"Hillraiser" Norman Hsu Heads to Prison

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Hsu Heads to Prison
By Paul Kiel - January 4, 2008, 4:28PM
Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better for Norman Hsu, the bizarre Hillraiser and fraudster.

He's been sent off to prison for 3 years to serve time for the fraud he was convicted of way back in 1992. And he still has to go to trial for the Ponzi scheme he was charged with by federal prosecutors in New York.


The Strange Case of Norman Hsu
By Paul Kiel - September 13, 2007, 2:58PM
The going suspicion in Washington has always been that politicians are not prone to ask too many questions of contributors as long as the checks keep coming. But never has a contributor's hidden past blown up in a campaign's face quite like it has for the Clinton campaign in the case of Norman Hsu.

The story began just two weeks ago when The Wall Street Journal noticed that one of Hillary Clinton's biggest donors was a family that lived in a single story home near the San Francisco airport. The father, William Paw, was a mail carrier; his wife was a homemaker. And yet the couple and their children had given $45,000 to Clinton since 2005. The contributions closely, and suspiciously, matched the timing of those by a New York businessman named Norman Hsu. It's illegal to reimburse individuals for making campaign contributions.

The next day, The Los Angeles Times made the story a scandal when it reportedthat Hsu had been convicted in California state court of stealing $1 million from investors in the early 90s. He'd failed to show at a sentencing hearing and been on the lam ever since.

After that story, he made his way back to California, but then promptly disappeared again after posting $2 million for bail. After sending out a "To Whom It May Concern" suicide note via FedEx to acquaintances and charitable organizations to whom he'd donated (like, ironically enough, The Innocence Project), he hopped on an Amtrak train to Chicago. On the train, he locked locked himself in a compartment. A passenger discovered him the following morning shirtless, wedged against the door in the fetal position. Pills were scattered over the floor. He was arrested after being transferred to a hospital in Colorado.

-snip

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004174.php

[aquart]

1. "Hillraiser"? Lotta tar.