Gambling in Texas – Is it Legal to Gamble in Texas?

How the Hunt Brothers Cornered the Silver Market and Then Lost it All

TL:DR: yes its long. Grab a beer.

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Until his dying day in 2014, Nelson Bunker Hunt, who had once been the world’s wealthiest man, denied that he and his brother plotted to corner the global silver market.
Sure, back in 1980, Bunker, his younger brother Herbert, and other members of the Hunt clan owned roughly two-thirds of all the privately held silver on earth. But the historic stockpiling of bullion hadn’t been a ploy to manipulate the market, they and their sizable legal team would insist in the following years. Instead, it was a strategy to hedge against the voracious inflation of the 1970s—a monumental bet against the U.S. dollar.
Whatever the motive, it was a bet that went historically sour. The debt-fueled boom and bust of the global silver market not only decimated the Hunt fortune, but threatened to take down the U.S. financial system.
The panic of “Silver Thursday” took place over 35 years ago, but it still raises questions about the nature of financial manipulation. While many view the Hunt brothers as members of a long succession of white collar crooks, from Charles Ponzi to Bernie Madoff, others see the endearingly eccentric Texans as the victims of overstepping regulators and vindictive insiders who couldn’t stand the thought of being played by a couple of southern yokels.
In either case, the story of the Hunt brothers just goes to show how difficult it can be to distinguish illegal market manipulation from the old fashioned wheeling and dealing that make our markets work.
The Real-Life Ewings
Whatever their foibles, the Hunts make for an interesting cast of characters. Evidently CBS thought so; the family is rumored to be the basis for the Ewings, the fictional Texas oil dynasty of Dallas fame.
Sitting at the top of the family tree was H.L. Hunt, a man who allegedly purchased his first oil field with poker winnings and made a fortune drilling in east Texas. H.L. was a well-known oddball to boot, and his sons inherited many of their father’s quirks.
For one, there was the stinginess. Despite being the richest man on earth in the 1960s, Bunker Hunt (who went by his middle name), along with his younger brothers Herbert (first name William) and Lamar, cultivated an image as unpretentious good old boys. They drove old Cadillacs, flew coach, and when they eventually went to trial in New York City in 1988, they took the subway. As one Texas editor was quoted in the New York Times, Bunker Hunt was “the kind of guy who orders chicken-fried steak and Jello-O, spills some on his tie, and then goes out and buys all the silver in the world.”
Cheap suits aside, the Hunts were not without their ostentation. At the end of the 1970s, Bunker boasted a stable of over 500 horses and his little brother Lamar owned the Kansas City Chiefs. All six children of H.L.’s first marriage (the patriarch of the Hunt family had fifteen children by three women before he died in 1974) lived on estates befitting the scions of a Texas billionaire. These lifestyles were financed by trusts, but also risky investments in oil, real estate, and a host of commodities including sugar beets, soybeans, and, before long, silver.
The Hunt brothers also inherited their father’s political inclinations. A zealous anti-Communist, Bunker Hunt bankrolled conservative causes and was a prominent member of the John Birch Society, a group whose founder once speculated that Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent” of Soviet conspiracy. In November of 1963, Hunt sponsored a particularly ill-timed political campaign, which distributed pamphlets around Dallas condemning President Kennedy for alleged slights against the Constitution on the day that he was assassinated. JFK conspiracy theorists have been obsessed with Hunt ever since.
In fact, it was the Hunt brand of politics that partially explains what led Bunker and Herbert to start buying silver in 1973.
Hard Money
The 1970s were not kind to the U.S. dollar.
Years of wartime spending and unresponsive monetary policy pushed inflation upward throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then, in October of 1973, war broke out in the Middle East and an oil embargo was declared against the United States. Inflation jumped above 10%. It would stay high throughout the decade, peaking in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution at an annual average of 13.5% in 1980.
Over the same period of time, the global monetary system underwent a historic transformation. Since the first Roosevelt administration, the U.S. dollar had been pegged to the value of gold at a predictable rate of $35 per ounce. But in 1971, President Nixon, responding to inflationary pressures, suspended that relationship. For the first time in modern history, the paper dollar did not represent some fixed amount of tangible, precious metal sitting in a vault somewhere.
For conservative commodity traders like the Hunts, who blamed government spending for inflation and held grave reservations about the viability of fiat currency, the perceived stability of precious metal offered a financial safe harbor. It was illegal to trade gold in the early 1970s, so the Hunts turned to the next best thing.
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Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; chart by Priceonomics

As an investment, there was a lot to like about silver. The Hunts were not alone in fleeing to bullion amid all the inflation and geopolitical turbulence, so the price was ticking up. Plus, light-sensitive silver halide is a key component of photographic film. With the growth of the consumer photography market, new production from mines struggled to keep up with demand.
And so, in 1973, Bunker and Herbert bought over 35 million ounces of silver, most of which they flew to Switzerland in specifically designed airplanes guarded by armed Texas ranch hands. According to one source, the Hunt’s purchases were big enough to move the global market.
But silver was not the Hunts' only speculative venture in the 1970s. Nor was it the only one that got them into trouble with regulators.
Soy Before Silver
In 1977, the price of soybeans was rising fast. Trade restrictions on Brazil and growing demand from China made the legume a hot commodity, and both Bunker and Herbert decided to enter the futures market in April of that year.
A future is an agreement to buy or sell some quantity of a commodity at an agreed upon price at a later date. If someone contracts to buy soybeans in the future (they are said to take the “long” position), they will benefit if the price of soybeans rise, since they have locked in the lower price ahead of time. Likewise, if someone contracts to sell (that’s called the “short” position), they benefit if the price falls, since they have locked in the old, higher price.
While futures contracts can be used by soybean farmers and soy milk producers to guard against price swings, most futures are traded by people who wouldn’t necessarily know tofu from cream cheese. As a de facto insurance contract against market volatility, futures can be used to hedge other investments or simply to gamble on prices going up (by going long) or down (by going short).
When the Hunts decided to go long in the soybean futures market, they went very, very long. Between Bunker, Herbert, and the accounts of five of their children, the Hunts collectively purchased the right to buy one-third of the entire autumn soybean harvest of the United States.
To some, it appeared as if the Hunts were attempting to corner the soybean market.
In its simplest version, a corner occurs when someone buys up all (or at least, most) of the available quantity of a commodity. This creates an artificial shortage, which drives up the price, and allows the market manipulator to sell some of his stockpile at a higher profit.
Futures markets introduce some additional complexity to the cornerer’s scheme. Recall that when a trader takes a short position on a contract, he or she is pledging to sell a certain amount of product to the holder of the long position. But if the holder of the long position just so happens to be sitting on all the readily available supply of the commodity under contract, the short seller faces an unenviable choice: go scrounge up some of the very scarce product in order to “make delivery” or just pay the cornerer a hefty premium and nullify the deal entirely.
In this case, the cornerer is actually counting on the shorts to do the latter, says Craig Pirrong, professor of finance at the University of Houston. If too many short sellers find that it actually costs less to deliver the product, the market manipulator will be stuck with warehouses full of inventory. Finance experts refer to selling the all the excess supply after building a corner as “burying the corpse.”
“That is when the price collapses,” explains Pirrong. “But if the number of deliveries isn’t too high, the loss from selling at the low price after the corner is smaller than the profit from selling contracts at the high price.”
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The Chicago Board of Trade trading floor. Photo credit: Jeremy Kemp

Even so, when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found that a single family from Texas had contracted to buy a sizable portion of the 1977 soybean crop, they did not accuse the Hunts of outright market manipulation. Instead, noting that the Hunts had exceeded the 3 million bushel aggregate limit on soybean holdings by about 20 million, the CFTC noted that the Hunt’s “excessive holdings threaten disruption of the market and could cause serious injury to the American public.” The CFTC ordered the Hunts to sell and to pay a penalty of $500,000.
Though the Hunts made tens of millions of dollars on paper while soybean prices skyrocketed, it’s unclear whether they were able to cash out before the regulatory intervention. In any case, the Hunts were none too pleased with the decision.
“Apparently the CFTC is trying to repeal the law of supply and demand,” Bunker complained to the press.
Silver Thursday
Despite the run in with regulators, the Hunts were not dissuaded. Bunker and Herbert had eased up on silver after their initial big buy in 1973, but in the fall of 1979, they were back with a vengeance. By the end of the year, Bunker and Herbert owned 21 million ounces of physical silver each. They had even larger positions in the silver futures market: Bunker was long on 45 million ounces, while Herbert held contracts for 20 million. Their little brother Lamar also had a more “modest” position.
By the new year, with every dollar increase in the price of silver, the Hunts were making $100 million on paper. But unlike most investors, when their profitable futures contracts expired, they took delivery. As in 1973, they arranged to have the metal flown to Switzerland. Intentional or not, this helped create a shortage of the metal for industrial supply.
Naturally, the industrialists were unhappy. From a spot price of around $6 per ounce in early 1979, the price of silver shot up to $50.42 in January of 1980. In the same week, silver futures contracts were trading at $46.80. Film companies like Kodak saw costs go through the roof, while the British film producer, Ilford, was forced to lay off workers. Traditional bullion dealers, caught in a squeeze, cried foul to the commodity exchanges, and the New York jewelry house Tiffany & Co. took out a full page ad in the New York Times slamming the “unconscionable” Hunt brothers. They were right to single out the Hunts; in mid-January, they controlled 69% of all the silver futures contracts on the Commodity Exchange (COMEX) in New York.
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Source: New York Times

But as the high prices persisted, new silver began to come out of the woodwork.
“In the U.S., people rifled their dresser drawers and sofa cushions to find dimes and quarters with silver content and had them melted down,” says Pirrong, from the University of Houston. “Silver is a classic part of a bride’s trousseau in India, and when prices got high, women sold silver out of their trousseaus.”
According to a Washington Post article published that March, the D.C. police warned residents of a rash of home burglaries targeting silver.
Unfortunately for the Hunts, all this new supply had a predictable effect. Rather than close out their contracts, short sellers suddenly found it was easier to get their hands on new supplies of silver and deliver.
“The main factor that has caused corners to fail [throughout history] is that the manipulator has underestimated how much will be delivered to him if he succeeds [at] raising the price to artificial levels,” says Pirrong. “Eventually, the Hunts ran out of money to pay for all the silver that was thrown at them.”
In financial terms, the brothers had a large corpse on their hands—and no way to bury it.
This proved to be an especially big problem, because it wasn’t just the Hunt fortune that was on the line. Of the $6.6 billion worth of silver the Hunts held at the top of the market, the brothers had “only” spent a little over $1 billion of their own money. The rest was borrowed from over 20 banks and brokerage houses.
At the same time, COMEX decided to crack down. On January 7, 1980, the exchange’s board of governors announced that it would cap the size of silver futures exposure to 3 million ounces. Those in excess of the cap (say, by the tens of millions) were given until the following month to bring themselves into compliance. But that was too long for the Chicago Board of Trade exchange, which suspended the issue of any new silver futures on January 21. Silver futures traders would only be allowed to square up old contracts.
Predictably, silver prices began to slide. As the various banks and other firms that had backed the Hunt bullion binge began to recognize the tenuousness of their financial position, they issued margin calls, asking the brothers to put up more money as collateral for their debts. The Hunts, unable to sell silver lest they trigger a panic, borrowed even more. By early March, futures contracts had fallen to the mid-$30 range.
Matters finally came to a head on March 25, when one of the Hunts’ largest backers, the Bache Group, asked for $100 million more in collateral. The brothers were out of cash, and Bache was unwilling to accept silver in its place, as it had been doing throughout the month. With the Hunts in default, Bache did the only thing it could to start recouping its losses: it start to unload silver.
On March 27, “Silver Thursday,” the silver futures market dropped by a third to $10.80. Just two months earlier, these contracts had been trading at four times that amount.
The Aftermath
After the oil bust of the early 1980s and a series of lawsuits polished off the remainder of the Hunt brothers’ once historic fortune, the two declared bankruptcy in 1988. Bunker, who had been worth an estimated $16 billion in the 1960s, emerged with under $10 million to his name. That’s not exactly chump change, but it wasn’t enough to maintain his 500-plus stable of horses,.
The Hunts almost dragged their lenders into bankruptcy too—and with them, a sizable chunk of the U.S. financial system. Over twenty financial institutions had extended over a billion dollars in credit to the Hunt brothers. The default and resulting collapse of silver prices blew holes in balance sheets across Wall Street. A privately orchestrated bailout loan from a number of banks allowed the brothers to start paying off their debts and keep their creditors afloat, but the markets and regulators were rattled.
Silver Spot Prices Per Ounce (January, 1979 - June, 1980)
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Source: Trading Economics

In the words of then CFTC chief James Stone, the Hunts’ antics had threatened to punch a hole in the “financial fabric of the United States” like nothing had in decades. Writing about the entire episode a year later, Harper’s Magazine described Silver Thursday as “the first great panic since October 1929.”
The trouble was not over for the Hunts. In the following years, the brothers were dragged before Congressional hearings, got into a legal spat with their lenders, and were sued by a Peruvian mineral marketing company, which had suffered big losses in the crash. In 1988, a New York City jury found for the South American firm, levying a penalty of over $130 million against the Hunts and finding that they had deliberately conspired to corner the silver market.
Surprisingly, there is still some disagreement on that point.
Bunker Hunt attributed the whole affair to the political motives of COMEX insiders and regulators. Referring to himself later as “a favorite whipping boy” of an eastern financial establishment riddled with liberals and socialists, Bunker and his brother, Herbert, are still perceived as martyrs by some on the far-right.
“Political and financial insiders repeatedly changed the rules of the game,” wrote the New American. “There is little evidence to support the ‘corner the market’ narrative.”
Though the Hunt brothers clearly amassed a staggering amount of silver and silver derivatives at the end of the 1970s, it is impossible to prove definitively that market manipulation was in their hearts. Maybe, as the Hunts always claimed, they just really believed in the enduring value of silver.
Or maybe, as others have noted, the Hunt brothers had no idea what they were doing. Call it the stupidity defense.
“They’re terribly unsophisticated,” an anonymous associated was quoted as saying of the Hunts in a Chicago Tribune article from 1989. “They make all the mistakes most other people make,” said another.
p.s. credit to Ben Christopher
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Welcome to Lost in the Sauce, keeping you caught up on political and legal news that often gets buried in distractions and theater… or a global health crisis.
I am doing a separate post for the insurrection and related events. I think it is important to make sure the news in this post doesn't get overlooked.
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Russia

A new report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) found that Trump political appointees politicized intelligence around foreign election interference in 2020, resulting in significant errors. ODNI analytic ombudsman Barry Zulauf delivered the report to Congress on Thursday: “Analysis on foreign election interference was delayed, distorted or obstructed out of concern over policymaker reactions or for political reasons.” The biggest misrepresentation of intel involved diminishing the threat posed by Russia and overstating the risk of interference from China.

“Russia analysts assessed that there was clear and credible evidence of Russian election influence activities. They said IC management slowing down or not wanting to take their analysis to customers, claiming that it was not well received, frustrated them. Analysts saw this as suppression of intelligence, bordering on politicization of intelligence from above.”

• WaPo: Zulauf, a career official, also found an “egregious” example of attempted politicization of the Russian interference issue in March talking points on foreign election threats, prepared “presumably by ODNI staff” and “shaped by” then-Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell.

The Justice Department and the federal judiciary revealed that the Russian Solar Winds hack also compromised their computer systems. 3% of the DOJ’s Microsoft Office 365 were potentially affected; it does not appear that classified material was accessed. The impact on the judiciary seems much more significant, jeopardizing “highly sensitive confidential documents filed with the courts.”

The sealed court files, if indeed breached, could hold information about national security, trade secrets and wiretap transcripts, along with financial data from bankruptcy cases and the names of confidential informants in criminal cases...

Appointees

D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine has accused U.S. Agency for Global Media Director Michael Pack of funneling $4 million in nonprofit funds to his own for-profit company. In a civil lawsuit filed last week, Racine states that for over 12 years, Pack used a nonprofit company he owned to direct money to his private documentary company, enabling “Pack to line his company’s coffers with a stream of tax-exempt dollars without...a competitive bidding process, public scrutiny, or accounting requirements regarding its spending.”
Employees at Voice of America have filed a whistleblower complaint accusing Pack of using the agency “to disseminate political propaganda in the waning days of the Trump administration. The staffers take issue with a planned speech by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to be broadcast from VOA headquarters. The event, to be attended by a live audience, “is a specific danger to public health and safety” in the middle of a pandemic. Finally, the whistleblowers say the event is “ a gross misuse of government resources,” costing at least $4,000 in taxpayer funds to date and using 18 employees who would otherwise be producing VOA content.
Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller has announced his appointees to the panel set to rename confederate military bases and plan the removal of confederate symbols/monuments. Most controversially, Miller named White House liaison Joshua Whitehouse, who oversaw the purge of the Defense Policy Board and the Defense Business Board last month. The other three Miller-appointees are former acting Army general counsel Earl Matthews, acting assistant secretary of Defense Ann Johnston, and White House official Sean McLean. The remaining four members will be appointed by the Senate and House Armed Services Committees.

• The 10 Army posts named in honor of Confederate generals are Camp Beauregard and Fort Polk in Louisiana, Fort Benning and Fort Gordon in Georgia, Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort A.P. Hill, Fort Lee and Fort Pickett in Virginia, Fort Rucker in Alabama, and Fort Hood in Texas.

Trump

The Trump Inaugural Committee, a nonprofit, improperly paid a $49,000 hotel bill that should have been picked up by Trump’s for-profit business. D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine revealed the allegation in an existing lawsuit against the committee, which already accuses Trump’s hotel of illegally pocketing about $1 million of donors’ money. “The Trump Organization was liable for the invoiced charges...The [Committee’s] payment of the invoice was unfair, unreasonable and unjustified and ultimately conferred improper private benefit to the Trump Organization.”
The Professional Golfer’s Association voted last night to move the 2022 PGA Championship from Trump’s Bedminster course. Jim Richerson, PGA of America president, said in a statement that “it has become clear that conducting” the championship at Trump’s property would “be detrimental to the PGA of America brand” and put the organization's ability to function "at risk."
Amid speculation that Trump may spend inauguration day at his Scottish golf course, Scotland First Minister Nicola Sturgeon warned him that even presidents can’t break the country’s pandemic restrictions. “We are not allowing people to come into Scotland now without an essential purpose, which would apply to him, just as it applies to everybody else. Coming to play golf is not what I would consider an essential purpose,” she said.
Trump is on a Presidential Medal of Freedom spree, giving out the award to sports figures and Republican allies. Last Monday, Trump awarded the medal to Rep. Devin Nunes for his work undermining the FBI’s investigation of Russia’s election interference. “Devin Nunes’ courageous actions helped thwart a plot to take down a sitting United States president,” the White House press release states. Likewise, Trump gave the medal to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) for his “effort to confront the impeachment witch hunt” and “exposing the fraudulent origins of the Russia collusion lie.”

• The day after Trump supporters rampaged through the Capitol, Trump awarded the medal to retired professional golfers Annika Sorenstam and Gary Player. The president planned on giving New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick the medal on Thursday, but he declined the offer, saying that “the tragic events of last week occurred and the decision has been made not to move forward with the award.”

Courts

Dominion Voting Systems filed suit against pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell for defamation. Powell falsely claimed that Dominion had rigged the election, that Dominion was created in Venezuela to rig elections for Hugo Chávez, and that Dominion bribed Georgia officials for a no-bid contract,” the lawsuit states. Citing millions spent on security for employees, damage control to its reputation, and future losses, Dominion requests damages of more than $1.3 billion.

• Dominion's lawyer told reporters last week the lawsuit against Powell “is just the first in a series of legal steps.” Ari Cohn, a free speech and defamation lawyer, told WaPo: “If I had to guess I would say that [Poulos] wants a very public vindication with a ruling establishing that Sidney Powell defamed them and that her statements were baseless...That's not something you generally get in a settlement agreement.”
  
• Just last week, Trump again said at a rally that Dominion machines allowed “fraudulent ballots” to be counted during the 2020 election (clip).
  

The Supreme Court declined to fast track eight Trump-related cases related to the 2020 election, ensuring they won’t be taken up before Biden’s inauguration. The cases include one brought by attorney Lin Wood against Georgia’s Secretary of State, the so-called “Kraken” cases, and three brought by Trump’s campaign. It is possible the lawsuits will be declared moot after Biden is sworn in.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases alleging that the Treasury Dept. incorrectly distributed Coronavirus aid meant for tribal governments. The Lower 48 Tribes argue that Alaska Native Corporations (ANCs) are not eligible for CARES Act funding, while the Trump administration wants to divvy up the money between tribes and ANCs.

Immigration

A federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s final attempt to restrict U.S. asylum laws. District Judge James Donato (Obama appointee) ruled in favor of advocacy groups who argued that acting Homeland Security secretary Chad Wolf lacked authority to impose the new rules, which would have resulted in the denial of most asylum applications.

“The government has recycled exactly the same legal and factual claims made in the prior cases, as if they had not been soundly rejected in well-reasoned opinions by several courts,” Donato wrote. “This is a troubling litigation strategy. In effect, the government keeps crashing the same car into a gate, hoping that someday it might break through.”

On Monday, acting Homeland Security secretary Chad Wolf submitted his resignation, citing the recent court ruling that he is not a valid appointee to the position. His resignation letter does not cite the Capitol riots or Trump’s language inciting the insurrection. FEMA Administrator Pete Gaynor will be the new acting secretary.

"Unfortunately, this action is warranted by recent events, including the ongoing and meritless court rulings regarding the validity of my authority as Acting Secretary. These events and concerns increasingly serve to divert attention and resources away from the important work of the Department in this critical time of a transition of power," Wolf added.

A new Immigration and Customs Enforcement policy will make it harder for immigrant minors to obtain asylum in the U.S. The change was made at the end of last month by then-acting agency leader Tony Pham, who served in the position for less than five months.

Beginning Dec. 29, ICE officers were told that they must review whether an immigrant child is still “unaccompanied” each time they encounter the minor… The memo indicates that the evaluation by ICE officers can come at any time, including when an officer is reviewing immigration court records of a child, and if it’s determined that an immigrant is no longer unaccompanied, they will move to change their status.
Such a change could lead to making some children ineligible to have their asylum claims initially heard and processed… “If implemented aggressively, this policy could significantly decrease the number of children who ultimately receive asylum in the United States,” said Sarah Pierce, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “They are really putting the onus on ICE officers to do everything they can as frequently as they can to remove these designations.”

The Trump administration is still awarding border wall contracts, even in areas where private land has not yet been acquired. The move will make it more difficult for Biden to stop construction of the border wall.

Attempts to halt construction completely, as Biden promised, will prove difficult, particularly if contracts continue to be struck -- a challenge [acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark] Morgan acknowledged Tuesday. "They could terminate those contracts if they want to, but that's going to be a very lengthy, messy process," Morgan said.
"We're going to have to go into settlement agreements with each individual contractor," Morgan added, noting, that payments will have to be made for what they've already done, as well as for materials produced. He estimated the process could cost billions.

Trump is set to visit Alamo, Texas, today to celebrate the completion of more than 400 miles of the border wall. You can watch the event on YouTube at 3:00 pm eastern.

Miscellaneous

Stories that didn’t fit in the above categories...
The Trump administration auctioned off leases to drill oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge last week. Only two private companies bid, each winning large tracts of land. Knik Arm Services, from Alaska, paid $1.6 million for a 50,000-acre tract along the Arctic Ocean. A subsidiary of Australian company 88 Energy paid $800,000 to win the smallest tract.
One of the Health and Human Services Department’s final acts under Trump was finalizing the removal of Obama-era regulations barring discrimination among HHS grantees. The change will allow recipients of federal grant money - like adoption and foster agencies - to discriminate against LGBTQ people and those of a different religion.

Human Rights Campaign: “Statistics suggest that an estimated two million LGBTQ adults in the U.S. are interested in adoption… Further, research consistently shows that LGBTQ youth are overrepresented in the foster care system, as many have been rejected by their families of origin because of their LGBTQ status, and are especially vulnerable to discrimination and mistreatment while in foster care. This regulation would only exacerbate these challenges faced by LGBTQ young people.

There are some heavy hitters on GME's Board and in the C-Suite. IMHO, the company should have spoken out about what's happening regarding their stock. They should also have a plan to address changes in the marketplace re Covid19, the push for digital and cryptocurrency, etc. Positive statements from them would improve the stability of the stock.
Why have they been silent throughout this entire event? Wouldn't they speak out against the disparaging remarks from various HF reps in recent weeks which have negatively impacted the value of the stock? Or, do they agree with the HFs that the stock is worthless, which would suggest that GME is behind a pump and dump which has enriched them and left us holding the bag? This is the kind of letter we need to send, en mass, to the Chairman of the Board: Kathy Vrabeck, and to the media.

GME Governance

Management

• George ShermanChief Executive Officer and Director George E. Sherman is the chief executive officer of GameStop. He was appointed to this role in April 2019.George is a member of GameStop’s Board of Directors, a seat he has held since April 2019.George brings to GameStop more than 25 years of senior management experience serving in a variety of retail leadership roles for several major retail brands like Advance Auto Parts, Best Buy, Target and Home Depot.Prior to joining GameStop, George served as CEO of Victra, the largest exclusive authorized retailer for Verizon Wireless products and services. Before this, he served as president and interim CEO for Advance Auto Parts where he was responsible for more than 4,000 stores, merchandising, marketing, IT, supply chain and commercial sales.George also served as president of Best Buy Services, where he led consumer services, small- and medium-business capabilities, channel partnerships and Best Buy for business. Prior to Best Buy, he ran the operations and home services divisions of Home Depot and spent 14 years with the Target Corporation in various leadership roles.He received his master’s degree from Central Michigan University and served as an officer in the United States Air Force for nearly seven years. George is an active community volunteer with veteran’s causes and currently serves on the board of directors of Building Homes for Heroes, which builds mortgage free homes catered to the unique needs of disabled veterans.
• Jim BellEVP and Chief Financial Officer Jim Bell serves as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for GameStop, a role he was appointed to in June of 2019. Prior to joining GameStop, Jim served as CFO and interim CEO of Wok Holdings, Inc., the parent company of P.F. Chang’s, Pei Wei and True Food Kitchen restaurants, where he successfully designed and led the company’s overall strategic plan and omnichannel digital transformation and the successful sale of each of these brands. Previously, Jim served as EVP and CFO at RLH Corporation and President and CEO of Coldwater Creek, Inc. Earlier in his career he held senior finance roles at Harry & David Holdings, Inc. and The Gap. Jim received his MBA from the University of Maryland and a B.S. in Economics from the U.S. Naval Academy. Following graduation, Jim served as a Naval Flight Officer leading squadron and flight operations in the U.S. Navy from 1989 to 1998.
• Dan ReedGeneral Counsel and Corporate Secretary Dan Reed serves as General Counsel and Corporate Secretary for GameStop. In this role, Dan oversees all company domestic and international legal matters and works closely with the executive leadership team and the Board of Directors to ensure legal compliance and success in meeting business objectives.Prior to joining GameStop in 2006, Dan worked in private practice as a business lawyer. Dan holds a J.D. degree from the University of Texas and a bachelor’s degree from Texas A&M University.

Board of Directors

• Kathy VrabeckBoard Chair Kathy P. Vrabeck is Board Chair and a member of the Compensation Committee. She has served as a Director since June 2012. She is currently a senior client partner in the consumer markets division of Korn Ferry. Previously, she was a Partner at Heidrick & Struggles International, Inc. (“Heidrick & Struggles”) in their Media, Entertainment and Digital practice. Prior to joining Heidrick & Struggles in July 2011, Vrabeck was with Legendary Pictures from March 2009 to March 2011 where she served as president, Legendary Digital and was responsible for the creation, management and delivery of digital entertainment, with a focus on video games, across current and next-generation platforms. From May 2007 to November 2008, Vrabeck was with Electronic Arts, Inc. (“EA”) where she served as president, EA Casual Entertainment and led EA’s efforts in the fastest growing segments of the video game market: mobile, online, social networking and global media sales. Prior to joining EA, Vrabeck was with Activision, Inc. (“Activision”) from August 1999 to April 2006 where she served as president, Activision Publishing, overseeing Activision’s product development and global brand management and publishing operations. Earlier in her career, Vrabeck held various marketing, sales and finance positions with ConAgra, The Pillsbury Company, Quaker Oats and Eli Lilly and Company. Vrabeck currently serves on the DePauw University Board of Trustees.
• George ShermanChief Executive Officer and Directo rGeorge E. Sherman is the chief executive officer of GameStop. He was appointed to this role in April 2019.George is a member of GameStop’s Board of Directors, a seat he has held since April 2019.George brings to GameStop more than 25 years of senior management experience serving in a variety of retail leadership roles for several major retail brands like Advance Auto Parts, Best Buy, Target and Home Depot.Prior to joining GameStop, George served as CEO of Victra, the largest exclusive authorized retailer for Verizon Wireless products and services. Before this, he served as president and interim CEO for Advance Auto Parts where he was responsible for more than 4,000 stores, merchandising, marketing, IT, supply chain and commercial sales.George also served as president of Best Buy Services, where he led consumer services, small- and medium-business capabilities, channel partnerships and Best Buy for business. Prior to Best Buy, he ran the operations and home services divisions of Home Depot and spent 14 years with the Target Corporation in various leadership roles.He received his master’s degree from Central Michigan University and served as an officer in the United States Air Force for nearly seven years. George is an active community volunteer with veteran’s causes and currently serves on the board of directors of Building Homes for Heroes, which builds mortgage free homes catered to the unique needs of disabled veterans.
• Carrie TeffnerDirector Carrie Teffner is a director and was appointed to the board in 2018. Carrie is chair of the Audit Committee and brings 30 years of financial leadership and experience in the consumer products and retail industries. Carrie has served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Crocs (NASDAQ: CROX) since 2015. Before assuming her executive positions at Crocs, she served on the Crocs board of directors, which she joined in June 2015. Prior to joining Crocs, she served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at PetSmart and, before that, at Weber-Stephen Products. Prior to those roles, she served as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Timberland and spent 21 years in various leadership positions at Sara Lee Corporation. Carrie holds Master of Business Administration and Bachelor of Science degrees from the University of Vermont.
• Raul FernandezDirector Raul is a director and was appointed to GameStop’s board in April 2019. He serves as a member of the company’s Audit Committee. Raul serves as Vice Chairman and Owner of Monumental Sports & Entertainment, a private partnership that co-owns the NBA’s Washington Wizards, the NHL’s 2018 Stanley Cup Champion Washington Capitals, the WNBA’s Washington Mystics, Team Liquid eSports and Wizards District Gaming NBA 2K, as well as co-owns and operates Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C. He also serves as Special Advisor and Limited Partner to General Atlantic Partners, a growth equity firm with more than $31 billion under management. He previously served in several leadership roles at various technology companies, including as Chairman and CEO for Object Video, a leading developer of intelligent video surveillance software. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Maryland and is an active philanthropist, focusing his energy primarily on education reform in the D.C. region.
• Lizabeth DunnDirector Lizabeth is a director and was appointed to GameStop’s board in April 2019. She serves as a member of the company’s Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee and the Compensation Committee. Lizabeth is the Founder and CEO of Pro4ma Inc, an information technology services consulting firm that provides cloud-based data forecasting and predictive analytics tools to retailers. She also is the Founder and CEO of Talmage Advisers, a retail and branded consumer products consulting firm that provides a full range of services across brand strategy, pricing analysis, financial benchmarking and transactional due diligence. Prior to founding these firms, Lizabeth served in various consulting and financial analyst roles for leading financial firms and retail organizations, including Macquarie Group, FBR, Thomas Weisel, Prudential Equity Group, Bear Stearns, Gap Inc. and Liz Claiborne. She holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Spelman College.
• William SimonDirector Bill Simon has more than 30 years of operational and strategic advisory experience in the retail, consumer and food and beverage industries. Since 2014, he has served as a Senior Advisor at KKR & Co. Mr. Simon previously served in multiple leadership roles at Walmart Inc. from 2006 to 2015, including as President and CEO of Walmart U.S. from 2010 to 2014; EVP and COO of Walmart U.S. from 2007 to 2010; and as EVP, Professional Services and New Business Development from 2006 to 2007. Earlier in his career, Mr. Simon served as VP of Marketing, Beverages at Cadbury Schweppes plc and held leadership roles of increasing responsibility at PepsiCo, Inc., after beginning his career at RJR Nabisco. Bill holds an MBA and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Connecticut. Mr. Simon was appointed to the board in 2020 and serves as a member of the Audit Committee and the chair of the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee.
• James SymancykDirector Mr. Symancyk brings more than 25 years of executive leadership and operational experience in the retail and consumer products industries. He has served as President and CEO of PetSmart, Inc. since 2018. Mr. Symancyk previously served as President and CEO of Academy Sports & Outdoors, Inc., a retail and ecommerce sporting goods chain, from 2015 to 2018. Prior to that, he held leadership roles of increasingly responsibility at Meijer, Inc., a regional supercenter chain store, including as President; COO; and EVP, Merchandising & Marketing. He began his career at Sam’s Club, where he served as Divisional Merchandise Manager, among other roles. Mr. Symancyk holds a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Arkansas. Mr. Symancyk was appointed to the board in 2020 and serves as the chair of the Compensation Committee.
• Reginald Fils-AiméDirector Reggie brings more than 35 years of experience transforming companies, revitalizing brands and reshaping industries. From 2006 to 2019, he served as President and COO of Nintendo of America, Inc. During his tenure, Mr. Fils-Aimé focused on the development and launch of industry re-defining products, including the Nintendo DS, Wii, Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo Switch, quadrupling the company’s revenue from 2005 to 2010, and oversaw the successful implementation of the company’s digital strategy. He previously served as Nintendo of America’s EVP of Sales and Marketing from 2003 to 2006. Prior to joining Nintendo, Mr. Fils-Aimé served as SVP of Marketing for VH1 from 2001 to 2003, where he led a strategic shift to appeal to younger consumers that resulted in an increase in ratings of more than 30 percent. Earlier in his career, he held multiple marketing roles at a variety of consumer and manufacturing companies, including the Derby Cycle Corporation, Guinness Import Company, Panda Management Company, Inc., Pizza Hut, Inc. and the Procter & Gamble Company. Mr. Fils-Aimé holds a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Economics from Cornell University. Mr. Fils-Aimé was appointed to the board in 2020 and serves as a member of the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee.
• Kurt WolfDirector Mr. Wolf is the Managing Member and Chief Investment Officer of Hestia Capital Management LLC. Previously, Mr. Wolf worked in a variety of financial, investing and operating roles, at First Q Capital, LLC, and as a co-Founding Partner at Lemhi Ventures LLC. Earlier in his career, Mr. Wolf worked as a consultant both with Deloitte Consulting and The Boston Consulting Group. Mr. Wolf earned a Master of Business Administration degree from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics and Mathematics from Carleton College. Mr. Wolf joined the board in 2020 and serves as a member of the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee.
• Paul EvansDirector Mr. Evans is a Senior Managing Director at Dillon Kane Group. Additionally, Mr. Evans is a Board Director at Hill International, Inc. Prior to this, Mr. Evans served in a variety of senior executive roles at MYR Group Inc. Earlier in his career, Mr. Evans held a number of executive management positions at several energy-related businesses. Mr. Evans is a Certified Public Accountant and a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Mr. Evans received a B.B.A in Accounting from Stephen F. Austin State University and a Masters of International Management from Thunderbird School of Global Management. Mr. Evans joined the board in 2020 and serves as a member of the Audit Committee.

Alright so it is currently over $60 a share and has gone up $9 just this week alone. Having just been listed for public trading in 2019, they have already rocketed over 300%. They just expanded a partnership with Canada for NFL fantasy sports.
Online gambling is the future and more and more states are going to be legalizing it in the future. If the 3 big states New York, California, and Texas legalize online sports betting that will be a 30 billion dollar increase in the industry.
Earnings is 2/26 so plenty of time to ride it up. Not to mention how many people are going to be using DraftKings this weekend for the SUPERBOWL!
This is not financial advise, I just like the stock.
Current position is $54 Call 2/12

Hello there! I just found this subreddit. Also I’m not too sure this belongs in the subreddit but i think it might. Also on mobile so if I miss anything I apologize!
So a bit of backstory:
At the time of one of the many times this has happened to me, I was visiting Las Vegas with my family for Christmas. I was 21 at the time, my birthday was that past August, so I was in legal age to gamble and/or drink. I just wanted to try to gamble at one of the casinos.
We were staying at the Treasure Island hotel and casino, in which I loved staying there and would recommend anyone whom asked me where would they stay. Anyways, I’m am from and still live in Texas as I have a bit of a Texan draw and accent, but my voice was still a bit higher than it is now. I had made a few friends at that casino that were around my same age, and we were playing the Dragon Spin slot machine. I made a joke about the luck I had, I had hit one of the three slot games where the dragon would roar and shake the game, and got close to $200 I think. With it happening 3 years ago I’m not for sure on the little details.
Then came the incident.....
I told my two friends that I was sitting with that I was going to go cash out because I didn’t want to gamble what I had earned away and I was going to start over on $20 that I had brought with me specifically for the trip. (In all I saved around $500 for the trip to buy souvenirs or to gamble a bit). At the time I’d only used about $50 for gambling and I was happy with that, and with the money I got from the slot game, I was well over what I had brought with me. (No im not bragging! This is part of the story!) So I go and pull the cash out and put it in my wallet that I was carrying around with me when I am grabbed by the arm by a woman with a casino manager and a security guard.
Meet the entitled windbag!
EW: this whore took my wallet and stole my money! This girl is too young to even be in here! I saw her drinking alcohol and smoking! She has to be no younger than 14 and you won’t even let my 16 year old daughter in her! She should be thrown out of here!
My eyes are as wide as saucers at this woman’s accusations. Now this grip actually bruised and ALMOST broke my arm! She grabbed me by the part of my arm closer to my shoulder. (Edit: I completely forgot the name of that bone to be honest 😅😅) Her grip was a mix of an alligator bite and a vice grip! Or at least it felt like it to me then.....
I continued to try to pull myself free when my two friends saved me.
F1 and F2 will be called Jane and Kira for the sake of the story.....
Jane: what’s going on?
Kira: you’re hurting her!
The woman let me go and practically threw me to Jane and Kira.
EW: you see she isn’t alone in soliciting her body! Throw them out NOW!
Me: hold on a second! You haven’t even let me tell my side!
I glared at the EW.
Me: first off.... this bag is mine! I have MY room key, MY license, and MY money in here so you ain’t taking shit from me lady! Secondly, I am 21 years of age yeah I look young but who cares?
When I said that I pulled out my license and room key showing what room I was in.
EW: THATS MY KEY GIVE IT TO ME NOW!
She swiped for my room key. Before she could take it, I handed it to the manager and security guard.
Me: here check my name and see which room I’m in.
Jane and Kira saw this next part but told me afterward.
The EW lunged for my wallet. Kira stood to my left side while Jane stood on my right.
Manager: -to the security guard- watch them no one leaves until we find out the truth
The Manager walked away as Kira, Jane and I glared to the EW. She began sweating and stuttering to try to pull something else.
As it turned out?
The EW wasn’t even staying at the hotel/casino! She was trying to steal from not only me but anyone she could sucker into getting money and then use the person she suckered into giving her anything she tried to ask for. I laugh at that every once in a while but cringe and get pretty hot-headed if someone insults me or anyone I know about stature, age, looks, etc.
But the most idiotic part of all this?
When the EW called all three of us hookers, whores and other profanities:
I was wearing boot cut jeans, a long sleeve t-shirt, a Jean jacket and boots!
Jane was wearing skinny jeans, a short sleeve t-shirt, a sweatshirt and converse.
And
Kira was wearing some clothes she borrowed from me which were, regular blue jeans, a tunic top, and some sandals she brought.
So were we looking like some kind of hookers? Or was this woman just too drunk?

Alright degenerates, if you want to make some easy money in the long run. Start looking into DraftKings. It’s not going to make you rich overnight but has the potential to double in price over the next year.
Currently over $60 a share and having just been listed for public trading in July of 2019, they have already rocketed over 300%.
They just expanded a partnership with Canada for NFL fantasy sports.
Online gambling is the future and more and more states are going to be legalizing it in the future. If the 3 big states New York, California, and Texas legalize online sports betting that will be a 30 billion dollar increase in the industry.
Earnings is 2/26 so plenty of time to ride it up. Not to mention how many people are going to be using DraftKings this weekend for the SUPERBOWL!
This is not financial advise, I just like the stock.
Current position is $54 Call 2/12

Alright degenerates, if you want to make some easy money in the long run. Start looking into DraftKings. It’s not going to make you rich overnight but has the potential to double in price over the next year.
Currently over $60 a share and having just been listed for public trading in July of 2019, they have already rocketed over 300%.
They just expanded a partnership with Canada for NFL fantasy sports.
Online gambling is the future and more and more states are going to be legalizing it in the future. If the 3 big states New York, California, and Texas legalize online sports betting that will be a 30 billion dollar increase in the industry.
Earnings is 2/26 so plenty of time to ride it up. Not to mention how many people are going to be using DraftKings this weekend for the SUPERBOWL!
This is not financial advise, I just like the stock.
Current position is $54 Call 2/12

I have been having fun playing this game on mtultiple free to play casino sites including poker stars but I've been looking to put in some real stakes for some real rewards online. Online gambling is legal where I live but no casinos near me so I'm looking for some texas hold'em games with real money stakes.
Update: Thanks guys Bovada is happily working for me! New past time activated.

Story Time: Silver short squeeze

How the Hunt Brothers Cornered the Silver Market and Then Lost it All

TL:DR: yes its long. Grab a beer.

​
Until his dying day in 2014, Nelson Bunker Hunt, who had once been the world’s wealthiest man, denied that he and his brother plotted to corner the global silver market.
Sure, back in 1980, Bunker, his younger brother Herbert, and other members of the Hunt clan owned roughly two-thirds of all the privately held silver on earth. But the historic stockpiling of bullion hadn’t been a ploy to manipulate the market, they and their sizable legal team would insist in the following years. Instead, it was a strategy to hedge against the voracious inflation of the 1970s—a monumental bet against the U.S. dollar.
Whatever the motive, it was a bet that went historically sour. The debt-fueled boom and bust of the global silver market not only decimated the Hunt fortune, but threatened to take down the U.S. financial system.
The panic of “Silver Thursday” took place over 35 years ago, but it still raises questions about the nature of financial manipulation. While many view the Hunt brothers as members of a long succession of white collar crooks, from Charles Ponzi to Bernie Madoff, others see the endearingly eccentric Texans as the victims of overstepping regulators and vindictive insiders who couldn’t stand the thought of being played by a couple of southern yokels.
In either case, the story of the Hunt brothers just goes to show how difficult it can be to distinguish illegal market manipulation from the old fashioned wheeling and dealing that make our markets work.
The Real-Life Ewings
Whatever their foibles, the Hunts make for an interesting cast of characters. Evidently CBS thought so; the family is rumored to be the basis for the Ewings, the fictional Texas oil dynasty of Dallas fame.
Sitting at the top of the family tree was H.L. Hunt, a man who allegedly purchased his first oil field with poker winnings and made a fortune drilling in east Texas. H.L. was a well-known oddball to boot, and his sons inherited many of their father’s quirks.
For one, there was the stinginess. Despite being the richest man on earth in the 1960s, Bunker Hunt (who went by his middle name), along with his younger brothers Herbert (first name William) and Lamar, cultivated an image as unpretentious good old boys. They drove old Cadillacs, flew coach, and when they eventually went to trial in New York City in 1988, they took the subway. As one Texas editor was quoted in the New York Times, Bunker Hunt was “the kind of guy who orders chicken-fried steak and Jello-O, spills some on his tie, and then goes out and buys all the silver in the world.”
Cheap suits aside, the Hunts were not without their ostentation. At the end of the 1970s, Bunker boasted a stable of over 500 horses and his little brother Lamar owned the Kansas City Chiefs. All six children of H.L.’s first marriage (the patriarch of the Hunt family had fifteen children by three women before he died in 1974) lived on estates befitting the scions of a Texas billionaire. These lifestyles were financed by trusts, but also risky investments in oil, real estate, and a host of commodities including sugar beets, soybeans, and, before long, silver.
The Hunt brothers also inherited their father’s political inclinations. A zealous anti-Communist, Bunker Hunt bankrolled conservative causes and was a prominent member of the John Birch Society, a group whose founder once speculated that Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent” of Soviet conspiracy. In November of 1963, Hunt sponsored a particularly ill-timed political campaign, which distributed pamphlets around Dallas condemning President Kennedy for alleged slights against the Constitution on the day that he was assassinated. JFK conspiracy theorists have been obsessed with Hunt ever since.
In fact, it was the Hunt brand of politics that partially explains what led Bunker and Herbert to start buying silver in 1973.
Hard Money
The 1970s were not kind to the U.S. dollar.
Years of wartime spending and unresponsive monetary policy pushed inflation upward throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then, in October of 1973, war broke out in the Middle East and an oil embargo was declared against the United States. Inflation jumped above 10%. It would stay high throughout the decade, peaking in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution at an annual average of 13.5% in 1980.
Over the same period of time, the global monetary system underwent a historic transformation. Since the first Roosevelt administration, the U.S. dollar had been pegged to the value of gold at a predictable rate of $35 per ounce. But in 1971, President Nixon, responding to inflationary pressures, suspended that relationship. For the first time in modern history, the paper dollar did not represent some fixed amount of tangible, precious metal sitting in a vault somewhere.
For conservative commodity traders like the Hunts, who blamed government spending for inflation and held grave reservations about the viability of fiat currency, the perceived stability of precious metal offered a financial safe harbor. It was illegal to trade gold in the early 1970s, so the Hunts turned to the next best thing.
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Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; chart by Priceonomics

As an investment, there was a lot to like about silver. The Hunts were not alone in fleeing to bullion amid all the inflation and geopolitical turbulence, so the price was ticking up. Plus, light-sensitive silver halide is a key component of photographic film. With the growth of the consumer photography market, new production from mines struggled to keep up with demand.
And so, in 1973, Bunker and Herbert bought over 35 million ounces of silver, most of which they flew to Switzerland in specifically designed airplanes guarded by armed Texas ranch hands. According to one source, the Hunt’s purchases were big enough to move the global market.
But silver was not the Hunts' only speculative venture in the 1970s. Nor was it the only one that got them into trouble with regulators.
Soy Before Silver
In 1977, the price of soybeans was rising fast. Trade restrictions on Brazil and growing demand from China made the legume a hot commodity, and both Bunker and Herbert decided to enter the futures market in April of that year.
A future is an agreement to buy or sell some quantity of a commodity at an agreed upon price at a later date. If someone contracts to buy soybeans in the future (they are said to take the “long” position), they will benefit if the price of soybeans rise, since they have locked in the lower price ahead of time. Likewise, if someone contracts to sell (that’s called the “short” position), they benefit if the price falls, since they have locked in the old, higher price.
While futures contracts can be used by soybean farmers and soy milk producers to guard against price swings, most futures are traded by people who wouldn’t necessarily know tofu from cream cheese. As a de facto insurance contract against market volatility, futures can be used to hedge other investments or simply to gamble on prices going up (by going long) or down (by going short).
When the Hunts decided to go long in the soybean futures market, they went very, very long. Between Bunker, Herbert, and the accounts of five of their children, the Hunts collectively purchased the right to buy one-third of the entire autumn soybean harvest of the United States.
To some, it appeared as if the Hunts were attempting to corner the soybean market.
In its simplest version, a corner occurs when someone buys up all (or at least, most) of the available quantity of a commodity. This creates an artificial shortage, which drives up the price, and allows the market manipulator to sell some of his stockpile at a higher profit.
Futures markets introduce some additional complexity to the cornerer’s scheme. Recall that when a trader takes a short position on a contract, he or she is pledging to sell a certain amount of product to the holder of the long position. But if the holder of the long position just so happens to be sitting on all the readily available supply of the commodity under contract, the short seller faces an unenviable choice: go scrounge up some of the very scarce product in order to “make delivery” or just pay the cornerer a hefty premium and nullify the deal entirely.
In this case, the cornerer is actually counting on the shorts to do the latter, says Craig Pirrong, professor of finance at the University of Houston. If too many short sellers find that it actually costs less to deliver the product, the market manipulator will be stuck with warehouses full of inventory. Finance experts refer to selling the all the excess supply after building a corner as “burying the corpse.”
“That is when the price collapses,” explains Pirrong. “But if the number of deliveries isn’t too high, the loss from selling at the low price after the corner is smaller than the profit from selling contracts at the high price.”
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The Chicago Board of Trade trading floor. Photo credit: Jeremy Kemp

Even so, when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found that a single family from Texas had contracted to buy a sizable portion of the 1977 soybean crop, they did not accuse the Hunts of outright market manipulation. Instead, noting that the Hunts had exceeded the 3 million bushel aggregate limit on soybean holdings by about 20 million, the CFTC noted that the Hunt’s “excessive holdings threaten disruption of the market and could cause serious injury to the American public.” The CFTC ordered the Hunts to sell and to pay a penalty of $500,000.
Though the Hunts made tens of millions of dollars on paper while soybean prices skyrocketed, it’s unclear whether they were able to cash out before the regulatory intervention. In any case, the Hunts were none too pleased with the decision.
“Apparently the CFTC is trying to repeal the law of supply and demand,” Bunker complained to the press.
Silver Thursday
Despite the run in with regulators, the Hunts were not dissuaded. Bunker and Herbert had eased up on silver after their initial big buy in 1973, but in the fall of 1979, they were back with a vengeance. By the end of the year, Bunker and Herbert owned 21 million ounces of physical silver each. They had even larger positions in the silver futures market: Bunker was long on 45 million ounces, while Herbert held contracts for 20 million. Their little brother Lamar also had a more “modest” position.
By the new year, with every dollar increase in the price of silver, the Hunts were making $100 million on paper. But unlike most investors, when their profitable futures contracts expired, they took delivery. As in 1973, they arranged to have the metal flown to Switzerland. Intentional or not, this helped create a shortage of the metal for industrial supply.
Naturally, the industrialists were unhappy. From a spot price of around $6 per ounce in early 1979, the price of silver shot up to $50.42 in January of 1980. In the same week, silver futures contracts were trading at $46.80. Film companies like Kodak saw costs go through the roof, while the British film producer, Ilford, was forced to lay off workers. Traditional bullion dealers, caught in a squeeze, cried foul to the commodity exchanges, and the New York jewelry house Tiffany & Co. took out a full page ad in the New York Times slamming the “unconscionable” Hunt brothers. They were right to single out the Hunts; in mid-January, they controlled 69% of all the silver futures contracts on the Commodity Exchange (COMEX) in New York.
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Source: New York Times

But as the high prices persisted, new silver began to come out of the woodwork.
“In the U.S., people rifled their dresser drawers and sofa cushions to find dimes and quarters with silver content and had them melted down,” says Pirrong, from the University of Houston. “Silver is a classic part of a bride’s trousseau in India, and when prices got high, women sold silver out of their trousseaus.”
According to a Washington Post article published that March, the D.C. police warned residents of a rash of home burglaries targeting silver.
Unfortunately for the Hunts, all this new supply had a predictable effect. Rather than close out their contracts, short sellers suddenly found it was easier to get their hands on new supplies of silver and deliver.
“The main factor that has caused corners to fail [throughout history] is that the manipulator has underestimated how much will be delivered to him if he succeeds [at] raising the price to artificial levels,” says Pirrong. “Eventually, the Hunts ran out of money to pay for all the silver that was thrown at them.”
In financial terms, the brothers had a large corpse on their hands—and no way to bury it.
This proved to be an especially big problem, because it wasn’t just the Hunt fortune that was on the line. Of the $6.6 billion worth of silver the Hunts held at the top of the market, the brothers had “only” spent a little over $1 billion of their own money. The rest was borrowed from over 20 banks and brokerage houses.
At the same time, COMEX decided to crack down. On January 7, 1980, the exchange’s board of governors announced that it would cap the size of silver futures exposure to 3 million ounces. Those in excess of the cap (say, by the tens of millions) were given until the following month to bring themselves into compliance. But that was too long for the Chicago Board of Trade exchange, which suspended the issue of any new silver futures on January 21. Silver futures traders would only be allowed to square up old contracts.
Predictably, silver prices began to slide. As the various banks and other firms that had backed the Hunt bullion binge began to recognize the tenuousness of their financial position, they issued margin calls, asking the brothers to put up more money as collateral for their debts. The Hunts, unable to sell silver lest they trigger a panic, borrowed even more. By early March, futures contracts had fallen to the mid-$30 range.
Matters finally came to a head on March 25, when one of the Hunts’ largest backers, the Bache Group, asked for $100 million more in collateral. The brothers were out of cash, and Bache was unwilling to accept silver in its place, as it had been doing throughout the month. With the Hunts in default, Bache did the only thing it could to start recouping its losses: it start to unload silver.
On March 27, “Silver Thursday,” the silver futures market dropped by a third to $10.80. Just two months earlier, these contracts had been trading at four times that amount.
The Aftermath
After the oil bust of the early 1980s and a series of lawsuits polished off the remainder of the Hunt brothers’ once historic fortune, the two declared bankruptcy in 1988. Bunker, who had been worth an estimated $16 billion in the 1960s, emerged with under $10 million to his name. That’s not exactly chump change, but it wasn’t enough to maintain his 500-plus stable of horses,.
The Hunts almost dragged their lenders into bankruptcy too—and with them, a sizable chunk of the U.S. financial system. Over twenty financial institutions had extended over a billion dollars in credit to the Hunt brothers. The default and resulting collapse of silver prices blew holes in balance sheets across Wall Street. A privately orchestrated bailout loan from a number of banks allowed the brothers to start paying off their debts and keep their creditors afloat, but the markets and regulators were rattled.
Silver Spot Prices Per Ounce (January, 1979 - June, 1980)
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Source: Trading Economics

In the words of then CFTC chief James Stone, the Hunts’ antics had threatened to punch a hole in the “financial fabric of the United States” like nothing had in decades. Writing about the entire episode a year later, Harper’s Magazine described Silver Thursday as “the first great panic since October 1929.”
The trouble was not over for the Hunts. In the following years, the brothers were dragged before Congressional hearings, got into a legal spat with their lenders, and were sued by a Peruvian mineral marketing company, which had suffered big losses in the crash. In 1988, a New York City jury found for the South American firm, levying a penalty of over $130 million against the Hunts and finding that they had deliberately conspired to corner the silver market.
Surprisingly, there is still some disagreement on that point.
Bunker Hunt attributed the whole affair to the political motives of COMEX insiders and regulators. Referring to himself later as “a favorite whipping boy” of an eastern financial establishment riddled with liberals and socialists, Bunker and his brother, Herbert, are still perceived as martyrs by some on the far-right.
“Political and financial insiders repeatedly changed the rules of the game,” wrote the New American. “There is little evidence to support the ‘corner the market’ narrative.”
Though the Hunt brothers clearly amassed a staggering amount of silver and silver derivatives at the end of the 1970s, it is impossible to prove definitively that market manipulation was in their hearts. Maybe, as the Hunts always claimed, they just really believed in the enduring value of silver.
Or maybe, as others have noted, the Hunt brothers had no idea what they were doing. Call it the stupidity defense.
“They’re terribly unsophisticated,” an anonymous associated was quoted as saying of the Hunts in a Chicago Tribune article from 1989. “They make all the mistakes most other people make,” said another.
p.s. credit to Ben Christopher

Team has been involved in a substantial number of the digital media, sports, entertainment, leisure and gaming industries’ most significant merger and acquisition transactions, holding key positions at, and transacting with Scientific Games Corp, Inspired Gaming Group, FOX Bets, Ocean Casino Resort, Resorts International Holdings, PokerStars, DraftKings, Mohegan Sun, Caesars Entertainment Corporation, Harrah’s Entertainment, Tropicana Entertainment, Inc., TSG/Sky Betting & Gaming, Facebook, Inc, Wynn Resorts, Dubai World/MGM Resorts
Here's all the Bios. These guys are stellar! TEKK closed at $10.30 today. Still cheap!
If you don't like to read... you don't like to make money!!!!
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Matthew Davey — Chief Executive Officer and Director
Mr. Davey has over 25 years of experience within the digital media, sports, entertainment, leisure and gaming ecosystems, as well as experience in the public sector. He is an experienced public company executive officer and board member. He has served in executive management positions across the gaming technology arena. Over the course of Mr. Davey’s career, he oversaw more than ten mergers and acquisitions and over $1.2 billion in debt and equity capital raised to support the companies he has led.
Most recently, Mr. Davey was Chief Executive Officer of SG Digital, the Digital Division of Scientific Games Corp. (“Scientific Games”) (Nasdaq: SGMS). SG Digital was established following the purchase by Scientific Games of NYX Gaming Group Limited (“NYX”) (formerly TSXV: NYX), where Mr. Davey served as Chief Executive Officer and Director. The NYX acquisition provided Scientific Games with a vehicle to significantly accelerate the scale and breadth of its existing digital gaming business, including the strategic expansion into sports betting. In his capacity as Chief Executive Officer of NYX, Mr. Davey developed and implemented a corporate strategy that generated strong revenue growth. Mr. Davey shaped company strategy to focus on digital gaming supplier platforms and content that provided various gaming operators with the underlying gaming and sports betting systems for their online gaming business. In 2014, Mr. Davey oversaw the initial public offering of NYX, and his experience in the digital media, sports, entertainment, leisure and gaming industries helped NYX recognize momentum as a public company. After the public offering, from 2014 to 2018, Mr. Davey oversaw seven acquisitions which helped establish NYX as one of the fastest growing global B2B real-money digital gaming and sports betting platforms. These acquisitions included:
• OpenBet: In 2016, NYX completed the $385 million acquisition of OpenBet. This was one of the more complex and transformative acquisitions that Mr. Davey oversaw at NYX. Through securing co-investments from William Hill (LSE: WMH), Sky Betting & Gaming and The Stars Group (formerly Nasdaq: TSG, TSX: TSGI), Mr. Davey was able to get the acquisition from Vitruvian Partners completed successfully, winning the deal against much larger and well capitalized competitors. By combining two established and proven B2B betting and gaming suppliers, NYX was well positioned to provide customers with exciting player-driven solutions across all major product verticals and distribution channels. This allowed NYX to become the leading B2B omni-channel sportsbook platform in the market and the supplier to over 300 gaming operators globally with an extensive library of desktop and mobile game titles, including more than 700 on NYX platforms and more than 2,000 on the OpenBet platform.
• Cryptologic/Chartwell: In 2015, NYX completed the $119 million acquisition of Cryptologic and Chartwell. The acquisition provided NYX with more than 400 titles of additional leading gaming content, a broader customer base, and direct exposure to PokerStars and Intercasino, part of the Gamesys Group (LSE: GYS) — two of the world’s largest online casino offerings.
• OnGame: In 2014, NYX completed the distressed acquisition of OnGame, a premier poker content, platform and service provider. This acquisition provided NYX with one of the best poker products in the industry, access to several regulated jurisdictions, and a valuable talent pool that was instrumental in the growth of NYX. The addition of OnGame further established a path for NYX to continue its growth in both European and U.S. markets.
These acquisitions, together with meaningful organic growth, increased NYX’s revenue from $24 million in 2014 to $184 million annualized in 2017. During that time, Mr. Davey helped build NYX to have over 200 customers in the global gaming industry and a team of 1,000 employees. Mr. Davey’s success at NYX ultimately led to its sale to Scientific Games for $631 million in 2018.
Mr. Davey joined Next Gen Gaming, the predecessor to NYX, in 2000 as the Vice President of Technology, was appointed as Executive Director in 2003 and named Chief Executive Officer in 2005. Prior to that, he was the Senior Consultant for Access Systems, a company that specializes in the provision of back-end software for licensed online casinos. Prior to joining Access, Mr. Davey worked for the Northern Territory Government specializing in matters pertaining to the internet and e-commerce along with roles in the Department of Racing and Gaming. Mr. Davey received a Bachelor of Electrical & Electronic Engineering from Northern Territory University, Australia (also known as Charles Darwin University).
Robin Chhabra — President
Mr. Chhabra has been at the forefront of corporate acquisition activity within the digital gaming landscape for over a decade. His prior experience includes leading corporate strategy, M&A, and business development at two of the global leaders in the digital gaming industry, The Stars Group (“TSG”) and William Hill, and a leading supplier, Inspired Gaming Group (Nasdaq: INSE). Mr. Chhabra served on the Group Executive Committees of each of these companies. From 2017 to May 2020, Mr. Chhabra served as Chief Corporate Development Officer at TSG and, from 2019 to August 2020, he also served as the Chief Executive Officer of Fox Bet, a leading U.S. online gaming business which is the product of a landmark partnership between TSG and FOX Sports, a transaction which he led. During that period, Mr. Chhabra led several transactions which transformed TSG into the largest publicly listed online gambling operator in the world by both revenue and market capitalization and one of the most diversified from a product and geographic perspective with revenues of over $2.5 billion. Mr. Chhabra’s M&A experience is extensive and covers multiple global geographies across the digital gaming value chain and includes the following:
• TSG/Flutter Entertainment Merger: In 2019, Mr. Chhabra led the TSG M&A team that was responsible for TSG’s $12.2 billion merger with Flutter Entertainment (LSE: FLTR). The merger between TSG and Flutter Entertainment is the largest transaction in the digital gaming industry to date. The combination created the largest publicly listed online gaming company with approximately 13 million active customers and leading product offerings, which include sports betting, online casino, fantasy sports and poker. The combined entity includes some of the world’s most iconic digital gaming brands such as Fanduel, Fox Bet, Sky Bet, PaddyPower, Betfair, PokerStars and SportsBet. TSG/Flutter Entertainment is one of the most geographically diverse digital gaming and media companies with leading positions in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Germany and Georgia.
• TSG/Sky Betting and Gaming (“SBG”): In 2018, Mr. Chhabra led the acquisition of SBG from CVC Capital Partners and Sky plc, Europe’s largest media company, in a transaction valued at $4.7 billion. At the time of the acquisition SBG was the largest mobile gambling operator in the United Kingdom and one of the fastest growing of the major operators having doubled its online market share in three years. The acquisition of SBG provided TSG with (a) greater revenue diversification, significantly enhanced expertise and exposure to sports betting just ahead of the judicial overturn of The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA) by the U.S. Supreme Court, (b) a leading position within the United Kingdom, the world’s largest regulated online gaming market, (c) improved products and technology as a result of the addition of SBG’s innovative casino and sports book offerings and a portfolio of popular mobile apps, and (d) expertise in deeply integrating sports betting with leading sports media companies, positioning TSG to create more engaging content, deliver faster growth and decrease customer acquisition costs.
• William Hill (LSE: WMH): At William Hill, from 2010 to 2017, Mr. Chhabra served as Group Director of Strategy and Corporate Development where he led several transactions which contributed to William Hill’s transformation from a land-based gambling operator in the United Kingdom to a leading online-led international business. Mr. Chhabra led William Hill’s entry into the U.S. sports betting and online lottery markets with the acquisition of four businesses, including the simultaneous acquisitions of three U.S. sportsbooks, Cal Neva, American Wagering and Brandywine Bookmaking, in 2011 for an aggregate purchase price of $55 million. These businesses ultimately led William Hill to achieve a leading position in the U.S. sports betting market with a market share of 24% in 2019. Additionally, Mr. Chhabra played a key role in structuring William Hill’s successful joint venture with PlayTech Plc (LSE: PTEC) in 2008. The combined entity created one of the largest online gambling businesses in Europe at the time of its formation and led to William Hill’s buyout of Playtech’s interest for $637 million in 2013. Prior to the transaction, William Hill had struggled in its attempt to establish a strong online gaming platform and a meaningful presence outside the United Kingdom.
Mr. Chhabra has also successfully completed four transactions worth over $1.2 billion in Australia, the world’s second largest regulated online gambling market, and various partnerships in Asia. Additionally, he completed several technology and media related transactions, including William Hill’s investment in NYX, where he worked with Mr. Davey on NYX’s transformational acquisition of OpenBet.
Prior to working in the gaming sector, Mr. Chhabra was an equities analyst and a management consultant. Mr. Chhabra received a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Eric Matejevich — Chief Financial Officer
Mr. Matejevich is a seasoned gaming executive with extensive experience in both the online gaming and traditional casino industries. From February to August 2019, he served as Trustee and Interim-Chief Executive Officer of Ocean Casino Resort (“Ocean”) (formerly Revel Casino, which had a construction cost of $2.4 billion) in Atlantic City, where he successfully led the management team through an ownership change and operational turnaround effort. Over the course of seven months, Mr. Matejevich managed to reduce the property’s weekly cash burn of $1.5 million to an annualized cash flow run rate in excess of $20 million.
Prior to Ocean, from 2016 to 2018, Mr. Matejevich served as the Chief Financial Officer of NYX. At NYX, he focused his efforts on integrating the company’s many acquisitions and multiple debt refinancings to simplify its capital structure and provided liquidity for growth initiatives. Additionally, Mr. Matejevich was instrumental to the executive team that sold NYX to Scientific Games for $631 million.
Prior to NYX, from 2004 to 2014, Mr. Matejevich was the Chief Financial Officer of Resorts International Holdings and later, from 2011, also the Chief Operating Officer of the Atlantic Club Casino, a property under the Resorts International Holdings umbrella — a Colony Capital (NYSE: CLNY) entity. As Chief Financial Officer, he provided managerial oversight for all finance functions for a six-property casino company with annual gaming revenue exceeding $1.3 billion, 10,000 gaming positions, 7,000 hotel rooms and over 11,000 staff members during his tenure. Mr. Matejevich led the transition effort to integrate a four-casino, $1.3 billion acquisition from Harrah’s Entertainment and Caesars Entertainment (Nasdaq: CZR). As Chief Operating Officer of Atlantic Club, he lobbied for and was successful in obtaining the first internet gaming legislation passed in the United States. The Atlantic Club was the sole New Jersey casino proponent of the legislation.
Prior to serving in various gaming positions, Mr. Matejevich was a Vice President of High Yield Research for Merrill Lynch, where he managed the corporate bond research effort for the gaming and leisure sectors and marketed high yield and other debt transactions totaling $4.8 billion. Mr. Matejevich received a Bachelor of Science in Economics from The Wharton School and a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from The College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.
Our Board of Directors
Morris Bailey — Chairman
Over the past 10 years, Mr. Bailey has been a leader in turning around Atlantic City, as well as being among the first gaming executives to embrace online gaming and sports betting in the United States. In his efforts, Mr. Bailey partnered with two of the largest digital gaming companies in the world, PokerStars, part of the Stars Group, and DraftKings (Nasdaq: DKNG). In 2010, Mr. Bailey bought Resorts Atlantic City (“Resorts”) and initiated a comprehensive renovation which allowed for the property to be rebranded and repositioned. In 2012, Mr. Bailey signed an agreement with Mohegan Sun to manage the day-to-day operations of the casino. In addition to Mohegan Sun’s operational expertise and ability to reduce costs via economies of scale, Resorts gained access to their robust customer database. Soon thereafter, Mr. Bailey and his team focused on bringing online gaming to the property. In 2015, Resorts established a platform to engage in online gaming by partnering with PokerStars, now part of the $24 billion Flutter Entertainment, PLC (LSE: FLTR), to operate an online poker room in Atlantic City. In 2018, Resorts announced deals with DraftKings and SBTech to open a sportsbook on-property and online. For 2020 year-to-date, Resorts has performed in the top quartile in internet gross gaming revenue in New Jersey. Mr. Bailey’s efforts in New Jersey helped set the framework for expansion of online sports and gaming throughout the United States.
In addition to his gaming interests, Mr. Bailey has over 50 years of experience in all facets of real estate development, asset M&A, capital markets and operations and is the founder, Chief Executive Officer and Principal of JEMB Realty, a leading real estate development, investment and management organization. Mr. Bailey has notable investment experience within the energy, finance and telecommunications sectors through investments in the Astoria Energy Plant, Basis Investment Group and Xentris Wireless.
Tony Rodio — Director Nominee
Mr. Rodio has nearly four decades of experience in the gaming industry. Most recently, Mr. Rodio served as the Chief Executive Officer and director of Caesars Entertainment Corporation (“Caesars”) (Nasdaq: CZR), one of the world’s most diversified casino-entertainment providers and the most geographically diverse U.S. casino-entertainment company, from April 2019 until its acquisition by Eldorado Resorts, Inc. in July 2020. Mr. Rodio led Caesars through its $17.3 billion merger with Eldorado Resorts, one of the largest transactions in the gaming industry to date. Additionally, Mr. Rodio was instrumental to Caesars’ expansion into the digital gaming industry and oversaw the implementation of new digital segments such as its Scientific Games powered retail sportsbook solution that now operates in various states throughout the U.S. From October 2018 to May 2019, Mr. Rodio served as Chief Executive Officer of Affinity Gaming. Prior to Affinity Gaming, he served as President, Chief Executive Officer and a director of Tropicana Entertainment, Inc. (“Tropicana”) for over seven years, where he was responsible for the operation of eight casino properties in seven different jurisdictions. During his time at Tropicana, Mr. Rodio oversaw a period of unprecedented growth at the company, improving overall financial results with net revenue that increased more than 50% driven by both operational improvements and expansion across regional markets. Mr. Rodio led major capital projects, including the complete renovation of Tropicana Atlantic City and Tropicana’s move to land-based operations in Evansville, Indiana. Each of these initiatives, among others, generated substantial value for Tropicana. Ultimately, Mr. Rodio’s efforts at Tropicana led to its sale to Eldorado Resorts in 2018 for $1.85 billion. Prior to Tropicana, Mr. Rodio held a succession of executive positions in Atlantic City for casino brands, including Trump Marina Hotel Casino, Harrah’s Entertainment (predecessor to Caesars), the Atlantic City Hilton Casino Resort and Penn National Gaming. He has also served as a director of several professional and charitable organizations, including Atlantic City Alliance, United Way of Atlantic County, the Casino Associations of New Jersey and Indiana, AtlantiCare Charitable Foundation and the Lloyd D. Levenson Institute of Gaming Hospitality & Tourism. Mr. Rodio brings extensive knowledge of and experience in the gaming industry, operational expertise, and a demonstrated ability to effectively design and implement company strategy. Mr. Rodio received a Bachelor of Science from Rider University and a Master of Business Administration from Monmouth University.
Marlon Goldstein — Director Nominee
Mr. Goldstein is a licensed attorney with nearly 20 years of experience in the gaming space. He joined The Stars Group (Nasdaq: TSG)(TSX: TSGI) in January 2014 as its Executive Vice-President, Chief Legal Officer and Secretary until his retirement from the company in July 2020 following the merger of TSG with Flutter Entertainment, PLC (LSE: FLTR). Mr. Goldstein also previously served as the Executive Vice-President, Corporate Development and General Counsel of TSG. Mr. Goldstein was also the senior TSG executive based in the United States and was one of the primary architects of TSG’s strategic vision for its U.S.-facing business. During his tenure, TSG grew from an approximately $500 million market-cap company to an approximately $7 billion market-cap company through a combination of organic growth and strategic mergers and acquisitions. Mr. Goldstein participated in numerous M&A transactions and capital markets offerings at TSG, including several transformational transactions in the digital gaming industry. Notable transactions in which Mr. Goldstein was involved include:
• TSG/Flutter Merger: In 2019, TSG merged with Flutter for a $12.2 billion transaction value, the largest transaction in the digital gaming industry to date.
• TSG/Fox Bet Partnership: In 2019, TSG entered into a partnership with FOX Sports to create FOX Bet in the U.S., a leading U.S. online gaming business. Wall Street Research estimates an approximate $1.1 billion valuation for Fox Bet post-partnership with The Stars Group.
• TSG/Sky Betting & Gaming: In 2018, TSG acquired Sky Betting & Gaming, the largest mobile gambling operator in the United Kingdom at the time, for $4.7 billion.
• TSG/CrownBet and William Hill: In 2018, TSG simultaneously acquired CrownBet and William Hill, two Australian operators, for a total of $621 million in a multi-part transaction.
• TSG/PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker: In 2014, TSG acquired The Rational Group, which operated PokerStars and Full Tilt and was the world’s largest poker business, for $4.9 billion.
Through his ability to legally structure large and complex transactions, Mr. Goldstein was integral to TSG’s vision of becoming a full-service online gaming company. Additionally, he assisted in structuring TSG’s capital markets activity, which generated liquidity for acquisitions and strengthened its balance sheet.
Prior to joining TSG, Mr. Goldstein was a principal shareholder in the corporate and securities practice at the international law firm of Greenberg Traurig P.A., where he practiced for almost 13 years. Mr. Goldstein’s practice focused on corporate and securities matters, including mergers and acquisitions, securities offerings, and financing transactions. Additionally, Mr. Goldstein was the founder and co-chair of the firm’s Gaming Practice, a multi-disciplinary team of attorneys representing owners, operators and developers of gaming facilities, manufacturers and suppliers of gaming devices, investment banks and lenders in financing transactions, and Indian tribes in the development and financing of gaming facilities.
Mr. Goldstein brings experience and insight that we believe will be valuable to a potential initial business combination target business. Mr. Goldstein received a Bachelor of Business Administration with a concentration in accounting from Emory University and a Juris Doctorate with highest honors from the University of Florida, College of Law.
Sean Ryan — Director Nominee
Mr. Ryan is a digital media and technology operator with extensive global experience in online payments, e-commerce, marketplaces, mobile ad networks, digital games, enterprise collaboration platforms, blockchain, real money gaming and online music. Since 2014, Mr. Ryan has been serving as Vice President of Business Platform Partnerships at Facebook, Inc. (“Facebook”) (Nasdaq: FB), where he leads a more than 500 person global organization that manages the Payments, Commerce, Novi/Blockhain, Workplace and Audience Network businesses. Prior to his current role, Mr. Ryan was hired in 2011 as the Director of Games Partnerships to lead and grow the global Games business at Facebook. While the Director of Games Partnerships, Mr. Ryan focused on re-shaping Facebook’s games and monetization strategies to derive more value for Facebook, its users and its partners, including the addition of a Real Money Gaming offering in regulated markets. Mr. Ryan’s team helped accelerate a major trend in engagement through cross-platform games and therefore the opportunity to increase users through establishing games on multiple platforms. Prior to joining Facebook, Mr. Ryan created the new social and mobile games division at News Corp, an American multinational mass media corporation controlled by Rupert Murdoch. While at News Corp, Mr. Ryan led the acquisition of Making Fun, a San Francisco social-game start-up, that created News Corp’s games publishing division.
Before joining News Corp., Mr. Ryan founded multiple digital businesses such as Twofish, Meez, Open Wager and SingShot Media. Mr. Ryan co-founded Twofish in 2009, a virtual goods and services platform that provided developers with data analytics and insights for individual application’s digital economies. Twofish was later sold to online payments provider Live Gamer, where Mr. Ryan served on the board of directors. From 2005 to 2008, Mr. Ryan founded and led Meez.com, a social entertainment service combining avatars, web games and virtual worlds. The white label social casino gaming company Open Wager was spun out of Meez and was later sold to VGW Holdings, Mr. Ryan also co-founded SingShot Media, an online karaoke community, which was sold to Electronic Arts (Nasdaq: EA) and merged into its Sims division.
We believe Mr. Ryan’s experience will be valuable to a potential initial business combination target and would provide an expanded perspective on the digital gaming landscape. Mr. Ryan received a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University and a Master of Business Administration from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Tom Roche — Director Nominee
Mr. Roche has more than 40 years of experience in the gaming industry as a regulator, advisor and independent auditor. Mr. Roche joined Ernst & Young (“EY”) as a partner in 2003 and opened its Las Vegas office. He was subsequently appointed as the Office Managing Partner and Global Gaming Industry Market Leader. In 2016, Mr. Roche relocated to the EY Hong Kong office to supervise the expansion of the EY Global Gaming Industry practice in the Asia Pacific region. Mr. Roche has been integral to numerous transactions that have shaped the current gaming landscape, including:
• Wynn Resorts (Nasdaq: WYNN) initial public offering: Mr. Roche was the lead partner on Wynn Resort’s initial public offering, which raised $450 million in 2002.
• Harrah’s Entertainment/Apollo Management Group & Texas Pacific Group: Mr. Roche headed the regulatory advisory services on the buyout of Harrah’s Entertainment, the world’s largest casino company at the time, for $17.1 billion.
• Dubai World/MGM Resorts: Mr. Roche headed the regulatory and due diligence advisory services to Dubai World in its approximately $5.1 billion investment in MGM. Dubai World bought 28.4 million MGM shares, or 9.5 percent of the casino operator, for $2.4 billion. It then invested $2.7 billion to acquire a 50% stake in MGM’s CityCenter Project, a $7.4 billion 76-acre Las Vegas development of hotels, condos and retail outlets.
• MGM Growth Properties (NYSE: MGP) initial public offering: Mr. Roche provided tax and structural transaction services to MGM Resorts in the creation of MGM Growth Properties, a publicly traded REIT engaged in the acquisition, ownership and leasing of large-scale destination entertainment and leisure resorts. MGM Growth Properties raised $1.05 billion in its 2016 initial public offering.
Mr. Roche also directed EY advisory services to boards and management teams for profit improvement and technology related initiatives. In addition, Mr. Roche provided advisory support to the American Gaming Association on several research projects, including those specifically related to sports betting, the revocation of The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA) and anti-money laundering best practices in the gaming industry. Equally, he has assisted government agencies in numerous international locations with enhancing their regulatory approach to governing the industry especially in the online gambling sector.
Prior to joining Ernst & Young, Mr. Roche served as Deloitte’s National Gaming Industry Leader and as the co-head of Andersen’s Gaming Industry Practice in Las Vegas. In 1989, Mr. Roche was appointed by then Governor of the State of Nevada, Robert Miller, to serve as one of three members of the Nevada State Gaming Control Board for a four-year term, where he was directly responsible for the Audit and New Games Lab Divisions. As a board member, he spent a substantial amount of time assisting global jurisdiction regulators enact gaming legislation in the design of their regulatory structure. During his career, Roche has been involved in numerous public and private offerings of equity and debt securities. His background includes providing casino regulatory consulting services to casino licensees and to federal and state agencies including the National Indian Gaming Commission and the Nevada State Gaming Control Board, and industry associations such as the Nevada Resort Association and the American Gaming Association.
We believe Mr. Roche’s highly regarded reputation as a gaming auditor and advisor in the gaming industry will be valuable for us and a potential business combination target. Mr. Roche is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and is licensed by the Nevada State Board of Accountancy and Mississippi State Board of Public Accountancy. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting from the University of Southern California.

21 year old Preston Bolden's body was found near railroad tracks in the vicinity of 419 Nolan near the 600 block of North Walnut Street in San Antonio, Texas on May 8, 1953 around 6:00 a.m. Preston's body was found by [name redacted in the Department of Justice's closing memorandum] who was walking along the railroad tracks that morning and saw Preston's body laying between the tracks with his head pointing west and wearing a shoe only on his right foot. Thinking Preston was asleep at first, [name redacted] tried to wake Preston but then noticed he was dead so [name redacted] used a neighbor's phone to call the police. The memorandum noted that [Name redacted] was not acquainted with Preston.
Two officers [both names redacted] arrived at the scene and filed a report. They found Preston without a hat and on his back near the Southern Pacific Railway tracks. Preston's left two-tone brown and white shoe was missing and his shirt was pulled up. The officers noted that Preston had been struck in the front of the head as his face was covered with blood. They found a pair of dice and $2.30 in cash in Preston's pockets which led them to believe robbery was not the motive. Other witnesses in the area reported hearing an argument in the area but an investigation later showed that the participants in the argument were in no way related to the circumstances surrounding Preston's death. Another officer, whose name was redacted, reported that he saw an old model Plymouth with a canvas top near the railroad tracks around 3:30 a.m.
Justice of the Peace M.D. Buck Jones ruled that the cause of death was "murder at the hands of some person or persons unknown.” According to the police report, Dr. G.D. Boyd said Preston's neck was broken at the third vertebra and an autopsy found that Bolden’s spine was severed at the base of the skull by a blunt instrument. The autopsy also noted that Preston died at about 2:30 that morning.
1953 San Antonio Investigation:
The San Antonio Police Department along with the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office investigated Preston's murder. Several witnesses who were acquainted with Preston told police that Preston, nicknamed Mullins, was in the company of friends the night before and was gambling with them. Their description of the night before are summarized below but contains a number of redactions:
Interview No. 1: On the evening of May 7, an acquaintance, whose name was redacted, saw Preston being followed by several men who were asking him for money. The acquaintance believed Preston had won a craps game which is why the men were asking to borrow money. There was an ongoing conversation which the acquaintance joined where one of the men in the group suggested that another group member [name redacted] should ask Preston for money since Preston liked this man more than the others in the group. This group member, following the group's wishes, asked Preston to honor one of the other men's request for money; Preston suggested that the group member lend the 50 cents requested and Preston would repay the group member once he obtained change. The group eventually all stopped at Four Hour Cleaners where Preston pulled out a wad of money and straightened up the bills on the store's counter. Preston then gave his money to the group member so he could get change. The acquaintance then saw Preston get into someone's Dodge and drive north on Chestnut Street which is the last time the acquaintance saw Preston.
Interview No. 2: [Name redacted] was with the acquaintance in Account No. 1 when he saw Preston and a group of men on the street. Preston was in the lead followed by two men [both names redacted] who were asking him for money. [Name redacted] heard the men say they had been in a craps game and Preston had "broke the other two." Acquaintance No. 1 left [name redacted] to join the group. [Name redacted] then watched the group walk to the Four Hour Cleaners after which he did not see Preston again.
Interview No. 3: [Name redacted] was a woman who knew Preston for approximately a year. On the evening of May 7, she was asleep at home but was woken up by noise outside her home. She saw a group of men shooting dice outside and recognized Preston and five others plus two soldiers in uniform. She told the group to not gamble there or else she would call the police. After the game ended, she spoke to Preston who told her not to call the police because he "had broke the rest of the fellows and he pulled out a big handful of bills." She thought there were at least several hundred dollars in his hand. She then saw him go down the street with others and never saw him again. She learned of Preston's death the following morning.
Interview No. 4: [Name redacted] told investigators that Preston came to his shop, Four Hours Cleaners, around 6:15 to 6:30 the night before. 2 men [both names redacted] followed Preston to the doorstep of the cleaners and one of the men grabbed Preston by the wrist and tried to force Preston to go with him, saying “Come on man.” When one of the men tried to stop the other from forcing Preston to go, the other man then said "you have everything you need and you don’t want anybody else to make anything.” The two men then left Preston and Preston came inside the cleaners where he told [name redacted] that the others wanted his money but he "wasn't going to be fooled into letting them have his money." Preston wanted to buy a shirt and pants from [Name redacted]'s business but he did not have enough money partly because he owed his lawyer money. Preston then asked one of the men in his group for a ride so he could get some money that was owed to him. After 15 minutes, Preston returned to the cleaners but looked like he had had a “shot of something” because he was falling asleep. Preston did not buy the pants he originally wanted to purchase but picked up his dry cleaning. Preston stepped outside as the business was closing and [name redacted] alerted one of the men in Preston's group to look after him. Preston was then observed standing in the middle of the sidewalk but sound asleep. [Name redacted] closed his shop for the night and then drove home. He did not see Preston again.
Interview No. 5: Another acquaintance of Preston's, whose name was redacted, told investigators that between 4:30-5:00 p.m., he observed Preston and a group of men shoot dice in the kitchen of the E. Commerce Bar and Café for about one and a half hours. One of the men broke even but another lost $14 by the time the game ended. Some time after, [name redacted] saw Preston and others walk towards Chestnut Street so he followed them so he could play dice as well. After 5 minutes, the woman in Interview No. 3, yelled at the men to quit playing or she would call police. [Name redacted] determined he lost $3 as Preston walked away from the game. [Name redacted] then saw Preston standing alone at a taxi stand on E. Commerce Street and did not see him again afterwards.
According to the police report, the men interviewed were booked on a vagrancy hold and one was scheduled to take a polygraph test. Due to the number of redactions, it is hard to determine which men were booked or scheduled for the polygraph test. No further information was provided about the results of the polygraph test or any further developments about the investigation.
2009 Federal Investigation:
In 2009, the FBI initiated a review of Carrie's death pursuant to the Department of Justice's Cold Case Initiative and the Emmett Till Civil Rights Crime Act of 2007. The initiative sought to investigate violations of criminal civil rights statutes that occurred no later than December 31, 1969 and resulted in death. As part of its investigation, the FBI looked at contemporary newspaper articles concerning Preston's murder along with records from the Homicide Unit of the San Antonio Police Department. The FBI also contacted the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office, the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office and the Texas Department of Public Safety but none of the agencies had any records on Preston. The FBI also posted public notices on the internet and other media seeking witnesses as well as relatives but no one has responded.
Four newspaper articles from the San Antonio Express provided information not reflected in police reports. Police Lieutenant W.J. Robitsch theorized that Preston had been beaten somewhere else and then transported in a car to the railroad tracks, where his body was dumped on the ground. According to one article, an “old model car” had been parked at approximately the spot where the body was found at about 3:30 a.m., and tire marks were observed near the body. Two of the articles referred to Preston as a part-time narcotics informer for the police. One article says the police arrested an unnamed suspect within an hour after Preston's body was found. The suspect reportedly heard Preston giving information to Lieutenant Robitsch.
Another article quotes Police Chief Joe Hester who said that Preston operated an “unusual racket” in that he sold keys to “gullible and amorous servicemen that would supposedly unlock doors behind which eager women were waiting." Chief Hester said the keys were “junk" and theorized that one of Preston's “suckers tracked him down” and murdered him. Police Lieutenant [name redacted] noted in one of the articles that other than the broken neck, there were no other marks on Preston.
The FBI located the former Police Lieutenant whose name was redacted but he was unable to recall Preston's murder. The FBI determined that Lieutenant Robitsch died in 1986. It is unclear if the FBI was able to find Chief Hester or interview him.
The Department of Justice closed Preston's case as there was insufficient evidence to establish that Preston's death was a racially-motivated homicide. Accordingly, the FBI declined to investigate further.
Preston's murder remains unsolved.
Links:
Department of Justice: Preston Bolden-Notice to Close File
Digital Journal: November 19, 2009-FBI Continues to Probe Civil Rights-Era Racial Murders
Discussion:
I came across the Department of Justice’s cold case initiative (Emmett Till Civil Rights Act) while reading an article discussing journalists’ efforts to install a billboard on an Arkansas highway aimed at solving the 1954 lynching of Isadore Banks. The Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice launched a website (linked above) to make information about the department’s investigation of cold cases from the Civil Rights Era more accessible to the public. As a result of the initiative, the Department of Justice has prosecuted and convicted Edgar Ray Killen for the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi (the "Mississippi Burning" case); he is the eighth defendant convicted. The Department has also been able to charge and convict perpetrators of the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama and secured a life sentence for James Ford Seale for the kidnapping and murder of two teenagers in Franklin County, Mississippi in 1964.
Unfortunately, many cases which were submitted to the Department of Justice remain unsolved due to the passage of time resulting in evidentiary and legal barriers. In each case that is not prosecutable, the Department of Justice wrote a closing memorandum explaining the investigative steps taken and the basis for their conclusion. To date, the Department of Justice has uploaded 115 closing memos. I hope to be able to post on all of the closed cases as I share in the belief with the Department of Justice that “these stories should be told [as] there is value in a public reckoning with the history of racial violence and the complicity of government officials.”
Other posts from the Department of Justice's Cold Case Initiative:
1. Isadore Banks-unsolved murder in Marion, Arkansas-June 1954
2. Willie Joe Sanford-unsolved murder in Hawkinsville, Georgia-March 1957
3. Ann Thomas-unsolved murder in San Antonio, Texas-April 1969
4. Thad Christian-murdered on August 30, 1965 in Central City, Alabama
5. Silas Caston-killed on March 1, 1964 by a Hinds County Sheriff’s Office Deputy in Jackson, Mississippi
6. Clifford "Clifton" Walker-unsolved murder in Woodville, Mississippi-February 1964
7. Jasper Greenwood- his badly decomposed body was found in Vicksburg, Mississippi in June 1964
8. Mattie Greene- killed in a bomb explosion in Ringgold, Georgia on May 19, 1960
9. Samuel O'Quinn-unsolved murder in Centreville, Mississippi-August 1959
10. Ladislado Ureste-unsolved murder in San Antonio, Texas-April 1953
11. Carrie Brumfield-unsolved murder in Franklinton, Louisiana-September 1967

Long time lurker, first time poster.
Before I begin.. I have never done a write up on here before, so, if I am lacking anything, welp, please be gentle. There are a bunch of pictures in the various articles linked below.
An elderly couple hadn't answered their phone in three days and their nephew, Marvin Marlin, was growing increasingly concerned. Marvin decided to go to their home but found the house was all locked up and the blinds drawn closed. He had no way to check on his aunt and uncle, so he called the police and requested a welfare check.
On June 23, 1965, Houston police officers accompanied Marvin to the home of the elderly couple. When there was no answer, they kicked the door in. Inside there was no sign of the couple or their son.
The house was a little messy, but according to Marvin, his aunt and uncle were not the neatest of people. What did seem odd was the moldy dinner on the table and the smell of rot coming from the 3-by-5 electric refrigerator in the kitchen.
After opening the freezer, police noticed the stacks and stacks of butchered hog meat.
The officers realized what they were dealing with after opening the crisper to find two human heads.
"On all the shelves and in the freezer compartment were the dismembered bodies, cut in unwrapped, washed off pieces smaller than individual joints. There was little food in the icebox."
"Whoever did this apparently took their time and knew what they were doing. The dismembering was a fairly neat job."
Edwina Rogers, 79, had been beaten and shot execution style. The killer had smashed in 81 year old Fred Rogers' head with a hammer, gouging out his eyes and removing his organs. Both were dragged to the master bedroom, drained of blood, chopped into pieces, and placed in the fridge. The organs were later found in a nearby sewer - the killer had chopped them up and flushed them down the toilet.
The house had been carefully cleaned, the only blood was discovered on the keyhole of a bedroom door. The bedroom belonged to the couples' son, 43 year old son Charles Rogers.
It was estimated that the Rogers' had been dead for three days, meaning they were murdered on Father's Day, June 20, 1965.
Charles was a recluse who only communicated with his parents via notes slipped under his bedroom door and rarely seen by neighbors.
The police never got the chance to speak with Charles, who, despite a nationwide manhunt, was never seen or heard from again. He was declared legally dead in 1975 by a Houston judge.
Charles Frederick Rogers was 43 years old and said to be extremely intelligent and with an intense interest in ham radios. He spoke several languages and had a Bachelor of Science degree in nuclear physics. He had been a pilot for the US Navy during WWII and served in the Office of Naval Intelligence.
Upon discharge, he became a seismologist for Shell Oil Company. At some point in the 1950's, Charles is said to have been involved in the Civil Air Patrol where he met David Ferrie - a man later accused of being involved in the plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.
After 9 years with Shell, Charles inexplicably quit his job without explanation and moved in with his parents, but they rarely ever saw their son. Charles turned into a loner and recluse living in the attic bedroom.
After the murders of Fred & Edwina, an international manhunt commenced in search of Charles. Most of the Rogers' neighbors were shocked to learn they had a son at all. Those who knew about Charles, like his cousin Marvin, said Charles rarely left the house, but when he did it become dawn and he would not return until after dark.
** THEORIES *\*
1
In 1992, John R. Craig & Phillip A. Rogers documented Charles' life in the book The Man on the Grassy Knoll.
In it, the authors - who were investigators for the National Intelligence Service Bureau - claim that Charles was a CIA agent until the mid 1980's. They accuse Charles of being one of the men who assassinated President John F. Kennedy, and of impersonating Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City. They say Charles was 1 of the "three tramps", along with Charles Harrelson [father of actor Woody Harrelson] and Chauncey Holt, who were arrested in Dealey Plaza after the assassination of Kennedy.
The authors also claim that this is why Charles had to kill his parents, Edwina was listening to and keeping track of Charles' CIA phone calls. The elderly couple knew too much and needed to be killed.
According to the Man on the Grassy Knoll, Charles fled to Guatemala, where he likely died of old age. The book has been heavily criticized for its complete lack of sources and blatantly fictionalized accounts of certain events, conversations and attributed thoughts.
2
In 1997, forensic accountant Hugh Gardenier and his wife, Martha, began investigating the crime themselvers. They wrote their own book detailing their theories, The Ice Box Murders.
In the book, they acknowledge that Charles had dealings with CIA contract workers while he was a seismologist for Shell, but they completely reject the notion that Charles was a CIA agent himself who needed to dismember his parents after they overheard his not so secret/secret phone calls from the attic about killing Kennedy.
Instead, the Gardeniers believe Charles was emotionally and physically abused as a child, and as an adult, by his father. Which, you know, cutting off his father's genitals on Father's Day, might confirm that a bit.
They also claim that near the end of their life, Edwina and Fred were both defrauding their son, forging his signature on deeds of land he owned, and taking out loans in his name and pocketing the money. The Gardeniers label Fred and Edwina "devious con artists." They say Fred worked as a bookie, regularly engaging in gambling and fraud, stealing large sums of money from Charles and continuing to physically abuse the grown man.
The Gardeniers claim Charles had been planning his parents' death for years and used his "powerful friends", whom he had met through his ham radio hobby while working in the oil industry, to flee to Mexico. They theorize Charles eventually ended up in Honduras where he experienced some cosmic karma when he was killed over a wage dispute with miners.
The Ice Box Murders has been called "a work of fact based fiction."
Sources:
https://truecrimesociety.com/2019/09/21/1815-driscoll-street-houston-tx/amp/
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/amp/grisly-ice-box-murders-7251178.php
https://www.houstoniamag.com/news-and-city-life/2018/11/icebox-murders
https://heresthefuckingtwist.com/2020/01/21/true-crime-tuesday-the-ice-box-murders/amp/

Enbridge Inc.’s high dividend yield has been flashing red throughout most of 2020, beckoning dividend investors but also signalling discomfort with the company’s connection to a depressed energy sector.
The stock’s rebound over the past month suggests that investors are at last warming up to the stock, and there are several reasons why the rally could continue.
Enbridge is an energy infrastructure company best known as a pipeline operator, moving crude oil and natural gas through an extensive network that spans North America. (Full disclosure: I own shares in Enbridge.)
Depressed oil prices and concerns about the financial health of energy producers – the ones that pay for pipeline space – have weighed heavily on the stock during the pandemic. It didn’t help that the company also faced continuing legal challenges to its Line 3 project, which is designed to replace part of its U.S. crude oil pipeline that moves crude from Alberta to U.S. Midwest refiners.
The share price sank 40 per cent between February and March, sending the dividend yield to a remarkable high of 9.5 per cent, even as bond yields sank.
What’s equally remarkable is that the share price in early November wasn’t much above its March low, as two promising rallies in the spring and summer fizzled out.
Welcome to the third attempt to break out of this funk: The share price has gained about 20 per cent since Nov. 6. This time, though, the dividend yield (now around 7.6 per cent) is looking more like an opportunity than a warning sign – and analysts are bullish on the stock.
Enbridge is operating with an improving backdrop. West Texas Intermediate oil, a U.S. benchmark, has gained 28 per cent since the end of October, to more than US$46 a barrel, which is its highest level in nine months.
Though still well off its recent high of about US$60 a barrel at the end of 2019, the oil price has eased concerns about the energy sector as the economy picks up. Even the share prices of volatile drillers are rallying in anticipation of better years ahead.
What’s more, analysts are upbeat that Enbridge’s Line 3 project – which promises to double its pipeline capacity and brighten the company’s growth profile – is moving in the right direction after years of delays.
“We view the construction and completion of the US$2.9-billion-plus Line 3 project as a catalyst for Enbridge’s shares,” Robert Hope, an analyst at Scotia Capital, said in a note last week.
He expects that the project will be completed, and operating, in the third quarter of 2021, after Enbridge received its final U.S. federal permit earlier this month and began positioning crews to start construction before year-end. Successful completion of the project could lift the stock’s valuation, meaning that investors will be willing to pay more for things like profits and cash flows.
But even without good news on oil prices and pipeline construction, Enbridge has demonstrated during these dark days that its business model can withstand some pretty nasty shocks.
The company’s EBITDA (or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) from its liquids pipelines declined just 7.5 per cent in the first nine months of the year from the same nine-month period last year. And overall, company generated slightly more cash this year.
As a result, Enbridge maintained its dividend at 81 cents a share over the past four quarters, and announced a modest dividend hike of 3 per cent last week, underscoring management’s confidence in the year ahead: They expect to generate EBITDA between $13.9-billion and $14.3-billion, or as much as $1-billion more than 2019, when times were good.
While the payout hike fails to meet a company target of raising the dividend annually by 5 to 7 per cent, Raymond James analyst Chris Cox said in a note that the increase strikes the “right balance of reaffirming a commitment to long-term dividend growth while acknowledging that higher dividends are not being rewarded [by the market] with the current yield.”
Analysts expect that Enbridge’s share price will rise about 21 per cent to $51.50 within 12 months, based on the average price target from 10 analysts, which would lower the dividend yield to 6.5 per cent. At current levels around $43, the stock may be a worthy gamble.

theglobeandmail.com/investing/markets/inside-the-market/article-enbridges-high-dividend-yield-signals-caution-and-opportunity/ 

Welcome to Lost in the Sauce, keeping you caught up on political and legal news that often gets buried in distractions and theater… or a global health crisis.
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Trump’s playbook is Russia’s playbook

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in July withheld an intelligence bulletin warning of a Russian plot to spread misinformation regarding Joe Biden's mental health. The bulletin, titled “Russia Likely to Denigrate Health of U.S. Candidates to Influence 2020 Election,” was blocked by the office of acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf on July 9.

• The bulletin states that analysts had “high confidence” in their conclusion. However, a DHS spokesperson tried to defend the “delay” in issuing the document by saying it did not meet the agency’s standards. This is curious because just a week later, on July 16, DHS circulated a bulletin on anarchists in Portland that officers admitted they had “low confidence” in. Why was the Russia memo held back but the Portland one released?
  
• Trump has been pushing the same line of attack against Biden for months - yet another instance of Russia and Trump operating from the same playbook. For instance, in March Trump said there was “something going on” with Biden; in June Trump ran selectively edited ads asserting that Biden is “unfit to serve as Commander in Chief”; last month Trump ran a digital ad portraying Biden as perpetually confused and mentally unstable. Most recently, Trump said questions about his own health are only in the news because “they want to try and get me to be on Biden's physical level."
  

DHS is just the latest agency in the Trump administration to erode election security, following actions by the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) last month. DNI John Ratcliffe announced he was ending in-person congressional briefings on election security ahead of November and AG Bill Barr removed a leading career official at the Justice Department’s national security division, replacing him with an inexperienced political appointee.
The ODNI’s decision to halt congressional election briefs may have been influenced by top White House officials. National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, among others, have repeatedly discussed in meetings with staff and with Trump “how to restrict and control the flow of information on such sensitive topics to Capitol Hill.”

One White House official told The Daily Beast that Meadows has for months been wary of the type of briefings on Capitol Hill that Democratic sources can potentially use to try to make Trump look bad through surreptitious leaks to media outlets.

Meanwhile, interim Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee Marco Rubio (R-FL) said last week that his committee will be granted an exception to the ODNI’s new policy and continue to receive in-person briefings from top U.S. intelligence officials about election-security issues. This essentially means that only Democrat-led committees have been cut out of the process ensuring election security.
House Democrats wrote to Ratcliffe insinuating if his office does not provide the previously scheduled briefings this month they will issue subpoenas and/or defund the ODNI in the appropriations bill due by the end of the month. Read the letter here.
In addition to attacks on Biden’s health, DHS has determined that Russia is seeking to “amplify” concerns over the integrity of U.S. elections by promoting allegations that mail-in voting will lead to widespread fraud. Intelligence analysts say this strategy has been underway since at least March, coinciding with Trump’s own assaults on mail-in voting.

• For instance, in March Trump said if he agreed to funding vote-by-mail expansions in the first coronavirus stimulus bill, the U.S. would see “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again” (clip). Fact check: Neither party has historically benefited. On April 7, at the White House press briefing, Trump claimed: "Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country, because they're cheaters… They're fraudulent in many cases" (clip). Fact check: There is no evidence that mail ballots are dangerous or fraudulent.

At a White House press briefing on Friday, Trump denied there is any proof that Russia poisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Instead of backing the German government's analysis of Nalvany's illness, Trump then redirected the criticism from Russia to China (clip).

"I don't know exactly what happened. I think it's tragic. It's terrible; it shouldn't happen. We haven't had any proof yet, but I will take a look. It is interesting that everybody is always mentioning Russia - and I don't mind you mentioning Russia - but I think probably China, at this point, is a nation that you should be talking about much more so than Russia. Because the things that China's doing are far worse.”

Trump then went on to say he’s “taken stronger action against Russia than any other country in the world,” but added “I do get along with President Putin” (clip).

• RELATED: Leaked notes obtained by the Telegraph say that when Theresa May asked for Trump to take a strong stand after Russia poisoned Sergei Skripal, Trump replied “I’d rather follow than lead.” He pushed May to “put together a coalition” first.

The Trump administration plans to deport a Russian national living in America, a move experts say is in response to a politically motivated request by Russia. Gregory Duralev was persecuted by the Russian state for exposing corruption. He fled to America and applied for asylum in 2015. While waiting for a decision on his application, he was arrested by ICE and jailed for nearly 18 months. His case is now in court.

“DHS has acted no better than the Russian authorities,” Duralev said. “They simply fabricated charges against me for violations I never committed — and if DHS can trump up charges against immigrants with impunity, nobody can guarantee they won’t start doing it” to regular Americans. “So that’s the main message I now hope to send.”

Michael Cohen & Peter Strzok

Former FBI agent Peter Strzok has a book coming out called “Compromised.” In it, he alleges that FBI investigators came to believe it was “conceivable, if unlikely” that Russia was secretly controlling President Trump after he took office:

“We certainly had evidence that this was the case: that Trump, while gleefully wreaking havoc on America’s political institutions and norms, was pulling his punches when it came to our historic adversary, Russia,” Strzok writes. “Given what we knew or had cause to suspect about Trump’s compromising behavior in the weeks, months, and years leading up to the election, moreover, it also seemed conceivable, if unlikely, that Moscow had indeed pulled off the most stunning intelligence achievement in human history: secretly controlling the president of the United States — a Manchurian candidate elected.”

He now says he doesn’t believe that Trump is literally a Russian spy: “I don’t think that Trump, when he meets with Putin, receives a task list for the next quarter,” Strzok said, referencing the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. “But I do think the president is compromised, that he is unable to put the interests of our nation first, that he acts from hidden motives, because there is leverage over him, held specifically by the Russians but potentially others as well.”
In an interview with Politico, Strzok confirms that he and then-deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, opened a counterintelligence case on the president, but that it likely was never pursued. Two weeks ago, NYT reported that Rosenstein secretly closed it.
As if there weren’t enough political books coming out this summefall, Michael Cohen is releasing his, called “Disloyal: A Memoir.” The following a couple of quick takeaways:
Cohen says that he, Trump, Aras Agalarov, Emin Agalarov, and others, watched a strip show in Las Vegas where one performer simulated peeing on another performer, who pretended to drink it. Trump reportedly reacted with “delight.” Aras Agalarov, a Russian real estate mogul, is a trusted associate of Putin and reportedly served as a liaison between Trump and the Russian president during Trump’s trip to Moscow.
WaPo:

On Russia, Cohen writes that the cause behind Trump’s admiration of Russian President Vladimir Putin is simpler than many of his critics assume. Above all, he writes, Trump loves money — and he wrongly identified Putin as “the richest man in the world by a multiple.” Trump loved Putin, Cohen wrote, because the Russian leader had the ability “to take over an entire nation and run it like it was his personal company — like the Trump Organization, in fact.”
...According to Cohen, Trump’s sycophantic praise of the Russian leader during the 2016 campaign began as a way to suck up and ensure access to the oligarch’s money after he lost the election. But he claims Trump came to understand that Putin’s hatred of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, dating to her support for the 2011 protest movement in Russia, could also help Trump amass more power in the United States.

USPS & mail voting

According to a Washington Post report yesterday, Postmaster Louis DeJoy engaged in campaign money laundering, also called a straw-donor scheme, at his former logistics business. Five of his former employees told WaPo that they were “urged” to donate to politicians in North Carolina and would be paid back through bonuses from DeJoy. Such a plan would allow DeJoy to illegally circumvent campaign donation limits.

“Louis was a national fundraiser for the Republican Party. He asked employees for money. We gave him the money, and then he reciprocated by giving us big bonuses,” said David Young, DeJoy’s longtime director of human resources, who had access to payroll records at New Breed from the late 1990s to 2013 and is now retired.
“He would ask employees to make contributions at the same time that he would say, ‘I’ll get it back to you down the road,’ ” said [another] former employee.
...A Washington Post analysis of federal and state campaign finance records found a pattern of extensive donations by New Breed employees to Republican candidates, with the same amount often given by multiple people on the same day. Between 2000 and 2014, 124 individuals who worked for the company together gave more than $1 million to federal and state GOP candidates. Many had not previously made political donations, and have not made any since leaving the company, public records show.

More than one million mail-in ballots were sent late to voters during the 2020 primary elections, an audit by the USPS IG’s office determined. Most of the ballots were late, the USPS says, because local election boards sent the ballots to voters at the last minute. Official press release.

[The audit] found the problems during primaries had been most pronounced in Kentucky and New York, where a combined 628,000 ballots were sent out late. In 17 states, the audit found, more than 589,000 ballots were sent from election boards to voters after the state’s ballot mailing deadline. In 11 states, more than 44,000 ballots were sent from election boards to voters the day of or the day before the state’s primary election.
One particularly troubling situation, auditors found, unfolded in Pennsylvania, where 500 ballots were sent to voters the day after the election.

Furthermore, only 13% of the ballots were mailed with the recommended bar code tracking technology.
Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D) was blocked from attending two scheduled tours of USPS facilities last week. Local Postal Service officials informed her and union leaders waiting to accompany her into the building that national USPS leadership had directed them to bar the group from the building. A Postal Service spokeswoman said they simply needed more notice for a tour.
Many states, including important battleground states, are not legally permitted to process mail-in/absentee ballots until Election Day, leading to concern that results will be delayed by days or weeks. For instance, in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan election officials cannot even begin processing ballots until Election Day. Processing involves opening envelopes, flattening ballots to run through the scanning machine, and prepping for the scanning.

"When voters have to wait so long for results, it erodes trust in the process and leaves room for partisan bad actors to dispute the will of the people," said Amber McReynolds, CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute, a nonprofit organization.

AG Bill Barr made three stunning false claims about mail voting during an interview with Wolf Blitzer last week. First, Barr wouldn’t even acknowledge that voting twice is a crime - because just hours earlier, Trump encouraged his North Carolina supporters to vote twice to “test” the state’s mail-in voting system (clip).

BLITZER: It sounds like he’s encouraging people to break the law and try to vote twice.
BARR: It seems to me what he’s saying is, he’s trying to make the point that the ability to monitor this system is not good. And it was so good, if you tried to vote a second time you would be caught if you voted in person.
BLITZER: That would be illegal if they did that. If somebody mailed in a ballot and then actually showed up to vote in person, that would be illegal.
BARR: "I don't know what the law in the particular state says.”
BLITZER: You can’t vote twice.
BARR: "I don't know what the law in the particular state says.”

Then, Barr tried to assert that foreign countries could fake ballots, but when challenged he admitted he had no evidence (clip).

BLITZER: You’ve said you were worried that a foreign country could send thousands of fake ballots, thousands of fake ballots to people that it might be impossible to detect. What are you basing that on?
BARR: I’m basing — as I’ve said repeatedly, I’m basing that on logic.
BLITZER: Pardon?
BARR: Logic.

Finally, Barr cited a supposed incident of mail-in voting fraud in Texas. Too bad it doesn’t exist.

The payroll

Charles Rettig, the Trump-appointed IRS Commissioner who has refused to release President Trump’s tax returns, has made hundreds of thousands of dollars renting out Trump properties while in office. Rettig makes $100,000 - $200,000 a year from two units at Trump International Waikiki. When first nominated, Rettig failed to disclose his financial ties to Trump Waikiki. When questioned by Congress, he did not directly answer concerns about the properties.

CREW: With Trump’s name removed from some buildings as it began to hurt property values, we can only imagine how toxic it would become if a bombshell in his tax returns were released. Which means the IRS Commissioner has a vested interest in the success of the Trump brand—and of preventing anything that could damage it.

Voice of America staffers say Trump appointee Michael Pack is threatening to wash away legal protections intended to insulate their news reports from political meddling. Since arriving, Pack has fired the network's leaders, pushed out agency executives, refused to approve allotted budgets, and refused to renew visas for foreign employees.

• Further reading: “Deleted Biden video sets off a crisis at Voice of America,” Politico.

Pack suggested the staff he fired and foreign journalists he essentially kicked out may have been foreign spies, without offering any evidence to support his claim. A group of 14 senior VOA journalists are openly disputing his explanation:

“Mr. Pack has made a thin excuse that his actions are meant to protect national security, but just as was the case with the McCarthy ‘Red Scare,’ which targeted VOA and other government organizations in the mid-1950s, there has not been a single demonstrable case of any individual working for VOA — as the USAGM CEO puts it — ‘posing as a spy,’ ” they wrote.

The White House is searching for a replacement for Federal Trade Commission Chair Joe Simons, a Republican who has publicly resisted President Donald Trump’s efforts to crack down on social media companies. Simons, a veteran antitrust lawyer, cannot legally be removed by the president except in cases of gross negligence. But the White House has already interviewed at least one candidate for the post.

• RELATED: The Justice Department plans to bring an antitrust case against Google as soon as this month, after Attorney General William P. Barr overruled career lawyers who said they needed more time to build a strong case.

Richard Grenell, formerly the highest-ranking out gay official in the Trump administration, has joined a law firm founded by Pat Robertson that has a history of opposing LGBTQ+ rights. Grenell also recently joined the Republican National Committee to do outreach to LGBTQ+ voters.
The Trump administration has quietly named a new acting State Department inspector general. Matthew Klimow, the U.S. ambassador to Turkmenistan since mid-2019, is the third acting IG since Trump and Pompeo ousted Senate-confirmed IG Steve Linick in May.
Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s current special envoy to Northern Ireland, former Chief of Staff, and former acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is starting a hedge fund focused on financial services regulation. Ethics experts say Mulvaney explicitly using his knowledge of CFPB to place bets for and against companies gives him an unfair and perhaps illegal advantage.

Court and DOJ matters

Court cases
The Trump administration must, for now, stop winding down in-person counting efforts for the 2020 census, a federal judge in California ordered.
The three-judge panel hearing a challenge to Trump’s new anti-immigrant census policy seemed hostile to the government’s arguments in a hearing last week.
A federal judge has stopped the Trump administration from enforcing a rule change that would let health care providers deny medical services to LGBTQ patients on the grounds of religion.
Justice Department
Federal prosecutors are preparing to charge longtime GOP fundraiser Elliott Broidy in connection with efforts to influence the U.S. government on behalf of foreign interests. Broidy helped raise millions for Donald Trump’s election and the Republican Party.
Barr ordered another round of changes to FISA rules, tightening the use of government surveillance on political candidates or their staffers — a move conservatives will likely cheer, as they have long criticized how the FBI investigated the Trump campaign in 2016.

Before conducting physical searches or wiretaps of a federal election official, members of the official's staff, candidates for federal office, or their staff or advisers, the FBI must now consider giving them a "defensive briefing," to tell them that they could be the target of foreign influence.