Ex-Trader Admits To Threatening To Kill Over Forty Financial Regulators

NEW YORK (Jennifer Golson) - A former commodities trader pleaded guilty on Monday to threatening to kill more than 40 financial regulators, including the heads of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Vincent McCrudden, 50, admitted in court that he posted the threats on his company's website last December, asking for help executing his plan. His guilty plea came the day testimony was to begin in his federal trial, said his lawyer Bruce Barket.

McCrudden pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Central Islip, New York, to two counts of transmission of threats to injure.

His posts included the names of current and former officials including SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro and CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler, as well as officials at the National Futures Association and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

"These people have got to go! And I need your help, there are just too many for me alone," McCrudden wrote in one post, according to the indictment.

He also sent an email last September to Daniel Driscoll, the executive vice president and chief operating officer of the NFA, that said: "It wasn't ever a question of 'if' I was going to kill you, it was just a question of when."

McCrudden faces up to 10 years in prison. His sentencing is scheduled for December 5.

McCrudden worked on Wall Street for more than 20 years, specializing in commodities, derivatives and foreign exchange, according to his biography on the website of his company, Alnbri Management LLC.

"This defendant crossed the line when he directly threatened to kill public officials who were working to keep our financial markets fair and open, and invited others to join him," Loretta Lynch, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement.

Barket, of law firm Quadrino Schwartz, said McCrudden apologized in court when he entered his plea. He called his client "a talented, decent guy who will find other work."

The case is U.S. v. McCrudden, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York, No. 11-00061.

(Editing by Matthew Lewis)

Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions.

Comments

[DeProVera]

07:14 PM on 07/19/2011

laughter. derision. guFFaw. and a good time being had by all . . .

innocence entering yet another new gulag

just wait . . . your turn.

as you turn on each other with just such last desperate laughs? __before soon turning one

another in on any/and all information asked

this report and these messages, like all junk mail, are the conspicuous consumption and overstuffed fluff of abundant klutter'n'kultur in each crammed mailbox and blackbox herein-- +ff falsified by further MegaFoney plants'n'posts --as every reader'n'riter eludes one little truth about Value: if it's worthless, it will find you . . . what's worthy must be found. searched. sought. Scarcity its significance as one digs and explores and digs some more for what might be a valuable find

in pretium laborum non vile, every muttonhead here has earned this A_OLery and HuffPuffery as you all together, for now, circle the slaughterfloor thinking it's, ya know, the sheeple being ff fleeced

funny

such fluffery

to huff. and puff. and blow . . .

+even further papering-over and pulling-the-wool as obscure pettifoggery seeks to thoroughly bury what youse mewing ewes don't know is even to be found

http://firstword.us/solzhenitsyn-200-years-together/

yes. Erasure. as poor-little-lambs-who-have-lost-their-way, ba. ba. ba, all finding themselves here

http://www.ethnopoliticsonline.com/archives/ais/ais%20main.html

[Miss Peaches]

02:28 PM on 07/19/2011

Type A personality on overdrive.

[StopMakingSense2]

01:12 PM on 07/19/2011

Some teabaggers just can't figure out the limits, or anything else for that matter. Is she so busy she can't tune into Faux Nooz to get programed?

[Ed Baker]

02:42 PM on 07/19/2011

Guess you didn't read the story?

[darkmark]

12:44 PM on 07/19/2011

i agree with others here. he probably got so caught up in his right to destroy lives financially he couldn't see he wasn't allowed to do it physically.

[corsair1917]

11:11 AM on 07/19/2011

Yeah and these people don't need regulating???
Please. If their reaction is like this - they are up to nothing good.

[Ed Baker]

02:44 PM on 07/19/2011

Commodities trades are regulated, and have been for about 80 years. Further, his conviction shows that existing law was enough to convict him in this instance. What is not regulated and should be, are credit default swaps and hedge funds - both of which the Obama administration has done nothing about. Swaps were the cause of the financial crisis.

[politicky]

03:20 PM on 07/19/2011

"Several changes over the past decade have relaxed the agency's oversight of commodities markets. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (CFMA) allowed energy commodities for the first time to be traded on deregulated "exempt commercial markets," meaning exchanges exempt from CFTC or any other U.S. government oversight. This law was a departure from the Commodity Exchange Act of 1936, which had confined commodities trading to CFTC-regulated exchanges."

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jun2008/db2008068_580706.htm

[Reticent2]

10:55 AM on 07/19/2011

Trading derivatives, threatens those who enforce the rules, but a decent guy. Yeah. Sure.

[Ed Baker]

02:46 PM on 07/19/2011

Derivatives are great financial instruments and are absolutely necessary to modern capitalism. Their primary use is in hedging risks, though they are traded speculatively. This man is a commodities broker, and commodities contracts are absolutely essential to the operation of our economy. Because this guy is nuts, it doesn't mean we don't need these contracts, we do.

[politicky]

03:23 PM on 07/19/2011

"As head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC], Brooksley Born became alarmed by the lack of oversight of the secretive, multitrillion-dollar over-the-counter derivatives market. Her attempts to regulate derivatives ran into fierce resistance from then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who prevailed upon Congress to stop Born and limit future regulation. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on Aug. 28, 2009."

Read more: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/interviews/born.html#ixzz1Sa4RSEYNhttp://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/interviews/born.html

[choctawwritergirl]

10:37 AM on 07/19/2011

The very construct of Capitalism, as we inherited from British Capitalist and Nobility, is SOCIO-PATHIC behavior PREDICATED on the SUBJUGATION OF THE MASSES AS SLAVE LABOR and the CONFISCATION OF LAND AND RESOURCES in the PRIVATIZATION IDEOLOGY of CAPITALISM.

THE BELIEF IN CAPITALISM AS THE PURVEYOR OF EQUALITY, FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY IS MADNESS AND DELUSIONAL THINKING EXONERATED BY INDIVIDUALS LIKE JOHN LOCKE AND ADAM SMITH.

TIME TO RETHINK 19TH CENTURY DOGMA and TEAR IT DOWN BEFORE WE ALL FALL.

[Ed Baker]

02:47 PM on 07/19/2011

What's the alternative? Communism? We know how well that works. Your syntax is very revealing. :)

[politicky]

03:23 PM on 07/19/2011

Is your bridge missing you?

[steve2035]

02:47 AM on 07/19/2011

Just the top of the iceberg...

[doris french]

01:54 AM on 07/19/2011

I always suspected things like this were happening but then I just thought, naw...just a conspiracy theory.

[teachone]

01:31 AM on 07/19/2011

Not surprising, they are all like that, ruthless over their precious $$$!

[Ed Baker]

02:47 PM on 07/19/2011

I'd bet you don't have any. :)

[PrairieGayCompanion]

01:06 AM on 07/19/2011

The Wall Street equivalent of roid rage.

[Ed Baker]

02:47 PM on 07/19/2011

Yup - the guy lost his mind.

[Pogner]

11:05 PM on 07/18/2011

Evidently you can commit remote control murder by destroying whole communities & countries, annihilating workers' pensions & gorging on their lifeblood, but threaten regulators who have been paid to look the other way while you were doing it gets you into legal hot water . . .

[gwilkes2]

01:43 AM on 07/19/2011

lol.....Amazing isnt it....

[Ed Baker]

02:49 PM on 07/19/2011

Yes, it's amazing how well people don't understand these things. :)

[Ed Baker]

02:49 PM on 07/19/2011

Where did it say he did that? The man was a commodities trader. He's trading contracts on beans, lumber, coal, oil......... he simply doesn't have that kind of power, and all the power he has is limited by his trading account.

[AN2009]

10:48 PM on 07/18/2011

He's merely saying what the rest of his colleagues are doing to the country.

[TFlint]

10:48 PM on 07/18/2011

Why is threatening to kill and encouraging others to join the conspiracy to kill only "threat to injure"?
And his lawyer calls him "a decent guy"!

[lcr999]

10:46 PM on 07/18/2011

"He called his client "a talented, decent guy who will find other work." " ....In prison. I hear they like talented guys there.

[Ed Baker]

02:50 PM on 07/19/2011

And another liberal slams gay people when it suits him.