No longer on the Lamm:
"Ex-GOP candidate for governor facing fraud charges"by Beth Healy and Stephanie Ebbert, Globe Staff February 11, 2015
There was a time when John Lakian was a household name in Massachusetts political circles, a promising young Republican whose run for governor was eventually eclipsed by a very public battle over misrepresentations on his resume.
Now, more than 30 years later, Lakian, 72, is again publicly accused of deceit — this time in federal court in New York. He was arrested last week along with his girlfriend and charged with stealing more than $11 million from investors and allegedly trying to defraud banks of $8 million.
The indictment alleges that between February 2009 and July 2013, Lakian and Diane W. Lamm defrauded the investors and banks in three schemes.
They allegedly defrauded investors of a New York firm where Lakian was an owner, Pangea Capital Management, by promising to use their money to buy and consolidate other investment firms. The pair instead diverted funds to themselves, to restaurant businesses they controlled, and to pay
Lakian’s home mortgage, according to the federal indictment.
In a second scheme, prosecutors allege, the pair drained a North Carolina fund that had 100 investors and again diverted the money to themselves and to their other business ventures. And between 2009 and 2012, Lakian and Lamm allegedly submitted fake tax returns and inflated pay stubs when they tried to obtain more than $8 million in loans from four banks in New York.
Lakian and Lamm are accused of preying on investors, “stealing their hard-earned money to use for their own purposes,’’ said Loretta E. Lynch, US attorney for the Eastern District of New York, in a statement. “They similarly disregarded the interests of lending institutions by submitting forged documents to banks.’’
Her confirmation has gotten bogged down.
Lakian’s attorney, Bruce Maffeo, said that Lakian pleaded not guilty. He was released on bail of $2 million.
“We look forward to what shall be a vigorous defense of the charges,’’ Maffeo said.
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Lakian was once a bright light on the political landscape in Massachusetts, a self-made and charismatic businessman who in 1982 gave the tiny state Republican party real hope of capturing the governor’s office.
His candidacy was abruptly derailed when The Boston Globe reported that he had exaggerated details of his military service, schooling, and business activities.
“He came onto the political scene with a great deal of splash and just bravado,” recalled Leon Lombardi, a state legislator who was the GOP nominee for lieutenant governor that year. “He impressed a lot of people with the story that he told about his up-from-the-bootstraps background, and he lived a rather luxurious lifestyle. But no one was really too sure about where he came from and how he made his money.”
Andrew Natsios, who was then chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party, compared Lakian to the classic F. Scott Fitzgerald character Jay Gatsby.
“He had a very opulent lifestyle — which he was very public about — and seemingly limitless ambitions,” Natsios said Wednesday.
“Lakian told a great story,” Natsios added. “The problem was, none of us were ever sure how much of it was true.”
In the 1982 Globe story, Lakian said that embellishment is an accepted part of politics.
“I think there’s that degree of slight fluff that’s put into every candidate’s brochure, every candidate’s advertisements,” Lakian said.
He also said: “It’s not that you take something that’s 50 cents and make it 100 cents, OK. It’s that you aggrandize a bit, OK. Every candidate does it. Everyone does it slightly. The key word there is slightly: You try and take something that’s 100 and make it 102. You make it 150 and you’re a liar.”
And that is what is wrong with this country, this state, its institutions, and its leaders.
Lakian placed a distant second in the primary to GOP nominee John Sears. He subsequently filed a $50 million libel suit against the Globe that a state judge dismissed in 1985. Sears went on to lose in the 1982 general election to Michael Dukakis.
Lakian would recover from that political defeat and seek a second Republican nomination, this time for US Senate, in 1994. He lost that race to another wealthy businessman who had emerged on the scene in Massachusetts: Mitt Romney. Lakian captured just 18 percent of the vote in that primary, after spending $3 million, the Globe reported.
In recent years, Lakian has continued in the investment business and has appeared as a commentator on Fox News....
Oh, how deliciou$ly ironic.
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Even the Globe agrees:
"John Lakian again under the microscope" by Frank Phillips, Globe Staff February 13, 2015
John Lakian, a fraud? A liar? Really?
The Globe’s intrepid reporter Walter Robinson first said so three decades ago.
Other people or intere$ts only mislead.
Then a jury agreed it was true. And now the US Justice Department is saying that Lakian, along with his business partner, have run afoul of the law once again.
“They lied, cheated, and stole,’’ an FBI official said last week when the Justice Department announced an indictment against Lakian and Diane W. Lamm for defrauding investors and banks of millions of dollars.
They behaved like the bankers they were trying to defraud!
The last we heard of Lakian, Mitt Romney had dispatched him to the dust bin of Massachusetts political history.
That was in 1994, when Romney emerged from nowhere, a wealthy financier who wanted to follow his father into politics. Lakian, a dozen years after getting mauled in a Republican gubernatorial primary over questions about his resume, was looking to reset his political career with a challenge to Edward M. Kennedy.
And had it not been for Romney, with his impeccable personal and professional credentials that galvanized the party behind him, he might have been the party’s US Senate nominee.
But the Democratic operatives, who chewed up even the clean-jeans Romney, would have had a field day with Lakian if he had made it to the general election.
A Worcester native, Lakian looked like the real deal when he ran for governor 1982. He had the perfect profile — a self-made millionaire, Harvard graduate, and a Vietnam veteran who was given a battlefield promotion. Along with good looks, a very likeable personality, and solid ethnic urban roots, he had all the trappings to be the perfect candidate for the struggling, calcified Massachusetts GOP.
The problem: He never went to Harvard and there was never a battlefield promotion. His claims that his father died of his World War II wounds were untrue as well. His father died when he ran his car into the back of a trolley in Worcester.
The hits were too much for his once-promising political career. He came in a distant second in a three-way race just ahead of a little known Holbrook state representative named Andrew Card, and far behind the winner, John Sears, a Yankee Brahmin who went on to be crushed by Michael Dukakis.
Lakian pursued a libel case against the Globe, spending well over $1 million of his own money, only to see the jury validate the story. He even had to admit on the stand — a hugely embarrassing moment in the trial — that he lied in a previous legal proceeding when he claimed under oath he had a Harvard degree.
When he reappeared on the political scene in 1994, saying he was sorry and had learned from his mistakes, the Republicans — and the media — were suspicious. But he put on an intriguing air of honesty, apologizing for all of his lies and fraudulent claims.
He even sought out Robinson, by then the Globe’s metro editor, to explain why he had been so deceptive. He said he gone to counseling and discovered he had “deep-seated psychological problems’’ that caused him to inflate his resume.
A born liar, huh?
I'm surprised he didn't blame drink.
But in the end, no one was buying the rebranding. He spent $3 million in the Senate primary, a hugely expensive endeavor considering he only got 18 percent of the vote in a two-person contest with Romney.
I just submitted my vote on the $cum.
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