Remember David H Brooks, the war profiteer?
Well, some interesting things have come up at his trial."...DHB, which specialized in making body armor used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, paid for more than $
6 million in personal expenses on behalf of Mr. Brooks, covering items as expensive as luxury cars and as prosaic as party invitations, Ms. Schlegel testified.
Also included were university textbooks for his daughter, pornographic videos for his son, plastic surgery for his wife, a burial plot for his mother, prostitutes for his employees, and, for him, a $100,000 American-flag belt buckle encrusted with rubies, sapphires and diamonds.
The expense-account abuse, the prosecution has said, represented a pittance compared with the
$190 million that Mr. Brooks and another top employee are accused of making through a
stock fraud scheme in which he falsified information about his company’s performance — including significantly overstating the inventory of bulletproof vests — to inflate the price of the stock before selling his shares in 2004...
..Mr. Brooks, who had
previously been fined by the S.E.C. for insider trading, also denied having participated in a scheme to push up the price of the stock...
..He may also face additional charges stemming from an episode last week when he was c
aught for a second time trying to smuggle into jail prescription anti-anxiety pills, which were similar to medication he was already taking at an unusually high dose. The pills had been hidden in pens that a supporter of Mr. Brooks’s had placed near the defendant’s seat in the courtroom...."
