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To be sure, there is, as yet, no evidence that any of these investment houses did anything illegal in either paying placement agents or, for that matter, in helping finance Chooch. (The film depicts losers from Queens cavorting in Cancun with a fun-loving prostitute. It received no positive reviews, of which this one in the New York Post was typical: “The sort of vanity project that gives amateurs a bad name.”) Like the “shock” expressed by Captain Renault in the movie Casablanca after a croupier hands him a pile of money, the investment houses can express dismay that their agents of influence earned their fees in any nefarious way. After all, the boilerplate in their agreements with their placement agents requires those agents, to quote from the Carlyle contract, to “abide by all laws.”
The money invested in Chooch may present a more difficult problem, because these payments were made many months after the movie had totally failed at the box-office. (Chooch played in a grand total of three theaters, and, in its short run, took in less than $33,000.) So why did these masters of the universe decide to sink their own money in Deputy Comptroller Loglisci’s Chooch? If it was anything other than to make profits from the Chooch enterprise, their investments could be construed as afoul of New York state’s strict antigratuity laws, which are intended to prevent parties from currying favor from public officials by gifting them.
Stay tuned, as Andrew Cuomo pursues the mysteries of placement agents, double agents, enterprise corruption, and other elements in the invisible universe of high finance, which only grow curiouser and curiouser. While Chooch may have been a slapstick comedy about a bag of stolen money, the corruption of an entire pension fund system is no laughing matter.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article stated that a Carlyle "top executive" invested $100,000 in Chooch. The article has been amended to reflect that an executive of CarlyleRiverstone made the investment.
Edward Jay Epstein studied government at Cornell and Harvard, and received a PhD from Harvard in 1973. The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood is his 13th book. The sequel, The Hollywood Economist will be published in January 2010.
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
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Edward Jay Epstein studied government at Cornell and Harvard, and received a PhD from Harvard in 1973. The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood is his 13th book. The sequel, The Hollywood Economist will be published in January 2010.
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Edward Jay Epstein studied government at Cornell and Harvard, and received a PhD from Harvard in 1973. The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood is his 13th book. The sequel, The Hollywood Economist will be published in January 2010.
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Edward Jay Epstein studied government at Cornell and Harvard, and received a PhD from Harvard in 1973. The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood is his 13th book. The sequel, The Hollywood Economist will be published in January 2010.
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