Fooling Some of the People All of the Time, a Long Short (And Now Complete) Story, Updated With New David Einhorn (best classic books of all time .TXT) 📖

As this went on I started realizing that there was actually some more orchestration here being provided, by what I’m calling here is the Sith Lord or the mastermind. Now, can I tell you who that designated bottom feeder was who was supposed to end up with our company? Can I tell you? I can. But I’m not going to today. The Sith Lord is, can I tell you who that is? Well, I could tell you it’s a name that everybody on the phone, every single person on the phone would recognize this person’s name. He’s one of the master criminals from the 1980s, and he’s back in business. But I’m not going to. I’ll just call him the mastermind today.

A few moments later, Byrne continued, “The man I’ve identified here as the Sith Lord of this stuff I just say, you know who you are and I hope that this is worth it, because if the feds catch you again, this time they’re going to bury you under the prison. And I’m going to enjoy helping.”

Though we were not part of his lawsuit, as Byrne went through his list of “miscreants,” first my name came up and a few minutes later my wife, Cheryl, joined the “Ball.” Byrne’s bringing me up in his public harangue was out of all context, except for one: Allied. Our fight with Allied had become so public that Byrne lumped me in with a cast of who he considered evil-doers trying to undermine perfectly good companies and ruining America.

“David Einhorn runs a fund in New York called Greenlight Capital,” Byrne said in about his only truthful statement about me. “Greenlight, I’ve been in Greenlight, and they told me sort of a founding myth of Greenlight, which was that David Einhorn was a Cornell guy who found some arb and traded it from his dorm room and that turned into Greenlight over time,” he continued.

Byrne had never been “in” Greenlight. I didn’t find an “arb” in college or trade it from my dorm room. This does sound like the story of Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel, who did just that at Harvard. It seemed that Byrne conjured up various stories and stereotypes about hedge fund managers and depicted me as an amalgamation of a bunch of them.

He next turned to Cheryl. “Then there’s Barron’s,” Byrne said. “And Barron’s, anybody on the ‘Street’ understands Barron’s more or less as just being a group of quislings for the hedge funds. . . . There has been until recently an editor there named Cheryl Strauss, married name Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, wife of David Einhorn. And if you trace the articles around, which I’m going to talk about in a minute, you’ll see that both entered these very odd relationships.”

This did not take a lot of detective work. At Barron’s, Cheryl always wrote and published as “Cheryl Strauss Einhorn.” Byrne went on to say that if people checked, they would find that a reporter who had recently written a negative article about Overstock in Barron’s probably knew Cheryl. That was probably correct, but so what? It was hard to tell because all he had was Joe McCarthyesque innuendo. Possibly, he wanted listeners to believe Cheryl fed a story to the reporter on our behalf at a time we weren’t even short his stock. In Byrne’s paranoid view of the world, reporters blindly accept assignments from former colleagues.

He also saw a conspiracy between Kroll and me. I guess Allied told him Greenlight had hired Kroll to investigate Allied and BLX loans. Now, according to Byrne, Kroll was investigating him. That’s all the evidence he needed to think this was my doing.

Byrne continued, “Kroll has been investigating me for a number of months, trying to come up with dirt on me. The general—well, I had trouble nailing that down until I discovered the personal relationship between Jules Kroll and David Einhorn.”

Though we retained the firm to investigate Allied, I have never met or spoken with Jules Kroll, the founder. Byrne seems to have made the connection because Kroll went to Cornell about twenty-five years before I did and also lives in the same town as my family.

Enter Jim Carruthers.

Byrne said:

Jim Carruthers is an interesting fellow. He’s up at Eastbourne Capital, north of San Francisco. Eastbourne has an “E” at the end. It’s funny because there’s a fellow holding himself out in a nearby location by the name of Jim Karruthers, with a slightly different spelling, holding himself out as a private investigator from Eastbourn Investigations, no “E” at the end. I know that couldn’t be this Jim Carruthers, because that would be a felony for a person to hold himself out as a PI when he’s not. And that PI has a very interesting relationship with a certain lawyer in Detroit, who has some very odd practices that maybe we’ll have time to get back to.

I suspect the part about the lawyer in Detroit referred to Carruthers’s getting information about the fraudulent BLX loans in Detroit. Plainly, Byrne spoke with Allied.

Before the show ended, he put my picture up on the screen next to a picture of David Rocker under the heading “Short-sellers.”

David Einhorn is the guy who is, of course, obsessive about his [security] concerns. They literally told me in Greenlight how he’s got six cell phones and swaps SIM cards and takes a different route to work. And when I was in Greenlight, they were explaining how you can’t even, I couldn’t even go into this part of the office and see him. He’s extremely shy and careful, won’t be seen in public, have pictures taken, anything like that. So if you ever see this man in public, do not take his picture because he’s evidently extremely concerned about it being known or on the Internet.

Again, Byrne has never been “in” Greenlight, nor has anyone at the