Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

In happier days: Richard & Rochelle Maize posing with Hollywood producer, Brian Grazer

Thanks for reader Robin for exposing the seamy legal past of Richard Maize, confessed real estate broker-fraudster, who has funded what apparently is a personal crusade against the Goldstone Report replete with fake Israeli NGOs and websites which I’ve written about here.

Those of us here in the States have heard scores of stories in the past few months about greedy mortgage brokers and lenders who contributed to the country’s economic meltdown by inflating the value of properties and convincing lenders to lend them money based on the fraudulent valuations.  This is precisely what Maize did in his heyday, and Lehman Bros., one of the victims of the meltdown, was his willing (though perhaps unwitting) partner in this according to an FBI press release that announced his plea bargain.  In it, he confessed to five felony counts in order to avoid a possible 98-year prison sentence:

…In United States District Court in Los Angeles, federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against Richard A. Maize, 53, of Beverly Hills. Maize, a co-founder of Americorp Funding, a mortgage banking company with offices in West Los Angeles and Pasadena, was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and loan fraud, three counts of bank fraud and one count of making a false statement on a federal tax return.

In a plea agreement also filed today, Maize agreed to plead guilty to the five felony counts…

Maize booked more than $245-million in mortgages for his employer in 2002 alone.  The FBI blames him for at least $18-million in fraud and he agreed to pay $2.75-million in restitution.

It’s certainly no accident that Maize established his family foundation just after his legal troubles arose.  This is a common practice with the world’s n’er-do-wells.  They seek to compensate for the evils they do by spreading a few philanthropic dollars to take the sting out of their infamy.  Maize apparently did this on the very cheap.  The first year his charity operated it had a mere $22,500 in assets.  Hardly a serious gesture from a confessed felon seeking to whiten his reputation.  It’s ironic that we have this fake PR campaign against the Goldstone Report thanks to the economic debacle into which people like Richard Maize got this country.

If you add to this that the “philanthropist” has hooked up with Joel Leyden, a rightist Israeli PR consultant who has helped him establish an NGO that milks the good name of the legitimate Association for Civil Rights in Israel (Maize-Leyden’s outfit is the Association for Human Rights in Israel), it’s a fine mess the two have gotten themselves into.

What I don’t know is whether there may be an Israeli government client behind this operation as well since the foreign ministry (one of Leyden’s PR clients) has established its own mis-information campaign attacking Goldstone, replete with online attack-advertising just like Maize’s.

Don’t get me wrong–even confessed felons are entitled to political opinions.  But one would think given their past they would promote their views in an ethical manner.  But given his past, we shouldn’t be at all surprised that Maize is continuing to engage in fraud of a different sort.