By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 4, 2024 ~

The largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, has a rap sheet that rivals that of a crime family — and those crimes show no signs of slowing down. The financial institution is, in effect, a criminal enterprise in drag as a federally-insured banking powerhouse.

The facts backing the above assertions are so strong that two trial attorneys, Helen Davis Chaitman and Lance Gotthoffer, wrote a book in which they compared the bank to the Gambino crime family and suggested JPMorgan Chase should be charged under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). The authors wrote at the time on their website that “The pattern is clear. JPMorgan Chase has a culture — like the mob — where anything goes so long as it is profitable. This is precisely the kind of pattern of criminal activity that RICO was intended to target.”

The Board of Directors of JPMorgan Chase, rife with conflicts themselves, apparently like the pattern of continuously paying out billions of dollars for nonstop crimes inside the bank. We draw that conclusion from the fact that the Board has kept Jamie Dimon in place as the Chairman and CEO since 2006 – despite the bank admitting to an unprecedented five criminal felony counts. In fact, after two of those felony counts in 2020 were settled with a deferred prosecution agreement from the U.S. Department of Justice, Dimon got a $50 million bonus from his Board.

Notwithstanding this clear history of being a serial recidivist when it comes to brazen crimes, JPMorgan Chase succeeded late last week in getting the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to bundle five separate alleged crimes with a neat little bow, one simple press release, and settle them all for the sum of $151 million. Adding to the speciousness of the deal, it came just four business days before the most consequential presidential election in U.S. history when the public’s focus is far removed from crimes on Wall Street. In addition, the SEC brought no charges against any individual and the bank was allowed to neither admit nor deny the charges, resurrecting an old rotten routine at the SEC.

Much of the alleged illegal conduct charged against the bank by the SEC last week involved brazen acts of self-dealing.

Unfortunately for the shareholders of this crime-infested bank, settling five cases all in one day doesn’t even make a dent in the “several hundred” legal proceedings of which it is a target, according to its October filings with the SEC.

According to an 8-K filing with the SEC on October 11, JPMorgan Chase has shelled out a stunning $1.979 billion in legal expenses in the past seven quarters. That breaks down as follows: $1.475 billion in total for the four quarters of 2023 and $504 million in total for the three quarters thus far reported in 2024. The latest $151 million in fines is not included in those figures since the settlement occurred in the fourth quarter of 2024.

A large chunk of JPMorgan Chase’s legal expenses don’t end up as restitution to the people the bank has abused but in the pockets of Big Law partners functioning as outside counsel to the bank. For example, throughout much of last year, the Big Law firm, WilmerHale, was racking up a lot of billable hours defending JPMorgan Chase from highly credible charges brought by the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands in a federal lawsuit that the bank “actively participated” in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of minors by serving as his cash conduit for more than 15 years. While the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands filed extremely heavy evidence with the court to back up her charges, WilmerHale pursued a scorched earth legal strategy of smearing officials in the U.S. Virgin Islands, leading to a cheap settlement of $75 million in September of 2023.

WilmerHale also represented JPMorgan Chase last year in a federal class action lawsuit on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual assault victims. Given that 15 JPMorgan Chase employees had visited Epstein at his Manhattan mansion where Epstein’s sex slaves were in abundance and their testimony at trial might have added new scandals to the bank, JPMorgan also settled that case for the generous sum of $290 million in June of 2023. (Plaintiffs’ lawyers were to get $87 million of the $290 million.)

WilmerHale had yet another billing track (and damage control track) by suing one of JPMorgan’s former executives, Jes Staley, attempting to shift the blame for the bank’s unconscionable dealings with Epstein (a registered sex offender and well-documented sex trafficker of minors) onto Staley’s shoulders. That narrative pretty much fell apart when a former FBI official, hired by opposing counsel as an expert witness, introduced court documents showing that different bank employees had funneled more than $5 million in hard cash to Epstein over a decade, sometimes as much as $40,000 to $80,000 a month, without filing the legally required Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

The Staley case was abruptly settled in September of 2023 for an undisclosed sum of money.

JPMorgan Chase also paid fat legal fees last year to the Big Law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP to get another scandalous case dismissed in federal court. That case named Jamie Dimon as a defendant, along with certain members of the bank’s Board of Directors. The thrust of the case was that the same members of JPMorgan’s Board of Directors who brought Jamie Dimon to the top leadership position at the bank, were also, verifiably, engaged in business dealings with Jeffrey Epstein. Before that case could be fleshed out for the public with depositions and discovery, Judge Jed Rakoff very conveniently dismissed it. (See Rakoff’s background with Paul Weiss here.)

Big Law firm Covington & Burling represented JPMorgan Chase last year in resolving a federal lawsuit for $499 million among a group of banks over charges that they conspired to stifle competition in the stock lending business.

Making this crime history at the largest U.S. bank all the more Orwellian is the fact that one of its banking regulators, the New York Fed, has put representatives of JPMorgan Chase on three of its “Sponsored Groups” to help the New York Fed develop “best practices” for the industry. The New York Fed writes:

“Through the sponsored groups, the New York Fed helps facilitate the development and adoption of industry best practices designed to strengthen and improve the efficiency of the financial system as a whole.”

Officials from JPMorgan Chase sit on the New York Fed’s Reference Rate Use Committee; Payments Risk Committee; and Treasury Market Practices Group.

JPMorgan Chase’s placement on the Treasury Market Practices Group is particularly hubristic. The New York Fed describes the group as “a group of market professionals committed to supporting the integrity and efficiency of the Treasury, agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) markets.” In 2020, JPMorgan admitted to a criminal felony count brought by the U.S. Department of Justice because its traders in New York and London, for a span of almost eight years, had “engaged in a scheme to defraud in connection with the purchase and sale of U.S. Treasury futures contracts that traded on the Chicago Board of Trade….”

JPMorgan no longer has a seat on the New York Fed’s sponsored Foreign Exchange Committee to establish “best practices” for foreign exchange trading. However, even after JPMorgan was charged with, and admitted to, a criminal felony count in 2015 by the U.S. Department of Justice for engaging with other banks in rigging that market, the bank’s then head of foreign exchange trading, Troy Rohrbaugh, continued to chair the New York Fed’s Foreign Exchange Committee. (See our report on the matter here.)

For critical background on the incestuous financial relationship that JPMorgan Chase and other megabanks on Wall Street have with the New York Fed, see our report: These Are the Banks that Own the New York Fed and Its Money Button.

For what kind of a future one might expect from a country so deeply mired in this kind of oligarchic behavior, we have one word for you: Vote.

Vote in tomorrow’s presidential election as if your future and the future of your country depends on it. Because – clearly it does.