I'm still waiting for that Epstein crossover moment

I'm still very behind on a lot of things I wanted to put on the blog this week. Probably won't get caught up for a while. But this is one for that if-I-don't-write-it-down-I'm-gonna-forget-about-it category. So here it goes.

Among the latest characters to pop up in the FNBC saga is real estate shark Gary Gibbs. (No, he is not the ex Saints defensive coordinator by that same name. Yes, I checked.) His case is one of several instances revealed so far where the bank appears to have been shoveling out new bad loans in order to cover old bad loans in the expectation that some external event might come about to turn everything around.

Regulators from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said in a notice filed last week that Robert Brad Calloway, a former loan officer and chief credit officer at First NBC Bank, submitted false or misleading documentation in order to make a series of loans to Diamondhead, Mississippi-based businessman Gary R. Gibbs that totaled $123 million at the time of the New Orleans bank's collapse.

The filing says that Calloway, along with First NBC'S former CEO, Ashton Ryan, got the loans to Gibbs approved when they knew he didn't have the necessary collateral, and that they also knew the money was being used by Gibbs to cover payments on existing loans instead of for Gibbs' business expenses, as was represented to the bank's loan committee.

In Gibbs's case one such external event may have been his successful conning of a former business associate's widow out of her inheritance. She has filed a civil suit seeking to recover those assets which, thanks to FNBC's collapse, now may technically belong to a vulture capital firm. 

In her civil case, Heisler is trying to keep assets that include a $2 million brokerage account, a shopping center in Metairie and a building at 844 Baronne St. from being seized by Girod LoanCo, the debt investor that bought a large portion of the First NBC loans sold by regulators last year, including the notes Heisler signed.

Girod LoanCo is a specially created company that is ultimately owned by TPG Capital, a $100 billion private investment firm co-founded by billionaire James Coulter.

Coulter, by the way, has been turning New Orleans's disasters into "opportunities" for some time now.  Here he is in 2010 dishing out advice to the 'treps at Idea Village.

Coulter told the crowd Friday  morning that there are three types of entrepreneurs: the natural, the coin flipper, and the rest of us.

The natural entrepreneur has the natural gift of gab and persuasion, which helps him find success in business. The coin-flipper is successful purely out of luck, while the rest-of-us are hard-workers.

It's not clear which entrepreneur type Coulter is supposed to be here.  If we're going by the way he describes himself to Forbes, we'd have to say he's the right-place-at-the-right-time-with-the-right-barrel-of-cash type.

I married a woman from New Orleans, so I had family here. Post-Katrina I had a number of friends call me up and say they wanted to do something to help the community – not just Habitat for Humanity or Red Cross, we’ve done that, but what can we do for the community. So we raised some money from one email and said to some friends: find some good places to put it.

One of the questions was how do you create something sustainable? And if you look at jobs here it’s likely that one of the real job creation engines will be entrepreneurship because it’s a place where people want to live.

Not so sure about that "job creation engine" of entrepreneurship in retrospect.  Unless the job we're talking about is grifter.  Post-Katrina New Orleans has been a ripe environment for those. They do like to call themselves "entrepreneurs," though. I think we've covered that a fair amount.   Maybe that's the type Coulter is.  That's more or less how this reads, anyway.

I think it takes an entire ecosystem, and to that end it has to attract entrepreneurs, and that’s about a lot of people under 30. I think the renaissance going on in education with TFA people coming into town provides a natural fuel for the city.

So the first thing you have to do is have the entrepreneurs, and the second thing is you have to have a funding system to help them. Now you see investors coming into town and investors that you didn’t know were in town showing up. The third is you have to create an infrastructure of support – the chamber of commerce and government really make it easy for entrepreneurship here. And lastly there needs to be a confidence that it can get done here. That’s part of what we’re seeing in that community that’s important – it’s exhibiting that confidence.

Coulter is the type of entrepreneur who was able to"create an infrastructure of support" within business and government circles by exhibiting a lot of confidence in order to turn the "fuel" provided by things like school charterization into a "renaissance."  Got it.  Anyway, now he owns a bunch of assets that got sucked up in the collapse of the bank that financed many of the post-K con jobs you read about.  Good for him.

I wonder how many more of these stories and characters we will read about before the FNBC case is over. I do hope someone is researching the book. If done well something like that has the potential to connect a lot of interesting threads in this city. I promise I really was just joking the other day when I suggested that maybe somewhere in the pile of politically connected non-profits, start-ups, and university projects that exert so much influence on what happens in New Orleans, somebody might have some Epstein money laying around.  But, you know, maybe that's not all that far fetched....

Anyone surprised Walter Isaacson called Joi Ito's book "brilliant and provocative"?

— Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) September 7, 2019