by JL Yastine
The Sovereign Investor
They swept in fast and unannounced.
Forty FBI agents converged on the brick-clad town hall of Ramapo, New York, about an hour’s drive north of Manhattan. They carted away dozens of boxes of financial documents and then left.
That was nearly three years ago, leaving town residents to wonder, why?
Rampant municipal-bond fraud, it turns out. It was a case of accounting deception that would have made Enron proud.
Last month, the feds arrested Ramapo’s elected town supervisor and a handful of cronies on charges of cooking the town’s books in order to sell $150 million in municipal bonds.
It’s a big deal because…