property assessor for the city, was found dead in a room at Philadelphia's Sylvania Hotel. Ingram told some colleagues his father had been murdered after he tried to start a construction business that trespassed on the turf of a mobbed-up union. But many relatives believe he committed suicide.
An ambitious entrepreneur, Nathan Ingram owned and managed several inner-city residential properties, and when he died in 1963, his wife Doris, a no-nonsense Bible-literate woman, took over the business. To keep her kids out of trouble she required that each take up a musical instrument. (Kevin chose the saxophone.)
Nathan had the foresight to set up a trust, and all his children went to college. Kevin set off to MIT, and after graduating with a degree in chemical engineering in 1980, he took related courses at Stanford but left in June 1981 to work as an engineer. Soon afterward, Talk has learned, he had his first run-in with the law. In February 1982 he was jailed in Sacramento, California, for passing bad checks and for misdemeanor property theft. Case records have since been destroyed but Ingram served five weekends in jail and was placed on a two-year probation; in 1984 the conviction was set aside.
In September 1982 Ingram returned to Stanford, winning one of the 318 coveted places in that year's freshman business school class; he was encouraged to enroll by a college friend. One former instructor at the top-ranked business school remembers Ingram as a standout student with a maverick streak. For the annual MBA Student Show, Ingram played Mr. T. shaving his hair into a Mohawk to spoof the TV star. Soon afterward he interviewed with a major Wall Street firm. "Most people were trying to look their best and fit the mold," says the teacher. "His attitude was.This is me. Take it or leave it."
It was an attitude that seemed to apply to his personal life as well. While at Stanford, Ingram was married to Aleta Hayes, the daughter of a physician and the valedictorian of her Fresno high school class. A friend recalls that the union lasted barely a year. After graduating from Stanford in June 1984, Ingram headed for Wall Street, where he settled into his first job: working on the mortgage-backed securities desk at Lehman Brothers. It was an inauspicious debut. Mortgages were the financial instrument du jour, and traders required "quant" skills in abundance and quarts of stamina. But coworkers claim Ingram was distinguished mainly by his spotty attendance record: In an office where arriving at 7 a.m. was considered late, he would regularly clock in at 10 a.m. In the fishbowl of a trading desk this behavior would elicit a brusque" 'What the fuck is wrong with you?'" one supervisor remembers." 'I'm having trouble with my girlfriend - our schedules aren't together,' he'd say." Some days Ingram would leave work on his skateboard. "It was weird," the supervisor recalls. "He was a very well-educated guy. And he badly wanted to be successful." But at times he behaved like an unruly child: "He tried to defy almost every rule you set up."
Lehman decided to send Ingram a message by paying him less than his colleagues - a tactic employed by Wall Street firms to get underperforming employees to leave. Ingram took the hint. In January 1986, to the surprise of envious Lehman colleagues, he landed a plwn job at Goldman Sachs, lured there by Paul Jacobson, who ran Goldman's mortgage desk.
At the time, Wall Street firms were under pressure to diversify, and Ingram's advanced math skills made him an especially prized commodity. He was one of only six black bond traders in Goldman's stable.
Eager to redeem himself in his new job, Ingram cultivated an impressive roster of mentors:There was Jacobson, who not only helped hire Ingram at Goldman but would hire him later at Deutsche Bank. And there was Bob Rubin, the cochairman of Goldman from 1990 co 1992, who went on to head the National Economic Council and later serve at Treasury. Rubin had a strong personal relationship with Ingram. "They would talk about issues other than Goldman Sachs," says a former Goldman partner. "You can't get any better than that. Rubin's a no-bullshit guy." (Rubin declined to comment on his former protege.)
As CEO, Corzine would call Ingram into his office for advice on managing the mortgage portfolio. Another Ingram supporter, Michael Mortara, a trader immortalized in the book Liar's Poker, promoted Ingram to head the mortgage desk. Corzine and Mortara badly wanted to see Ingram make partner: Started by German Jews in 1869, Goldman had had just one black partner in its entire history when Ingram arrived. Blacks mainly worked in Goldman's mail room, in the cafeteria, as support staff, or in sales. Corzine and Mortara believed Ingram had the skills to make it to the top of the firm. In 1994, a tough year in the markets, Ingram was told he probably wouldn't be making partner. He was crushed. He was earning $1 million a year based on his trading successes, but he felt he was being held to a higher standard than his white colleagues, says an acquaintance, Earl Graves Jr., CEO of Black Enterprise magazine.
Why wasn't Ingram made partner? "Mike and I had common views that we had a really extraordinary talent on our hands," says Corzine. "But we knew that Kevin would always be difficult to manage. [It was] difficult to understand completely what was driving him." One former partner insists racism had nothing to do with it. Instead he claims Ingram was "falling asleep at the trading desk and not showing up at work for days on end."
Ingram's increasingly flashy lifestyle was conspicuous in the context of Goldman's buttoned-up culture. Ingram began to spend lavishly on clothes. He was partial to Hermes and Zegna ties and Armani, Gucci, and Prada suits. "Kevin was one of the top 25 blacks on Wall. Street, but he was the best dressed," says a friend.A wardrobe of watches expanded to include a Patek Philippe, a Cartier, and multiple Rolexes, including one $20,000 gold model. He also liked to eat well and was a regular at Nobu and Le Cirque. He spent thousands of dollars a year just on champagne, says a close friend; Cristal was his preferred label. He frequently threw big parties.
Ingram encouraged Goldman to hire more blacks, spearheading recruitment efforts at traditionally black colleges. Unlike some other black Goldman executives, Ingram refused to play down his black-ness at the predominately white firm, say sources who note that the talk about one senior black executive was that he had done well at the firm because he'd been adopted as a child by a white family. Instead, Ingram told one friend that he thought of himself as a "Tuskegee airman," recalling the experimental unit of brash black fighter pilots who proved themselves in World War II. Ingram would invite young blacks working in the Goldman Sachs mail room to parties at his apartment, where they would mingle with the likes of Andre Harrell and Russell Simmons. "Kevin had a host of guys rooting for him," says a friend. Increasingly, when he wasn't working he preferred to keep the company of other black professionals and celebrities. Among the shooters in his Saturday morning basketball league were Simmons, Harrell, Puffy Combs, and LL Cool J, as well as prominent black financiers including Advent Capital's Tracy Maitland, Merrill Lynch's Edward Johnson, and Derek Johnson, CEO of the Apollo Theatre Foundation.
In 1996 Ingram was tipped off by his gurus that he was unlikely to make partner that year, either. When his mentor Jacobson jumped to Deutsche Bank and offered him an opportunity to double his salary to $2 million, Ingram informed Mortara he was quitting. Sources say Mortara was furious; he had planned to push Ingram for partner in 1998. "Mike would have gone to the wall for him if he'd stayed and not screwed up," says Corzine.
By then Ingram was also divorcing his second wife, Demetra Harrison, who had been a back-office accountant at Goldman.They'd married in 1988, and their relationship had produced one son. (Right before he married Harrison, Ingram had a son with a woman he once lived with in Brooklyn.) Acquaintances of Ingram's remember Harrison as a quiet, conservative, practical woman who grounded him. But when they divorced, Ingram settled into a luxe Jersey City bachelor pad and began partying harder than ever before. The space was three apartments fashioned into one: There was a small screening room, a pool table, expensive African art, and super-high-end stereo equipment.The garage downstairs housed his brown Bentley and his Harley-Davidson and Ducati motorcycles.
Warming up to his bachelor lifestyle, Ingram dated frequently and enjoyed taking his dates clothes shopping. One associate remembers that he would flip through Vogue until he got to a model he liked, and then call up her agency to ask the model out. After a few years of playing the field, he decided to settle down, and in I 998, he married for the third time, at the tony Water Club in New York. His new wife, Deann Absolam, was almost 15 years younger than he was and about half a foot taller, a sometime Tommy Hilfiger model who had briefly worked as an assistant at Def Jam Records. Like Puffy Combs, Absolam bragged that she never wore the same clothes twice and sometimes wore two Rolexes on her wrist at once.
Friends say Ingram was infatuated with his Gucci-obsessed wife and the lifestyle that thrilled her. He became a regular presence on Manhattan's late-night club scene; he still owns a 2 percent stake in NY, a Soho nightclub where Mariah Carey used to be a regular. As he became increasingly immersed in this nocturnal new world, he cut back time spent with friends who worked on the Street. "The guys who could really help him became a smaller and smaller part of his life," says one former mentor.
For a while, at least, bis social life didn't seem to have any effect on his career. At Deutsche Bank he got off to a good start, successfully hiring away a troop of Goldman colleagues; by mid-1997 his staff numbered about 100. But Edson Mitchell, who was on the bank's management board and ran the firm's global trading operations from London, never liked Ingram.
Ingram's department was highly profitable, grossing nearly $100 million in 1997; that year, his bonus was $3 million. But in 1998 his luck suddenly ran dry.That year, the bond market was knocked off its feet when a massively leveraged hedge fund in Greenwich, Connecticut - Long-Term Capital Management - needed to be bailed out by a collective of other Wall Street firms. In the resulting market turmoil, Ingram's trading desks suffered substantial losses (as did other bond desks on Wall Street). He had recently won a promotion and a transfer to London - the bank had even thrown him a going-away party. Ingram was house hunting in London when he suddenly found out he'd been fired.
Around Deutsche Bank, the word was that Mitchell had tired of Ingram's erratic behavior and frequent absences, and had even issued him a warning. The outraged trader told friends he was convinced that his German bosses had it in for him because he was black, and he contacted Jesse Jackson's staff at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition's Wall Street Project to see if the reverend could intervene. Ingram didn't want his job back; instead, several sources say, be demanded $20 million in severance pay. "It seemed unbelievable to Kevin that he would need the help of Reverend Jackson," remembers Chee Chee Williams, who headed Jackson's Wall Street Project.
In March 1999, at Deutsche Bank's high-tech midtown Manhattan headquarters, Ingram and Jackson met with Mitchell and Josef Ackermann, Deutsche Bank's number two. Ingram argued that white guys who were Mitchell's buddies had lost more money than he had but managed to keep their jobs and pull bigger bonuses. At one point in the meeting, sources say, Ingram began to weep. Jackson "was amazed by how much Kevin was crying," says a source. Finally, Ingram left the 45-minute meeting to regain his composure.
In early May, Ingram and Deutsche Bank convened in Manhattan for another fruitless mediation session. By then Deutsche Bank wanted to force settlement, and so the bank filed suit against Ingram - after he'd filed an action against the bank in the U.K. Large institutions don't tend to sue black employees who have charged them with discrimination, but Deutsche Bank was brutal in its accusations. The firm charged that Ingram had ignored strict limits imposed on his balance sheet, causing the firm financial losses. The bank also complained of missed meetings, unexplained disappearances that often lasted for days at a time. In private, friends speculated that with all his trips to the bathroom and sleepless nights, the trader might be bingeing on drugs (even if they'd never seen him do it). Publicly Deutsche Bank said that Ingram double-dipped on expenses and attempted to charge the firm for a wedding he'd canceled in 1998.
The two sides eventually agreed to an out-of-court settlement, and though Ingram walked away with about $6 million, his battle with Deutsche Bank left him embittered. "The guy had a chip on his shoulder. He was loyal to no one," says one former Goldman partner. "He told me, 'From now on I'm looking out for myself'"
INGRAM WAS NOW POISED FOR A roll with Randy Glass. Glass, a 49-year-old from Boca Raton, Florida, with the affect of a Jewish Joe Pesci, was well known to Florida law enforcement officials. A putative jeweler who also went by the names Randy Goldberg and Randi Goodstein, Glass had bilked diamond and jewelry wholesalers in locales ranging from South America to Toronto out of $6 million. He'd also conned insurance companies by pretending he had been robbed. One phony 1993 claim had Glass telling police on Thanksgiving Day that he had been robbed of $250,000 in diamonds on a Chicago street corner. In April 1996 Glass said burglars had stolen $1 million in jewels from his Palm Beach store. But Glass was careless, and in 1998 he suddenly found himself facing 13 federal charges, which carried a maximum penalty of 130 years.
Desperate to avoid jail, on December 2, 1998, Glass approached the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and said he knew someone involved with illegal arms deals. He agreed to cooperate with an ATF sting if prosecutors helped reduce his jail time.
Five days later Glass called a meeting with Diaa Mohsen, whom he identified to ATF agents as an arms dealer he had met two years earlier at the Taj Mahal casino in Las Vegas. A former Olympic long-jumper who speaks nine languages, Mohsen had been a U.S. citizen for 30 years; he claimed to be a lumber and commodities broker but he'd also worked as a ticket-taker at New Jersey's Meadowlands sports complex. Glass told Mohsen he knew army-base people who could supply him with artillery. Court papers say that Mohsen eagerly inquired about howitzers, grenade launchers, and surface-to-air missiles, and even asked if Glass could get hold of an MR2020, a nuclear-weapon component. The ATF affidavit says that Mohsen told Glass that a friend of Mohsen's-Mohammed "Mike" Malik-was negotiating with an individual who was seeking arms on behalf of an unnamed foreign country. According to court papers, Mohsen says this individual wondered whether Glass would accept heroin as partial payment. By August, court papers say, Mohsen, Malik, and an individual named "Abbas" had flown down to Fort Lauderdale to inspect Glass's goods, which had been assembled by the ATF. Throughout the sting, Glass made tape recordings for the government, and he was talking one night with Diaa Mohsen, say court papers, when Mohsen suddenly said that the Taliban was seeking arms, too.
The question of how Glass would dispose of some of the $32 million in arms payments naturally arose. Mohsen suggested that Glass get in touch with Ingram, whom he'd met through their mutual car detailer, says a source close to Mohsen.
At the time, Ingram, whose Wall Street career had effectively stalled, was restlessly seeking other options. He rented an office at the World Trade Center, which became the base for five new businesses: two restaurant development companies, a Brooklyn realty firm, a company that would form the basis of TruMarkets, and BIA (for Black-Italian-Arab) Construction Corp. Diaa Mohsen and a New Jersey contractor named Rocco Romeo were partners in BIA.
Ingram took his first meeting with Glass and Mohsen at the World Trade Center in June I999, according to an ATF affidavit. Glass handed the fallen trader $100,000 in cash and told Ingram that the money was proceeds from illegal weapons sales. A paranoid Ingram asked Glass to "retract" the statement - perhaps suspecting that Glass was wearing a wire (which he was). Calming down, Ingram handed Glass a check for $9,000 - keeping $9,000 for himself as a commission.
There is a memo from this period outlining Ingram's plan for the "IAM Global Money Fund" - just as if he were presenting to a Ford pension-fund executive. Ingram detailed how the crew might start a $30-million fund outside of government regulation. In his bulleted one-page "Executive Summary," Ingram proposed setting up an offshore account with an initial investment between $25 million and $30 million.
The intrigue clearly whetted Ingram's appetite. One month later he called Glass to discuss ways that he could launder $250,000, says the affidavit. On August 4 Glass invited Mohsen and Ingram to a meeting at his Boca Raton residence, where he was joined by two undercover agents. A government videotape showed the five men drinking Gatorade as Ingram diagrammed plans to set up the Cayman Islands fund on white poster board.
As the meeting drew to a close, Glass dumped money out of a black trash bag. He passed Ingram and Mohsen the $250,000, says the government affidavit. Mohsen then transferred the money into a black carry-on bag. Ingram got on a computer to send instructions on wiring $227,500 of his own money (minus his nine percent commission, of course) to an account in London he didn't realize had been set up by federal agents. Mohsen and Ingram then tooled away in Ingram's Ferrari Spider, high on the glucose of quick cash.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1999 INGRAM also decided to pursue a potentially more lucrative project: an Internet venture that would challenge the very desks at Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank he used to work for. TruMarkets would be a cheaper, more efficient alternative to the old-fashioned way.
Morgenthaler Ventures checked out Ingram with his old boss Robert Rubin shortly after signing on as TruMarkets's lead investor. In January 2000 the company was launched from nondescript offices in Manhattan directly across tl1e street from the Empire State Building. Ronald Blaylock joined Jon Corzine as an equity investor.
Ingram, CEO of the newly minted venture, threw in $3 million of his own money and hired about 50 people. In December 2000 the technology looked so promising that Morgenthaler recruited two Wall Street luminaries for the board: former Merrill Lynch president Herbert Allison and former Charles Schwab COO Ronald Readmond. But by
early 200 I the party suddenly ran out of champagne.
TruMarkets software was in trouble. By January 2001, Ingram had been replaced as CEO by Readmond - because Ingram had trouble sticking to a budget, says one major investor. TruMarkets had hired Morgan Stanley's former international chief information officer to rebuild the software. But after three months of 90-hour weeks, TruMarkets had ripped through some $30 million in all and missed its launch deadline. Venture capitalists were now fleeing dot-corns in droves. Ingram, who remained at TruMarkets as a director, struggled to find additional financing. But no one bit.
Early in 2001 Ingram threw himself into negotiations with MortgageSight, a consortium ofWall Street firms. But in the middle of the negotiations, Ingram suddenly disappeared. People were saying at one point that he'd traveled to Switzerland, one investor recalls. On March 29, 2001, creditors threw ilie company into Chapter 7 - involuntary bankruptcy - on the same day MortgageSight reached an agreement to buy the firm.
EVEN AS INGRAM FACED MOUNTING business pressures, the feds were moving in for the sting's third - and final - act. In June, an undercover ATF agent met with Ingram to clean $ 2.2 million dollars gleaned from arms sales. Instead of offering to take the cash and wire the money, Ingram said he knew a guy with a Learjet who could fly the cash out of the country, according to an ATF affidavit. The idea was that the agent's London-based partner would meet Ingram and Walter Kapij for the hand-off. Ingram would take a 20 percent cut ($440,000); Kapij would expect five percent ($110,000), say court papers.
On June 12 the agent rendezvoused with Ingram at a Fort Lauderdale hotel, where Ingram inttoduced airplane broker Kapij as his partner, according to the ATF affidavit. (Kapij had been a golfing buddy of Ingram's, says Ka pi j's attorney James Eisenberg.) Another special agent then arrived at the hotel with the money. The government says Ingram and Kapij accepted the two cases and were arrested on the spot. "All of a sudden there were agents pointing guns at them," says Eisenberg.
When news of Ingram's arrest broke, his TruMarkets colleagues were dumbfounded. "It was like an April Fool's joke," says one big investor. "This was not the person I had known. Kevin put his heart and soul in buildingTruMarkets. He was a person of unbelievable energy, ethical to a fault in his treatment of employees and customers."
Ingram spent three weeks in the Palm Beach County jail. His twin sister Karen came to visit him, but his mother did not; Ingram didn't want her to see him in jail.
Meanwhile top blacks on Wall Street are distancing themselves from Ingram. "I definitely heard the buzz on the beach at Martha's Vineyard this summer," says Lawrence Otis Graham, author of Our Kind of People:I nside America'sB lack Upper Class. "A lot of successful blacks are always worried about things that will reflect poorly on the group .... This came up when Alan Bond was in the paper, and it came up with Kevin Ingram." Still, Graham notes that Ingram was never much of a presence in the civic and philanthropic worlds, and that his presence won't be missed as much as Bond's.
Attorneys for Mohsen and Malik believe that other people may be implicated as Ingram casts about for ways to reduce his jail time. Malik's attorney James Eisenberg offers cryptically, "Ingram's got information on more than just the clients in this case." In a sidewalk chat in front of the courthouse in West Palm Beach, Ingram's lawyer Richard Lubin is quick to point out, "The only illegality my client has been involved in is this one."
Lubin, who is among the best-known criminal attorneys in Palm Beach County, remains upbeat. He believes Ingram will be sentenced to only two or three years in jail - and maybe less-for cooperating with the government.
In the meantime, Ingram's alleged coconspirators are busily preparing their defenses. Mohsen and Malik will claim that Randy Glass convinced them that Glass was a U.S. government employee selling arms on behalf of a U.S. government agency, say lawyers Rodriguez and Eisenberg. "Glass let it be known that this was a covert operation similar to Iran-contra," says Eisenberg. "He convinced these guys he was working for a clandestine U.S. government agency." Kapij will maintain that he was merely offering a hitchhiker - Ingram - a ride to Europe. And Glass is now serving a seven-month jail term.
Ingram is busy too, asking friends and family to write letters to the court on his behalf. Some will vouch for him and some won't.
"Kevin allowed his integrity to be compromised in his lust to continue to get paid," says a friend and former coworker. "You can't be willing to compromise your integrity to eat at Le Cirque or La Cote Basque every night." ■
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https://www.nydailynews.com/2001/03/04/real-wanna-bebop-revival-harlem-theater-coveted/
By NEW YORK DAILY NEWS | NYDN@medianewsgroup.com
UPDATED: January 11, 2019 at 5:12 AM EST
Long before Bill Clinton, Magic Johnson’s movie theaters and Starbucks came on the scene, Harlem was home to bebop music. And there was no better place to hear the greats than a little neighborhood club called Minton’s Playhouse.
Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Miles Davis and all the legends played there, oftentimes walking in off the street and joining in with house horn player Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis or whoever was on stage.
Other nights, the crowd would hear the city’s two best trumpeters, Dizzy Gillespie and Roy Eldridge, duking it out.
There were more ritzy clubs in the late 1940s and early 1950s, or more famous ones, such as Smalls or Birdland. But those who truly appreciated bebop – a fast, irreverent and exhilarating offshoot of jazz – would go uptown to Henry Minton’s place, where patrons kept the conversation low and soaked in the music till dawn.
But that was another age.
The club closed in 1974 after going disco, and though Harlem is coming back with new businesses, brownstone restorations and maybe the offices of a former Pesident, no one has been able to make Minton’s sing again.
Five years ago, a group fronted by actor Robert De Niro and restaurateurs Melba Wilson and Drew Neiporent pitched plans to turn the W. 118th St. club into a restaurant and jazz hangout. But they went nowhere.
In 1999, Wall Street investor-turned-developer Kevin Ingram secured a $570,000 loan from the local federal empowerment zone to spruce up the joint.
His plans, too, ended on a flat note: Ingram never took out the loan and hasn’t been heard from in nine months.
Last month, a deadly fire ripped through the old but refurbished Cecil Hotel, where Minton’s is located. The playhouse wasn’t damaged, though in truth there was not much left worth saving.
The birthplace of bebop is now just a shell, its austere but cozy wooden tables cleared out long ago and its hallowed stage stripped bare.
If the words “Minton’s Playhouse” were not still spelled out in neon lights on the building’s facade, few passersby would know the club ever existed.
“I went by there to see it one day. It seems to be in limbo,” said artist Vincent Smith, 71, who frequented the club during its heyday and featured it in a glass mosaic he created for the 116th St./Lenox Ave. subway stop. “It’s really a shame.
”
Claire Haaga, president of Housing and Services Inc., which has turned the Cecil Hotel into a senior-citizen apartment building, said she has fielded random inquiries and has had “very preliminary” talks with restaurateurs about the empty playhouse.
But no one has come forward with the $2 million she estimates it will take to reopen Minton’s and a connected storefront on St. Nicholas Ave. as a jazz club and 125-seat restaurant.
“None of the other jazz clubs in the city have expressed interest,” she said. “I don’t know if they have the willingness or the ability to be in expansion mode.”
Still, Haaga remains hopeful that Harlem’s revitalization will one day include Minton’s.
Another jazz landmark, the Lenox Lounge on Lenox Ave. between 124th and 125th streets, reopened a year ago as a restaurant.
Terry Lane, president and CEO of the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, which has administered millions in federal redevelopment loans in Harlem, including the now-expired grant to Ingram, said funds are still available for anyone who wants to tackle the project.
“It’s like a magical name – you know what I mean?” asked Smith. “People will gravitate to the place because of the name and what it means
By Landon Thomas Jr. / Dec. 30, 2016
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Anshu Jain, left, and Jürgen Fitschen, co-chief executives of Deutsche Bank, at a shareholder meeting in 2015.
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The London home where William Broeksmit, the brains behind Mr. Mitchell’s ambition for Deutsche to become a leading derivatives bank, killed himself in 2014.
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In 2005, Deutsche Bank, then a powerhouse in the selling of risky derivatives on a global scale, was minting money.
To mark the moment, the bank’s profit engine — its global markets division — commissioned a book about itself. The remembrance would celebrate how Deutsche Bank, once a sleepy lender to German car companies, had transformed itself in just 10 years into a force in financial engineering, selling interest-rate swaps, credit derivatives and opaque tax-slashing investment vehicles to the world’s wealthy elite.
In the view of one senior executive, it all came down to masterly salesmanship by a single man, Anshu Jain, the chief promoter of the bank’s hottest product: risk.
“The size just kept mounting and mounting,” this person marveled in a passage in the book, referring to the growing demand for some of Deutsche’s raciest fare. And it was Mr. Jain, the bank’s eventual leader, who “dramatically accelerated that delivery of complex structures to the broader client base.”
Today, these words read more like an epitaph than a commemoration. On Dec. 22, the bank agreed to pay $7.2 billion to settle a claim with the Justice Department that it pushed toxic mortgages on investors in the years leading up to the American housing bust.
The fine was one of the last — and among the stiffest — penalties imposed upon global investment banks by the Obama administration for their role in the financial crisis. And it was also a fitting coda to a turbulent 21-year run by the trading and banking unit at Deutsche that was inspired by three derivative specialists who had been poached from Wall Street years earlier.
In addition to Mr. Jain, they included Edson Mitchell, a charismatic builder of businesses at Merrill Lynch who, in 1995, was given a mandate by Deutsche to create a world-class investment bank in London and spare no expense in doing so.
Mr. Mitchell recruited two colleagues from Merrill to help him in his task. William S. Broeksmit, a derivatives trader with a risk manager’s nose for spotting financial dangers, was one. And Mr. Jain, then just coming into his own as a purveyor of the exotic to hedge funds around the world, joined him.
Today, two of these three men are dead.
Mr. Mitchell died in a plane crash in 2000 at age 47. Mr. Broeksmit committed suicide in 2014 at 58.
As for the 53-year-old Mr. Jain, his carefully crafted plan to finish what his mentor, Mr. Mitchell, started at Deutsche Bank has ended in disappointment.
In the years since the financial crisis, many investment banks have had to pay significant amounts to atone for their various sins. And while the sum of Deutsche’s fines is in the middle of the pack, the bank has been drawn into some of finance’s furthest frontiers when it comes to the pursuit of profit.
Deutsche has been a primary offender in two of the biggest banking scandals of the past decade: promoting toxic mortgages to unwitting investors and manipulating for profit the main lending rate for banks in London. In the process, it has agreed to pay over $9 billion in fines and consumer relief. The bank has sold tax-reduction products to hedge funds, and is alleged to have helped Russian investors illegally move money overseas.
This is also a bank that marketed complex derivatives to Europe’s sickliest bank, Monte dei Paschi in Italy. And it is one of the largest lenders to Donald J. Trump, having extended roughly $300 million in loans to the president-elect’s businesses.
Analysts calculate that of the 20 billion euros in profits that Deutsche’s trading and banking unit accumulated since 1995, as much as 15 billion euros will ultimately be returned to regulators via fines and penalties. Of course, not all of this lands in the lap of Mr. Mitchell — and more recently, Mr. Jain.
The investment bank they created remains a power in bond and foreign currency trading worldwide. And from the beginning, it was overseen by a strong-willed German board that knew well the risks and rewards that came with such a business.
It is also the case that when Mr. Jain became co-chief executive of Deutsche in 2012, one of his first priorities was lowering the bank’s risk, which he did by unloading opaque, hard-to-trade assets. In spring 2015, Mr. Jain put in place his own plan for reforming the bank, which his C.E.O. successor, John M. Cryan, has not entirely abandoned.
That said, Mr. Cryan has made it clear that his Deutsche Bank will be markedly different from Mr. Jain’s. Since taking over last year, Mr. Cryan has preached simplicity, less risk, better internal controls and reduced reliance on derivatives. As for the investment bank he inherited from Mr. Jain, he has said that he is committed to it but that it will be a very different institution under him.
Through spokesmen, Mr. Jain and Deutsche Bank declined to comment.
Following Mr. Trump’s election, Deutsche’s stock has been on a tear, up over 30 percent on the hope that the combination of a banking-friendly president and a more cautious leadership under Mr. Cryan will help the bank chart a new path.
When an investment bank trips up in spectacular fashion, human misfortune is often a consequence. That could mean a cashiered chief executive seeing his career and reputation ruined. Or a rogue trader who loses billions of dollars and ends up in prison.
But there have been few instances in which the personal toll surrounding a bank’s rise and fall has been as profound as this one.
By December 2000, Mr. Mitchell seemed to have accomplished the impossible. In just five years, he had hired thousands of traders and bankers from firms all over Wall Street (an effort that got a boost by the acquisition of Bankers Trust in 1999), forging not just a strong culture but also a highly profitable business.
While there were numerous deposit-driven banks in Europe that made a play for American investment banking business in the 1980s and 1990s, none did it with the zeal of Deutsche Bank under Mr. Mitchell and later Mr. Jain.
Even before he moved to London, Mr. Mitchell had developed a reputation for being one of Wall Street’s premier recruiters, with a pied-piper-like ability to attract, and keep, the best traders and bankers around. He had a special methodology in his choosing, inclining toward those who came from big families and played team sports in college, because he felt that these traits would give him “athletes” capable of working well together in the large competitive grouping of a trading floor.
“It was as if entropy was his vision — that out of this chaos would emerge a greater efficiency,” said Kevin Ingram, a former top bond executive at Goldman Sachs whom Mr. Mitchell recruited in 1996 and who left Deutsche Bank in 1998 and later pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges. “He did an extraordinary job in managing egos.”
At Merrill, Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Jain and Mr. Broeksmit had used their expertise in derivatives and swaps to carve out market share from established players like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. As Mr. Broeksmit would recount in an unpublished interview with a reporter for Bloomberg News, the strategy worked because of Mr. Jain’s skill, while at Merrill, in enticing his hedge-fund clients into volatile yet profitable investments — such as bond futures, swaps and other derivatives.
“He was persistent and persuasive and able to show it would make good economic sense,” Mr. Broeksmit said, according to an email exchange with the reporter. Mr. Broeksmit’s son, Val, provided documents and email communications from Mr. Broeksmit’s files to The New York Times. A musician, the younger Mr. Broeksmit taught himself finance, and for several years he has been looking into his father’s career at Deutsche in a search for answers as to why he took his life.
The plan was to use a similar strategy in London with Deutsche Bank.
“I remember Edson called me up and said, ‘I have just been given the keys to the kingdom at Deutsche Bank — we can do whatever we want,’” recalled Michael G. Philipp, one of the first Merrill executives to follow Mr. Mitchell to Deutsche; “2,500 people in 18 months — it has never been done since.”
Mr. Mitchell’s untimely death in 2000 was a devastating blow to the bank and more so to his many friends and followers. But it did not alter the bank’s mission, the mantle of which was eventually taken on by Mr. Jain.
By the time of the financial crisis, 90 percent of the bank’s profits would come from the London-based global market’s division — fueled mostly by derivatives-driven trading bets and its dominant positions as a foreign currency trader.
All that changed in late 2008.
With one investment bank after another going bust, Deutsche’s board had become increasingly concerned as to the bank’s derivatives holdings, according to documents reviewed by The Times. In October 2008 the bank’s derivatives exposure, net of cash collateral, was 181 billion euros, these documents show, a sizable sum given its equity cushion of just 30 billion euros.
Starting in 2007, Mr. Jain had already taken steps to materially reduce Deutsche’s risk profile. However, he and his team pushed back hard against the view that the investment bank’s power should be significantly curtailed.
“This underlines the paradox of D.B.,” read a briefing paper for Mr. Jain prepared in advance of the bank’s general executive committee meeting in mid-December 2008. “However much some at the G.E.C. would like to see D.B. return to its roots as a continental commercial bank, it is clear that international sales and trading will represent the bulk of value creation at D.B.”
Sales and trading would also become the focus for regulators in Germany, London and the United States who, in the wake of the crisis, cracked down severely. The $7.2 billion penalty announced in December represents, in effect, the final bill to be paid toward the Mitchell and Jain plan of paying bankers outsize sums to take outsize risks in pursuit of outsize profits.
Of course, it was an approach that was endorsed by the leadership in Frankfurt, not least Josef Ackermann, Deutsche’s chief from 2002 to 2012, who encouraged these bold gambits.
As the fines and scandals mounted, though, especially the rigging scheme involving a key interest rate known as the London Interbank Offered Rate — in which Deutsche played a central role — even bankers who had been along for the ride wondered if it had been worth it. “Shame on what is happening to DBK,” wrote Martin Loat, a retired Deutsche Bank executive, to Mr. Broeksmit in December 2013, using the common shorthand of Deutsche’s stock ticker.
“I was negative on big banks and very vocal to Joe on bonuses. The then-1.6 trillion euro balance sheet on 50 billion euros of equity was plain stupid. I also disliked credit derivatives with a passion. But Libor and other thefts — that even ultra-cynic Martin never believed could happen,” he wrote, referring to himself.
For many senior bankers, eye-watering losses and regulatory crackdowns are part of the cold calculation of a Wall Street career that can, quite suddenly, veer from triumph to ignominy.
Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Jain were such men — exceedingly confident risk takers with thick public skins. Bill Broeksmit, a behind-the-scenes technician with an acute sense of the rights and wrongs in finance, was not.
And that is why his sad end carries a larger resonance as the business model that his two close colleagues put in place ultimately failed the institution and the many who had devoted their lives to it. He was, in many ways, the connective tissue linking Mr. Mitchell to his protégé Mr. Jain in their management of the bank.
Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Broeksmit were close friends, working together for more than a decade at Merrill and bonding over a shared love of Maine, where they decamped each summer. After Mr. Mitchell’s death, Mr. Broeksmit would form a bond with Mr. Jain, offering advice to him, via official and unofficial channels, as to Deutsche’s fluctuating risk profile.
Within Deutsche, Mr. Broeksmit was seen to be Mr. Jain’s eyes and ears when it came to tracking various trading positions and risk exposures.
Mr. Broeksmit was always an ardent advocate for Mr. Jain. He was the Deutsche Bank executive who cited Mr. Jain’s salesmanship abilities as a formative contributor to the bank’s early success in the book that celebrated the unit’s 10-year anniversary.
Mr. Broeksmit had originally been persuaded by Mr. Mitchell to move to London with the first wave of Merrill Lynch defectors in 1995 and 1996. As the brains behind Mr. Mitchell’s ambition for Deutsche to become a leading derivatives bank, he was what financial hands call a plumber — an expert in the piping and flow of money, largely unknown beyond the trading floor.
Bookish, though not without a touch of the trader’s swagger, Mr. Broeksmit was also a man of loyalties, always quick to share the burdens of a friend in need. So when Mr. Jain asked him to take on a larger risk role at Deutsche in 2007, he said yes, even though he had been enjoying his more relaxed life as private consultant after stepping down as a full-time executive.
After a time, though, the drumbeat of investigations began to wear on him.
There was Deutsche’s role in the rate-rigging scandal, for which it paid $2.5 billion, the highest sum of the roughly $9 billion paid by major investment banks.
There was a $55 million fine Deutsche had to pay for misstating its derivatives positions. And finally, there were the withering criticisms by the New York Fed regarding Deutsche’s troubled American operations — where, at the behest of Mr. Jain, Mr. Broeksmit had become a member of the board.
In the days after Mr. Broeksmit’s death in early 2014, Mr. Jain ordered up a report, with help from outside lawyers, to determine whether the suicide had been work-related. Mr. Broeksmit’s ties, direct or indirect, to Deutsche’s many regulatory woes were examined in detail. In September of that year, the report concluded that there was “nothing that shows a direct link between Bill’s death and his work at Deutsche Bank.”
The executives who produced the report said that he was “not unhappy” during his last days at the bank in 2013. He had officially stepped down that summer, although, in his usual style, he was not cutting ties completely, staying on as a director at Deutsche’s New York Bank. “Had my retirement luncheon hosted by Anshu last week,” Mr. Broeksmit wrote to a friend that November. “It’s the third time I have retired!”
The extent to which Deutsche’s legal woes played a role in Mr. Broeksmit’s untimely death remains a mystery.
In mid-2013, with investigations into Deutsche’s conduct mounting, Mr. Broeksmit did pay a visit to a psychiatrist in London that became part of the coroner’s examination into his death. According to the doctor’s diagnosis, Mr. Broeksmit had “imagined being investigated, being prosecuted, losing his wealth and his reputation.” But, in the same letter, the doctor said his patient recognized that these thoughts were not a “realistic possibility,” even if they caused him sleeplessness and anxiety.
There are no records of Mr. Broeksmit paying further visits to a psychiatrist in the year before his death.
Outwardly, friends and colleagues do not recall Mr. Broeksmit showing signs of stress, although they do say he had always been very private in terms of his inner life. While he peppered his lawyers for updates on various investigations, he also made plans with a group of former colleagues to take a ski trip in February.
But on Jan. 26, 2014, instead of meeting his wife and son for lunch, Mr. Broeksmit slung a dog leash over a door in his London home, and hanged himself from it. Left by his side was a neat stack of company documents related to Deutsche’s New York banking operations, and suicide notes addressed to relatives, as well as one to Mr. Jain.
“You were good to me,” Mr. Broeksmit wrote to the man he had known for over 30 years, adding, “I am eternally sorry.”
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 1, 2017, Section BU, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: The High Price of Deutsche’s Fall. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
By Andrew Rice, a features writer at New York Magazine
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1One sweltering late-spring morning in Fort Lauderdale, not far from where he kept his 44-foot yacht, Kevin Ingram went to a breakfast meeting at a hotel. In the lobby, a 12-story atrium with glassed-in elevators and an enormous grottolike fountain surrounded by tropical plants and café tables, he met his contact, who went by the name Ray Spears. A Learjet was waiting to fly Ingram to Europe once their business was done.
“Do you want a cup of coffee?” Spears asked.
“Yeah, that’s good,” Ingram replied. “How are you doing?”
“We’re ready,” Spears said. “It was a long, long night.”
The date was June 12, 2001. Spears was about to hand Ingram $2.2 million in cash, proceeds from a recent deal. Ingram had agreed to carry it overseas in return for a 25 percent cut.
For most of the previous decade, Ingram had worked at Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, where he specialized in trading mortgage-backed securities. He had a mind for mathematics, degrees from MIT and Stanford, and a talent for reckoning the complexities of risk. His success as a bond trader had made him one of most prominent Black men on Wall Street, where his colleagues knew him to be charming, cocksure, and game for adventure. He liked to go cliff diving. He raced around on motorcycles. By night in New York, he lived fabulously, blasting Biggie Smalls from the rolled-down windows of his green Bentley and mixing it up in the clubs with hip-hop moguls.
At the Fort Lauderdale hotel, Ingram introduced Spears to an associate, the guy who had arranged for the private jet, his golfing buddy Walter Kapij. The three men sat down at a table in the atrium.
“We are all set,” Ingram told Spears. “We are going to do it like I said.” Spears handed Ingram and Kapij an envelope containing a piece of paper on which he had written the address of the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London, along with a photo of a man they were to meet.
“This gentleman,” Kapij said. “Have you known him for quite a long time?”
“Oh, yeah,” Spears replied. “This is our guy. I mean — you know what I do.”
“No, actually, I don’t know a lot about what you do at all,” Kapij said. “I have no idea.”
“Kevin,” Spears said, gingerly. “I want to, you know …”
“Right,” Ingram said.
“You need to know, okay. I mean, this, this, this, this money is, is, you know …”
“Important,” Ingram said.
“It’s important,” Spears said, before clarifying: “It’s coming in from arms shipments.”
“Um-hum,” Ingram replied.
“And I need you to protect that,” Spears said.
“Okay,” Ingram said.
Spears made a call to someone in a waiting car. “I’m not going to be driving around with $2.2 million without a guy,” he said, by way of explanation.
The guy entered the lobby carrying two suitcases and handed them to Ingram.
“Take care,” Spears said and walked away. Then he muttered an order into his microphone. “Let’s go, baby,” he said. “Both, do both.”
Federal law-enforcement officers surrounded Ingram and Kapij, flashed their badges, and took them into custody. The man Ingram knew as Ray Spears — actually an undercover agent — would later recall, “I don’t think Ingram was surprised.” After all, he understood risk.
BIZ BIG BUSTED IN ARMS SALE RING, screamed the headline in the New York Post, then the nation’s most influential purveyor of gossip and scandal. Two other suspects, an Egyptian and a Pakistani, had been arrested separately on the same day, after being lured into a warehouse in West Palm Beach that was filled with crates of machine guns and surface-to-air missiles. “A Wall Street hotshot and three other men have been busted in a spy-novel tale of arms smuggling and money laundering,” the tabloid reported, “aimed at putting high-tech Stinger missiles in terrorists’ hands.” In reality, the arms were props and the deal was staged by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms — the culmination of an elaborate undercover operation.
Court filings were oblique about where the black-market arms were supposed to be headed, referring only to “people abroad” in a “foreign country.” But the Post was happy to guess at the most obvious customer: the “terror master Osama bin Laden.” In the summer of 2001, bin Laden was already a figure of morbid fascination, a cinematic villain whose call for global jihad was drawing thousands of zealous young men to training camps in Afghanistan. The notion that a conspiracy might stretch all the way from him to Ingram — a finance star who was married to a model and counted the Reverend Jesse Jackson as a friend — made an irresistible tale. Talk, the buzzy magazine edited by Tina Brown and financed by Harvey Weinstein’s movie studio, published a juicy profile headlined “Wall Street’s Soldier of Fortune.”
Ingram would end up striking a deal: He pleaded guilty to a single charge of money laundering, without admitting knowledge of any arms deal, in August 2001. It turned out to be fortunate timing. Just two weeks later, a team of 19 operatives dispatched by bin Laden blew America’s prosperous complacency to smithereens; it’s not hard to imagine that if Ingram’s proceedings continued into the era of vengeance and misjudgment that followed, he could have drawn a far harsher sentence. But the lack of a trial also meant there would be no public examination of some of the case’s murkier questions. In subsequent years, the case was swallowed by War on Terror secrecy. Ingram himself was largely forgotten, except by the handful of people who knew him in his Wall Street days — and they remember him vividly. “To us, he was the Black version of Gordon Gekko,” says Philmore Anderson, a Black entertainment executive who was friendly with him.
In 2018, I got in touch with Ingram, and after much back-and-forth, he agreed to meet me in Manhattan. He was casually dressed, still fit and handsome at 60, and had come in from Philadelphia to have dinner with a yoga instructor. “My life is great right now,” he told me. Since his release from prison in 2004, he said, he had gotten back into finance and made investments in the legalized cannabis industry.
Ingram pressed me to explain the “risk-reward” of telling his story. I told him I was writing a book about 2000 — the year that I thought America went awry, culturally and politically. The televised drama of little Elián González, the birth of the reality-show craze, Donald Trump’s absurd first campaign for president, the early stages of the September 11 plot, the 36-day legal battle over the impossibly close presidential election, finally decided by the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore — it was all happening at the same time and, to an eerie degree, converging in the same place: Florida. I was intrigued by Ingram, a man whose life intersected with many of the other characters in my book — including Trump, whom he had inadvertently helped to rescue from financial oblivion — and who had taken his own wrong turn in the Sunshine State. I told Ingram I was getting some documents about his case from the government, but that I would much rather hear his version of events directly.
Ingram with Randy Glass (center) and Diaa Mohsen in 1999. Photo: David Friedman/Getty Images
Ingram told me he would think about it. He ended up spending many hours with me, unspooling a long story that was hard to believe and, more often than not, verifiably true. Ingram swore to me from the beginning that it was all a “made-up” crime. He wasn’t innocent, but it turned out he wasn’t entirely wrong, either.
“Iwas a bit flamboyant,” Ingram told me over lunch a few months after our first meeting. At a time when minority representation in high finance was minuscule, many of his few Black peers kept their voices down as they assimilated into the white-dominated industry, but Ingram always lived loud. “I was from my neighborhood,” he said. “And all the Black guys warned me, ‘You can’t act like this.’ I was like, ‘Yes, I can.’”
Ingram came from North Philadelphia. Over the course of his childhood in the 1960s and ’70s, his rowhouse neighborhood was hollowed out by drugs, crime, and neglect. But Kevin’s family was upwardly mobile. His father, Nathan, was wounded in France during the Second World War; afterward, he became a real-estate appraiser and eventually went into property investing. He died when Kevin was just 5 years old. In later years, Ingram would hint to friends that there was mystery surrounding the circumstances, suggesting that his dad might have been murdered by mobsters. In fact, the cause had been determined to be suicide.
Kevin was a math prodigy. He went to Central High, a magnet school for top achievers, and even there he hardly had to study. He also played the saxophone and would stay out late performing at jazz cabarets. At MIT, he majored in chemical engineering and won a prestigious scholarship for graduate study at Stanford. But after a while he tired of laboratory work, switched to business school, and took his M.B.A. to Wall Street in 1984.
He arrived at a Promethean moment. Banks were experimenting with mortgage securitization, bundling and redividing individual loans into complex debt instruments. Eventually, the market would become so incomprehensibly large that a housing downturn would send waves of destruction across the global economy. But that was still 20 profitable years away. Ingram went to Goldman Sachs, where he was one of just a handful of Black bond traders. Within a few years, he was promoted to head the bank’s mortgage-trading desk. “People tend to think of this as a mystical area, but it’s really a practice,” he told Black Enterprise in 1992, when the magazine included him in a special issue ranking the “25 Hottest Blacks on Wall Street.”
“Kevin Ingram — he was like the Black guy who was still a Black guy, operating at the top of a firm,” says Jerry McMillan, a Goldman colleague at the time, who is also Black.
Ingram quit Goldman in the mid-1990s, angry that a better-connected colleague — Steven Mnuchin, whose father had been on the bank’s managing committee — made partner in a year that he was passed over. (“I resented it,” Ingram told me, of the man who would go on to become Trump’s Treasury secretary. “I was more talented than Steve Mnuchin in every respect.”) Ingram was recruited by an upstart competitor, Deutsche Bank, to run its department handling mortgage bonds and other asset-backed securities. His staff there moved into an unexplored niche: securitizing commercial real-estate loans. One of Ingram’s hires would make a major loan that revitalized the career of a spectacularly uncreditworthy developer: Donald Trump.
In 1997, Ingram’s desk had a profitable year, and he received a multimillion-dollar bonus. By this time, he was engaged to a glamorous model. Her name was Deann, but everyone called her Sparkle. “We were jet-setters,” she said in 2019. “It was fabulous. It was like we were living the life. He was a dream boyfriend.” Sparkle had worked for a time at Def Jam, the record label founded by Russell Simmons, and she offered Ingram entrée to the hip-hop elite. The two went to Sean Combs’s parties, where talent from his label, Bad Boy Entertainment, mixed with gangsters, celebrities, and white CEOs seeking to associate themselves with street culture. Ingram made a silent investment with a nightclub owner who was renovating an old printing shop in Soho. The club, NV (pronounced “envy”), became a hot spot.
Ingram hung out with Simmons and Andre Harrell, another label boss. “Russell and especially Andre — they were intrigued,” Ingram said. “Because I was from such a different world and so successful.” Sometimes Ingram played in pickup basketball games where the hip-hop guys faced off against the Black finance guys. Ingram was small but tough — he would run into a hard foul and pop right back up. “We would always kick their ass, and that you can quote me on,” recalls one of Ingram’s banker teammates. “One minute you could be playing basketball with Puffy or Russell or Andre, and the next minute you could be talking to the CEO of an insurance company about his portfolio of risk and selling him a couple hundred million worth of securities.”
Among his friends, Ingram was renowned for functioning at a high level on little or no sleep. He could go to work at 6 a.m., get off at 6 p.m., and stay out until last call. “Sometimes you’re too smart,” says McMillan. “You feel invincible. You start to test yourself. You start to come into the office a little late, still hung-over. And you come into the meeting, and these guys slept eight hours last night, had their coffee, had their sparkling water, and you’re still the smartest guy in the room. Kevin was the smartest guy in the room. Anyone who doesn’t tell you that is a liar.”
The problem was that, at some point, Ingram was no longer making it into the room. During his later years at Goldman Sachs, Ingram’s co-workers had noted that he would go absent from work for curious periods of time. At Deutsche Bank, the pattern reemerged. Ingram contends he was working constantly but that he also required periods of quiet. “Some people like to call it depression,” he says. “I just like to turn all the lights out, and I don’t think about anything for a day or two.” A psychiatrist would later give him a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.
In September 1998, Ingram and Sparkle married in an over-the-top Brooklyn ceremony. At the same time, instability in Russia and Asia caused Ingram’s department to lose “a boatload of money,” a bank source later told a trade publication. “It was — bang, you’re dead,” said another. Deutsche Bank asked for Ingram’s resignation. He refused, noting that other executives — who were, of course, white —had lost more money yet kept their jobs. Ingram threatened a discrimination lawsuit and called in Jesse Jackson to make his case.
The fight went on for months, and during this stressful limbo period his erratic patterns turned more self-destructive. “Bad decisions,” Sparkle says. “Bad financial decisions, bad friend decisions.” Ingram was going through one of his “hyper” phases, devising and discarding numerous business ideas. He wanted to reopen the old Harlem jazz club Minton’s. He invested in reviving a beloved chicken-and-waffles joint. He formed a company called Mastermind Entertainment, hoping to break into the hip-hop industry. He flitted into real estate, striking a tentative deal to develop a property near NV.
Ultimately, Ingram pressured Deutsche Bank into giving him a substantial severance package. His contentious departure corresponded with the frenzied height of the dot-com boom. Ingram and a former Deutsche colleague started to collaborate on a technology start-up, developing an online platform for bond trading. Ingram thought it was a billion-dollar idea. But it needed angel investors. He was looking for cash. And he met a man who said he had a lot of it: Randy Glass.
The federal criminal investigation known as Operation Sphinx was the creation of a lifelong grifter. Born Randy Goldberg in Baltimore, Randy Glass danced in and out of crime, ran carwashes, managed a 1970s singer-songwriter, and smuggled hashish from Morocco before finding his way to Florida and the international diamond trade. He was incarcerated for a year for cocaine possession and had a record of arrests for small-time scams, like the one where he convinced some marks to trade their house for supposedly “rare” postage stamps. Glass was shameless. He later described his philosophy to Dateline NBC: “If I couldn’t talk you out of it,” he said, “you got to keep it.”
In 1998, Glass got pinched on federal fraud and money-laundering charges. An indictment alleged he had bilked wholesale dealers out of consigned jewelry worth $6 million. Glass told one victim that his diamonds had been taken by “Mafia connected” people and another that he had been robbed by “two Black males in camouflage clothes.” He tried to pass off fake diamonds to a third. Glass was also charged with plotting with a narcotics trafficker to funnel $1 million in drug proceeds into diamond purchases. Facing serious prison time, he did what came naturally. He started scheming — this time, in cooperation with law enforcement.
Glass began to work with the ATF. Although the agency designated him a “confidential informant,” he did much more than merely pass on information. Glass told the ATF he could bring in international arms dealers, then he went out and created a network to penetrate. He called up Diaa Mohsen, an Egyptian immigrant to the U.S., whom he had met in Atlantic City at a high-stakes table in the Trump Taj Mahal casino. Mohsen liked to tell people he was in the import-export business and that he was related to Egypt’s deposed royal family, but in reality he lived in a modest brick rowhouse in Jersey City and he was always hustling. One of his gigs was teaching tennis lessons at the local public courts, where he had become friendly with Ingram, who’d recently taken up the sport, in order to compete with his colleagues on Wall Street.
Glass told his handlers that Mohsen had black-market connections. He called up Mohsen and spun a tale of stolen weapons. “Listen, between me and you,” Glass said, “they have a warehouse full of shit.” Mohsen fell for the ruse immediately. Boasting that he could sell anything, he brought up Osama bin Laden as a potential buyer. “You don’t know these fucking people,” he told Glass. “They are terrorists. They are organized. They’re going to war with this country.” The ATF agents handling Glass were initially skeptical. “We thought it was bullshit, too,” says one. But then Mohsen started to bring in potential customers: middlemen purporting to represent Serbian paramilitaries, Chechen rebels, the Congolese army.
Glass threw himself into the sting, spending hours on the phone, coaxing and wheedling. “Randy was a wild man,” says Dick Stoltz, the now-retired ATF agent who posed as his partner, “Ray Spears.” “He was a con man and an excellent con man.” Stoltz surmised that Glass had a two-part strategy: “One was to get out from under the criminal charges. Two was to make himself some kind of a media star.” Glass would later tell his version of his career as an undercover informant to newspapers, TV shows, and the 9/11 commission. He saw himself as the hero of the caper. “I was a rogue, a scoundrel,” Glass told the Palm Beach Post in 2002. “When I realized the magnitude of what I got involved in, I realized I had to stand up, do the right thing, and be a patriot.”
As a cooperating felon, Glass was supposed to operate under tight supervision, but his handlers could not control him. He was a “force of nature,” another ATF agent later wrote, “and he was constantly coming up with side deals through the Egyptian.” Glass asked Mohsen if he knew anyone who might be capable of handling the huge sums of money they expected to fetch from their arms sales.
Mohsen immediately thought of his tennis pal, Kevin. Back when Ingram was still working at Deutsche Bank, he had moved from his New York apartment to a sprawling art-filled triplex in Jersey City with stunning views of the Manhattan skyline. He started playing tennis in a nearby park. At first, Ingram and Mohsen would just hit around. But they became fast friends, much to the chagrin of Sparkle, who didn’t understand their bond. (“I never liked him,” she says of Mohsen. “He’s such a bullshit artist.”) One thing had led to another, and after Ingram’s abrupt departure from Deutsche Bank, they started doing business together.
Kevin and Mohsen’s joint ventures ranged from mundane to mind-boggling. They formed a construction company. Mohsen would sometimes come across cheap merchandise, stuff that had fallen off a truck, and Ingram says he would offer occasional financial backing for what Mohsen called “closeout deals.” (Ingram says he did this as a favor and didn’t bother to ask too many questions.) Mohsen took Ingram to Egypt in what he later described as an effort to invest money for the Libyan state oil company.
To Glass, Mohsen boasted about Ingram’s influence, saying that he had once been Time magazine’s Businessman of the Year. (There is no such accolade.) He also said Ingram was funding his travel to Switzerland to work on a deal involving a Saudi prince and $500 million in frozen Libyan assets.
Glass asked Mohsen how to spell Ingram’s name so he could do a search on AOL. He was unsure about involving a top Wall Street banker. Wouldn’t Ingram be scared off by the nature of their plans? Mohsen reassured Glass that his plan was to lie to Ingram. He could always say that the arms-dealing money came from the other project with the Saudi prince. He would tell Ingram that Glass served as a conduit for international money.
In 2021, Mohsen told me that he innocently believed the arms deals were sanctioned by the U.S. government, “like Nicaragua and Oliver North,” and that Glass told him they were working as secret agents. “I didn’t know he was a crook,” Mohsen says of Glass. “Motherfucker.”
When we spoke for my book, Ingram claimed he was motivated by compassion. He said Mohsen was scuffling through life and had a disabled son. “He was a very nice guy that I started caring about, simple as that,” he said. “He’s a guy who wanted so much more for his family than he could give them.” (Mohsen rejects this characterization of the relationship. “I am the main man,” he says. “I am the real fucking character … When I open my mouth, there comes out a lot of bullshit. I didn’t go to Harvard, I didn’t go to Princeton. But I am more intelligent than anybody you can think of.”)
Mohsen took Glass to meet Ingram aboard Ingram’s yacht, the Ingee, which was docked not far from the diamond dealer’s home in Boca Raton. Glass said he was seeking investment advice. He told Ingram he had partners who had “a certain amount of cash coming in every month” and needed help “cleaning it up.” While he was vague about his business, it wasn’t hard to size up the situation.
Glass and Mohsen went to see Ingram for a follow-up meeting at his office in the World Trade Center. The details of what was said there are in dispute. But Glass handed over $100,000 in cash and Ingram wrote Glass a check from a corporate account at Chase Manhattan bank for $91,000, taking a fee of $9,000. In a series of taped phone calls, Ingram talked about establishing an offshore investment fund with “a minimum investment” of $15 million. They started making arrangements for Ingram to present a plan to Glass and his partners at his house in Boca Raton.
“In order for that to happen,” Glass said, “you’ll come down, just do a bank wire in front of their face while they’re sitting there. And they’ll start with whatever nominal amount of money just for that wire transfer.” Ingram said that was a “trivial” condition.
In another call, Glass told Ingram that he and his partners were about to close a lucrative sale. “It’s going to be a very large transaction,” he said. “Let me tell you, I am not a poor little boy.”
“I know that,” Ingram said. “I’ve heard.”
“We’re partners,” Glass said. “We’re on the same team now.”
Within two months of their first meeting, Ingram was back in South Florida, zipping up I-95 in his yellow Ferrari Spider, heading to Boca to make a pitch to Glass and his mysterious investors. Ingram called from the road to tell Glass he was stopping at an office-supply store. “I’m a long-term, big-business guy, so anything I got to do, I’m not going to write it down on paper,” he said. “You know those Magic Marker boards where you wipe it clean? I’m getting one of those.”
Ingram promised Glass that his partners would be impressed with his investment pitch. “I’m a professional,” he said. “I’m not going to do this for, like, a quick hit. I’m a lifelong manager.”
“Kevin, listen, this isn’t a onetime deal,” Glass said. “Believe me when I tell you: This is for the long run. And this isn’t some corporate executive board. You understand what I mean.”
“There’s not going to be any mysteries when I’m done,” Ingram replied.
Mohsen was in the Ferrari’s passenger seat. A little before lunchtime, the sports car pulled up in front of Glass’s home, a Mediterranean-style stucco villa in a recently constructed gated community. There was a tennis club across the street. Inside, Glass introduced Ingram to Ray Spears, the supposed managing partner of his phony syndicate. Spears dressed well and talked like he had been in the military. He said he had flown in from the West Coast for the meeting.
“I’m a financial engineer,” Ingram told the group. He diagrammed on the whiteboard the structure of the entity he had devised, drawing arrows that showed how their cash, once committed to the fund, would move to accounts in the Cayman Islands controlled by Ingram, who would then direct the money into investments, paying out periodic dividends at his discretion. He never used the phrase “money laundering.” This was money management.
Glass presented a modest sum, $250,000 in cash, so Ingram could show how he performed his financial acrobatics. Mohsen counted the money, taped it up in a plastic bag, and packed it into a piece of carry-on luggage. One of Spears’s associates gave Ingram a bank-account number in London. Ingram got on the phone and gave instructions to wire $227,500 from his account, again subtracting his 9 percent fee. Then they all went out to play tennis. Glass won.
Meanwhile, Glass and Mohsen were negotiating a purported arms deal with a group of Pakistanis who claimed to represent that nation’s intelligence service, the ISI. Glass urged Mohsen to make sure he kept his mouth shut about that business around Ingram, who was just meant to handle the money. “Listen,” Glass cautioned Mohsen. “Don’t mix the two things.” Glass claimed to have mentioned arms dealing in an initial meeting with Ingram, but in conversations with undercover agents, they had avoided any such discussion of the source of the funds. “Of all the targets, he was the most circumspect,” says Stoltz, the undercover ATF agent, of Ingram. “He was intelligent. I had the feeling this was a guy who did well for himself but still maintained his street smarts.”
More than a year passed between the meeting in Boca Raton and Ingram’s arrest at the hotel in Fort Lauderdale. For much of this time, he had no involvement with the Florida business. Glass claimed that Ingram had lost interest when it became apparent that his promises of an imminent investment of many millions was, in Ingram’s words, “way off.” Ingram counters that Glass was “creepy” and lied about everything. “When I kind of figured out what was really going on — because they did ask me to launder some money — I stopped talking to them,” Ingram says.
Ingram lived his life in chapters, abandoning one thing, finished or not, once he moved on to his next obsession. While his dealings with Glass never resulted in a huge payoff, he had already found another source of capital. In 2000, a prominent Silicon Valley venture-capital firm put more than $6 million into the technology firm that Ingram was trying to get off the ground. He called the start-up TruMarkets. It aimed to digitize bond trading, cutting the big banks — his former employers — out of the equation. “This was a flaming spear aimed at the heart of Wall Street,” the start-up’s primary investor says today. Ingram attracted a formidable roster of early backers, including one of his old bosses, Jon Corzine, a former chief executive of Goldman Sachs who was then running for a U.S. Senate seat in New Jersey.
But when the dot-com bubble burst, TruMarkets burned through all of its capital. It was shortly after the start-up filed for bankruptcy that Ingram received a message from Stoltz, in the guise of Ray Spears, saying he wanted to do another deal. By this point, Ingram was desperate. He claims he was thinking, irrationally, about ways to rescue TruMarkets. He remembered that Mohsen had once told him that Spears had a connection to a well-known Florida billionaire, Wayne Huizenga. “I was reaching for straws,” Ingram says. “One of those straws ended up being in Florida.”
Based on their earlier interactions, Stoltz knew that Ingram would be wary. But the ATF wanted to rope him into another deal. While it already had grounds to arrest Ingram, the money-laundering case was far from solid. The only person who claimed to have spoken directly to him about arms dealing was Glass, and prosecutors were not thrilled about putting a convicted con artist on the stand as their star witness. In the end, for all of Glass’s efforts over the two years of the sting — “a cavalcade of negotiations,” according to an ATF history of the case, “with a litany of representatives from the world’s hotspots” — he never managed to complete a single sale. There were no illegal proceeds. Every dollar in cash presented to Ingram belonged to the government.
“None of it was real,” Ingram said in 2020, when we met for a final interview at a hotel on the Bowery. “It was con men conning con men, and one of them conned me.” He says there is little question in his mind about why he was targeted out of all the money-hungry men on Wall Street. “Why would they focus on me?” Ingram wondered aloud. “What could it have been? Why spend two years looking at me? I had hot girls and a Ferrari and a boat. And I was Black.”
Sparkle was pregnant when her husband was arrested in June 2001. She rushed down to West Palm Beach to see him in jail. “On my way to Florida is when I saw his face and Mohsen’s face on CNN,” she says, recalling her thoughts: “This is real, right now. What have you gotten yourself into?”
On Wall Street, many of Ingram’s old colleagues expressed astonishment and dismay. “I literally spat my coffee across the table,” one banker told the New York Observer. Ingram’s mentors — mostly white men who had been conveyed through life on a cushion of privilege — wondered how he could have squandered the opportunities he was offered. “The tragedy is that this guy is a role model for what could be,” Corzine told Talk. Some of Ingram’s Black peers were furious with him, believing that his arrest reinforced racist stereotypes. “We’ll all have to crawl out of the rubble,” one anonymously told the magazine.
Other friends of Ingram’s were far less surprised. “For an African American to be doing what he was doing at that time,” says an acquaintance from the hip-hop world, “he was already a target.”
Federal prosecutors would never produce any evidence that Ingram directly participated in any of the purported arms dealing. There is little in the public record (or the recollections of the retired agents involved in the investigation) to suggest he was aware of, let alone collaborated in, his partners’ negotiations with the Pakistanis or any other potential foreign customers. But the money-laundering case the government amassed against him was overwhelming. Ingram pleaded guilty, as did the other three defendants. He was given the lightest sentence: 18 months and a $185,000 fine. (The most severe penalty, 33 months, went to his golfing buddy Walter Kapij, the man with the plane, who only stumbled into the sting at the last moment.)
The shadowy would-be customers from Pakistan — who expressed interest in obtaining, among other things, nuclear-weapons materials — returned home without buying anything. The portion of the investigation that implicated Pakistan’s intelligence service was kept quiet at the direction of “Main DOJ,” according to an internal ATF memo, in deference to the Bush administration’s national security priorities. Indictments of two Pakistani nationals were filed under seal. It remains unclear whether the men were for real, and if so, whom they represented. They remain at large.
It would turn out that Osama bin Laden did have an operation afoot in Florida that summer — just not one that anyone could imagine. On the morning of June 12, as Ingram was having coffee in the Fort Lauderdale hotel lobby with Ray Spears, a group of Arab men were staying at a fleabag motel called the Deluxe Inn, just five miles up the road. They checked out on June 14, after their group’s leader, Mohamed Atta, had an argument with the front-desk attendant. The conspicuously rude guests piled into a rented Oldsmobile and drove away. There was no need to hide, because no one was looking. The government’s eyes were on Kevin Ingram.
Excerpted from The Year That Broke America, by Andrew Rice, with permission of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2022 Andrew Rice.
PROFITS OF DEATH —
INSIDER TRADING AND 9-11
by Tom Flocco – Edited by Michael C. Ruppert
http://www.copvcia.com/free/ww3/12_06_01_death_profits_pt1.html
~ ~ ~
Buzzy the Banker Joins the CIA
According to a CIA press release, in February 1998, A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard, former CEO of Deutschebank-Alex Brown (the nation’s oldest investment banking firm) and Vice Chairman of the Board of Bankers Trust, left BT and the investment banking community to join the CIA full time.
As a matter of fact, the Washington Post reported that Krongard helped engineer the $2.5 billion BT merger with Deutschebank shortly before sliding over to the intelligence side of the stage.
Buzzy (as his friends call him) had served a long-term “moonlighting” stint as a “consultant” to a series of CIA Directors. He left his banking position to become counselor to CIA Director George Tenet just 11 months prior to the final $19.1 million guilty plea by BT, which was by then a subsidiary of Deutschebank.
Given Krongard’s lofty intelligence and investment banking positions, there are no reports available dealing with important questions concerning his knowledge about such relevant issues as the disposition of “unclaimed” funds, monitoring of global stock trades for national security purposes, and wealthy “private client” operations –- let alone whether the developing investigation into BT fraud had necessitated his, ”leaving town just ahead of the sheriff,” as it were.
Yet Krongard has since risen to new heights, having received a March 16, 2001 Bush Administration promotion by President George W. Bush to Executive Director, the number three position at the intelligence agency.
Ingram’s Last Trade
On August 28, 2001, 14 days before the Trade Center attacks, former Deutschebank senior bond investment trader Kevin Ingram, pled guilty in a $2.2 million dollar money laundering conspiracy, resulting from a government sting operation investigating the illegal sale of night vision goggles, Beretta machine pistols, M-16 machine guns with silencers, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, mortars, surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), TOW anti-tank missiles, and Stinger missiles, according to court papers examined by the New York Post.
The next day, Alert Global Media, Inc., publishers of Money Laundering Alert, reported that Ingram “pled guilty on August 28 to money laundering conspiracy as part of an agreement [plea bargain] with the U.S. government, which will drop other charges and receive Ingram’s testimony against two co-defendants from Egypt and Pakistan.” Some published reports say that both of the other defendants were from (current U.S. ally) Pakistan.
“Bin Laden has long-standing contacts with senior officials [of Pakistan]…,” said Andrew Pearce of the Rand Institute in Washington. The Times of India also reported on June 17, 2001 that one of three Pakistani middlemen working illegally with Ingram asked undercover agents about the chances of obtaining components for nuclear weapons.
Earlier (July 7) Associated Press reported that “Kevin Ingram, 42, an investment counselor at the World Trade Center, was indicted June 28 on three counts of trying to conceal at least $350,000 and one count of violating the Arms Export Act.”
“Ingram allegedly laundered $100,000 and $250,000 for federal agents, both times taking a 9 percent cut before being asked to launder the $2.2 million,” according to court papers examined by the New York Post in a June 15, 2001 report.
AP added that “Ingram is also named in two other counts…for trying to launder $2.2 million in illegal arms sales. Ingram, out on $250,000 bond, faces a maximum of 100 years in prison if convicted of all charges.”
Arrested with Ingram were two New Jersey-based Pakistanis who had offered to make a partial payment for the arms “in the form of heroin,” also according to both AP and the New York Post.
A September 29, 2001 Bloomberg News/St. Louis Post Dispatch report revealed that Ingram had angered his judge in July by failing to disclose his Swiss bank account. Bloomberg reported that the Swiss account contained $1,086,000 in cash and 75,800 shares of Carver Bancorp, Inc. worth $650,000.
“He was afraid of the implications, and he just panicked,” attorney Richard Lubin told U.S. Magistrate Judge Ann E. Vitunac at a bail hearing on July 10. Vitunac raised Ingrams’s bond to $1.25 million and ordered him jailed two days later.
Curiously, however, given the terrorism that has transpired, federal agents refused to divulge the name of the country that would have received the arms according to court papers examined by the New York Post and others. However, the documents confirmed that the defendants “referred to their foreign arms buyer…as a well-known, former military official who wanted to partially pay for the weapons with heroin.”
On June 15, 2001, the New York Post, reported that experts said the most likely buyers connected to the former Deutschebank securities trader and the two Pakistanis were current U.S. ally Pakistan or Osama bin Laden.
The Associated Press reported on 12/1/01 that Ingram had been sentenced to 18 months plus two years probation and a $20,000 fine on the money laundering charges in this case. All other charges were dropped in the plea bargain. AP quoted Ingram as saying at his sentencing hearing, “I made a horrible mistake and I did something wrong. I’m very sorry about it, sorry for my family.” Ingram’s sentence will likely be served at a minimum security facility in Fairton, New Jersey….
In spite of these revelations, no reporter or government official has asked or disclosed how many times Ingram had laundered money or completed arms shipments before he was finally nabbed. The extensive array of military hardware in the possession of the Taliban and al Q’aeda beg this question.
A “Trader’s” Powerful Friends
Deutschebank-Alex Brown’s role in brokering the insider trades that scream foreknowledge of the attacks further provides a common denominator — given the activities and histories of key executives at the highest levels of the world’s financial markets.
Ingram’s history speaks of access to power and financial policy making at the highest levels. Not only was he an associate of Robert Rubin before Rubin left Goldman Sachs to become Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, he has had ongoing relationships with Corzine, who also sits on the Senate’s Subcommittee on Securities and Investment — a subcommittee which should be investigating the insider trading.
Prior to working for Deutschebank, Ingram was a highly placed executive with the investment bank Goldman Sachs. Both Rubin and Corzine have served as CEOs at Goldman. Rubin currently sits on the board of Citigroup — a bank which has been cited for drug money laundering by the U.S. government and which (May 2001) purchased a Mexican bank (Banamex) which has now lost two suits and one appeal over press reports that its former owner, Roberto Hernandez, was a world-class drug money launderer. Hernandez currently sits on the board at Citigroup as a result of the buyout. So too does former CIA Director John Deutch. (See FTW: Vol. IV, No. 3 – May 31, 2001 or visit www.copvcia.com.)
Kevin Ingram joined Goldman Sachs in 1988 after a brief stint at Lehman Brothers, and by 1992 was promoted to run Goldman’s Collateralized Mortgage Obligations desk, overseeing all trading of mortgage and asset-backed securities, according to the New York Observer. Mortgage trading has long been suspected of being a vehicle for the laundering of “hot” money.
In Black Enterprise (BE) magazine’s 1992 “Top 25 Blacks On Wall Street,” Ingram was said to have left his (nine-year) high profile Goldman Sachs treasury securities and options desk position in 1996 to head Deutschebank’s U.S. mortgage-backed securities department — and ultimately their global securitiies operations in 1998.
BE added that “at Deutschebank, Ingram and his team of 25 professionals structure and issue securities for an international clientele, including…high net-worth individuals. These deals can range from $1 million to several billion dollars.”
No member of the House or Senate has even broached the subject of hearings to question either Ingram or recent Deutschebank-Alex Brown Vice Chairman and current CIA Executive Director A.B. Krongard as to whether they dealt with any wealthy Middle Easterners or Saudis in particular. Almost all of the September 11 hijackers were of Saudi nationality. Since both men had high supervisory positions connected to the secretive “private client” operations of Deutschebank, and Deutschebank handled the insider trades, this is an obvious course of inquiry.
Ingram’s position at Deutschebank became tenuous when the bond market crashed in 1998 and the protégé of Corzine and Rubin likely felt insecure. The tumbling bond market combined with periodic absences where “he would sometimes go incommunicado for days — unusual for someone who ran a tradinng desk and was responsible for open positions of $7 billion and more.”
Deutschebank asked for his resignation in September 1999, according to the New York Observer….
www.moneyfiles.org/wilderness3.html
https://nationalpublicdata.com/people/i/kevin-ingram/ny/westbury/pdzv0j1bvg1yfg7kkup7kdh68zvbzlre/
2025-10-19-nationalpublicdata-com-kevin-ingram-ny-westbury-pdzv0j1bvg1yfg7kkup7kdh68zvbzlre.pdf
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Kevin Ingram, born on October 11, 1958, is 67 years old at the moment. We found 11 Ingram’s phone numbers in our database. They are (917) 757-2509, (516) 338-0684, and others. Before moving to 721 Clinton St, Westbury, New York, 11590, Ingram was a resident of 28 different addresses in 11 cities. You may also email Kevin at his 5 email addresses. 16 individuals are listed as this person's family members.
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Born in 1958
Westbury, NY
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721 Clinton St, Westbury, NY, 11590
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5905 Greene St, Philadelphia, PA, 19144Last reported in 2018
381 York St, Jersey City, NJ, 07302Last reported in 2017
55 River Dr, Jersey City, NJ, 07310Last reported in 2016
303 37th St, New York, NY, 10016Last reported in 2012
169 Boden Ave, Valley Stream, NY, 11580Last reported in 2012
701 Macon St, Brooklyn, NY, 11233Last reported in 2011
348 Franklin Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11238Last reported in 2011
PO Box 1050, Norwalk, CT, 06856Last reported in 2011
PO Box 5010, Norwalk, CT, 06856Last reported in 2011
1186 Decatur St, Brooklyn, NY, 11207Last reported in 2010
5821 Knox St, Philadelphia, PA, 19144Last reported in 2010
55 River Dr S, Jersey City, NJ, 07310Last reported in 2008
1706 Girard Ave, Philadelphia, PA, 19130Last reported in 2008
26 Federal Plz, New York, NY, 10278Last reported in 2007
1723 Cecil B Moore Ave, Philadelphia, PA, 19121Last reported in 2007
275 Madison Ave, New York, NY, 10016Last reported in 2006
840 Massachusetts Ave, Arlington, MA, 02474Last reported in 2005
182 Arlington Ave, Staten Island, NY, 10303Last reported in 2005
2394 Adam Clayton Powell Jr Blvd, New York, NY, 10030Last reported in 2004
31 W 52nd St, New York, NY, 10019Last reported in 2002
55 Riverview Rd, Jersey City, NJ, 07305Last reported in 2001
55 S 1906 River Dr, Jersey City, NJ, 07310Last reported in 2001
6755 Telegraph Rd, Saint Louis, MO, 63129Last reported in 2001
55 River Dr S, Jersey City, NJ, 07310Last reported in 2000
235 48th St, New York, NY, 10036Last reported in 2000
672 Jaffa Ave, Uniondale, NY, 11553Last reported in 2000
55-1909 River Dr S, Jersey City, NJ, 07310Last reported in 1999
2 br 1 bath apartment, 3800/momnth rent est 2025 1000 sq ft
1325 Union St, Brooklyn, NY, 11225Last reported in 1996
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Demetra K IngramKarl IngramDeann A IngramCheryl E IngramNatalie A IngramLatasha IngramKevin B IngramDonna M IngramBryce IngramGermaine IngramDoris B IngramKaren Ingram
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https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/1732/records/335493242?tid=&pid=&queryId=a2bc00a5-13dd-43a4-bda5-ade006a7c046&_phsrc=kyz2443&_phstart=successSource
Detail Source
Name
Kevin Ingram
Birth Date
11 Oct 1958
Address
9741 NW 7th Cir Apt 522
Residence Place
Plantation, Florida, USA
Zip Code
33324-4974
https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/1732/records/333813296?tid=&pid=&queryId=4e704a8d-c2b2-439d-962c-e03a281521ca&_phsrc=kyz2445&_phstart=successSource
Detail Source
Name
Kevin Ingram
Birth Date
11 Oct 1958
Address
19755 NE 32 Slip C36
Residence Place
Miami, Florida, USA
Zip Code
33180