The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare

Recently, Carmen Segarra made headlines as a Goldman Sachs whistleblower. Now,  Chase whistle-blower Alayne Fleischmann is coming forward, saying, “If we don’t start speaking up, then this really is all we’re going to get: the biggest financial cover-up in history.” Before she went to Wall Street, she did human rights work, but she had to pay-off her student loans… Ladies and Gentlemen, the show has begun! -LW

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Chase whistle-blower Alayne Fleischmann risked it all. Photo credit: Andrew Querner

Meet the woman JPMorgan Chase paid one of the largest fines in American history to keep from talking

By Matt Taibbi | November 6, 2014

She tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn’t take it anymore.
“It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street,” she says. “I thought, ‘I can’t sit by any longer.'”
Fleischmann is a tall, thin, quick-witted securities lawyer in her late thirties, with long blond hair, pale-blue eyes and an infectious sense of humor that has survived some very tough times. She’s had to struggle to find work despite some striking skills and qualifications, a common symptom of a not-so-common condition called being a whistle-blower.

 Fleischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing.

Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as “massive criminal securities fraud” in the bank’s mortgage operations.
Thanks to a confidentiality agreement, she’s kept her mouth shut since then. “My closest family and friends don’t know what I’ve been living with,” she says. “Even my brother will only find out for the first time when he sees this interview.”
Six years after the crisis that cratered the global economy, it’s not exactly news that the country’s biggest banks stole on a grand scale. That’s why the more important part of Fleischmann’s story is in the pains Chase and the Justice Department took to silence her.
READ MORE: http://2012thebigpicture.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/the-9-billion-witness-meet-jpmorgan-chases-worst-nightmare/