JM02 - Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home by Peter Spiegelman Page A
Authors: Peter Spiegelman
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co-conspirators in Ainsley’s fraud if they knew but didn’t tell. And either way, they were horribly conflicted: Pace’s interest in keeping Piedmont as a client, and in keeping Piedmont’s shares inflated, led it— and Danes— to distort research reports and to mislead investors.
Though they made for fun reading, the allegations were difficult to prove. There was no trail of memos or smirking e-mail to indicate that anyone at Pace-Loyette had known of the fraud, or to suggest that Danes had not believed his own research reports. And there was the fact, besides, that Pace had lost a large pile of dough on its loans to Ainsley. But the absence of a smoking gun hadn’t deterred the lawyers, and it hadn’t saved Gregory Danes’s reputation. Pundits, politicians, and op-ed columnists feasted on the Piedmont affair— and on Danes— for many months, until a host of larger and more garish frauds came along.
The search engines returned links to interviews that Danes had given over the years, and I skimmed through a few of them. There was something almost quaint in his rosy pronouncements— on e-commerce, broadband, data mining, and a dozen other jargon-soaked topics. It was like reading about eight-track tapes or bongs. I read farther down the list of links and stopped at something called LindaObsession.com. I clicked, not knowing what to expect.
It was a disturbing and aptly named site. A page entitled “Our Mission” summed it up:
We are here to appreciate and adore the most beautiful and intelligent and most totally HOT host/reporter/superstar/diva on television today (OR EVER!)— the Amazing, Incredible, Spectacular LINDA SOVITCH! We Are Totally Linda!!!
Linda Sovitch was the blond glossy host of Market Minds, the Business News Network show that offered analysis of the day’s market action and features on investing, the economy, and politics. In recent years, Sovitch had also become the glamorous face of BNN itself. Gregory Danes had been a frequent guest on Market Minds, practically a fixture there since the show’s debut in the late nineties, and this was why LindaObsession had come up in my search.
Along with the fevered deconstruction of Linda Sovitch’s physical charms— the cornflower eyes, the ash-blond hair, the delicate nostrils and bee-stung lips and swelling bosom— and the meticulous parsing of what seemed her every utterance, there were stills and video clips from the Market Minds show. In among these was Gregory Danes.
There was Danes on the show’s premier segment, and when the Dow hit 10,000. There he was when Cisco surpassed GE in market capitalization. And there was Danes on the first anniversary show and on every subsequent one— except for the last few. I clicked on a video clip.
It was fuzzy and jumpy but watchable nonetheless. The topic was the significance of adding Microsoft and Intel to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Sovitch was smiling and flirty and pitching softballs; Danes was arrogant and preening and knocking the hide off them. But there
was a twitchy, adolescent quality about him too, which came through even on the murky video— like the class wiseass who’s suddenly found himself captain of the football team. Even so, his message was simple and clear: It’s a whole new world, and there’s no place to go but up. For sure, Greg.
Most of the references that turned up in my search were several years old, and they were all business. There were no references to him in the social pages, and— apart from Ainsley’s posh barbecue— no reported sightings of him at any of Wall Street’s many charity events. Even the few magazine profiles of him mentioned nothing more personal than his fondness for classical music.
The only exception was a mention of Danes in a 1998 article from a Newark, New Jersey, newspaper. It was a short piece, reporting on an administrative action by the SEC against a tiny Jersey City firm and a broker there named Richard Gilpin, for a slew of
Though they made for fun reading, the allegations were difficult to prove. There was no trail of memos or smirking e-mail to indicate that anyone at Pace-Loyette had known of the fraud, or to suggest that Danes had not believed his own research reports. And there was the fact, besides, that Pace had lost a large pile of dough on its loans to Ainsley. But the absence of a smoking gun hadn’t deterred the lawyers, and it hadn’t saved Gregory Danes’s reputation. Pundits, politicians, and op-ed columnists feasted on the Piedmont affair— and on Danes— for many months, until a host of larger and more garish frauds came along.
The search engines returned links to interviews that Danes had given over the years, and I skimmed through a few of them. There was something almost quaint in his rosy pronouncements— on e-commerce, broadband, data mining, and a dozen other jargon-soaked topics. It was like reading about eight-track tapes or bongs. I read farther down the list of links and stopped at something called LindaObsession.com. I clicked, not knowing what to expect.
It was a disturbing and aptly named site. A page entitled “Our Mission” summed it up:
We are here to appreciate and adore the most beautiful and intelligent and most totally HOT host/reporter/superstar/diva on television today (OR EVER!)— the Amazing, Incredible, Spectacular LINDA SOVITCH! We Are Totally Linda!!!
Linda Sovitch was the blond glossy host of Market Minds, the Business News Network show that offered analysis of the day’s market action and features on investing, the economy, and politics. In recent years, Sovitch had also become the glamorous face of BNN itself. Gregory Danes had been a frequent guest on Market Minds, practically a fixture there since the show’s debut in the late nineties, and this was why LindaObsession had come up in my search.
Along with the fevered deconstruction of Linda Sovitch’s physical charms— the cornflower eyes, the ash-blond hair, the delicate nostrils and bee-stung lips and swelling bosom— and the meticulous parsing of what seemed her every utterance, there were stills and video clips from the Market Minds show. In among these was Gregory Danes.
There was Danes on the show’s premier segment, and when the Dow hit 10,000. There he was when Cisco surpassed GE in market capitalization. And there was Danes on the first anniversary show and on every subsequent one— except for the last few. I clicked on a video clip.
It was fuzzy and jumpy but watchable nonetheless. The topic was the significance of adding Microsoft and Intel to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Sovitch was smiling and flirty and pitching softballs; Danes was arrogant and preening and knocking the hide off them. But there
was a twitchy, adolescent quality about him too, which came through even on the murky video— like the class wiseass who’s suddenly found himself captain of the football team. Even so, his message was simple and clear: It’s a whole new world, and there’s no place to go but up. For sure, Greg.
Most of the references that turned up in my search were several years old, and they were all business. There were no references to him in the social pages, and— apart from Ainsley’s posh barbecue— no reported sightings of him at any of Wall Street’s many charity events. Even the few magazine profiles of him mentioned nothing more personal than his fondness for classical music.
The only exception was a mention of Danes in a 1998 article from a Newark, New Jersey, newspaper. It was a short piece, reporting on an administrative action by the SEC against a tiny Jersey City firm and a broker there named Richard Gilpin, for a slew of
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