JC / Railbird

Material Information

On the IEAH web site, co-president Michael Iavarone is described as “a high-profile investment banker on Wall Street,” but Bloomberg turns up a different story, reporting that the man behind the $50 million Big Brown stud deal and a proposed $100 million racing hedge fund is a sanctioned penny stock broker and failed dotcom bubble day trader.

The NYT adds a few more details: “Iavarone told The New York Times that he had worked for Goldman Sachs, the world’s largest investment bank…. But he never worked for Goldman Sachs.”

Iavarone said he couldn’t reveal much about his background earlier, because it would have been “misunderstood.” No, I doubt that’s it … everything that’s come out is quite understandable, as is why he’d want to keep it quiet.

5/29 Addendum: Investors tell DRF they support IEAH. “We’re all entitled to screw up a little in our pasts, and you get to make up for those things,” said one. “They’ve been nothing but professionals.” The same investor did admit, though, that the information, new to him, about Iavarone’s experience, “disturbs me, maybe, a little bit.”


6 Comments

Here’s some juice!

One thing I’ve learned ‘speculating’ on horses is to always trust my gut. Don’t listen to other people. Instincts are my most powerful tool.

Something always seemed off here … maybe it was the ‘too flashy’ sunglasses. Sometimes people open their mouthes and you can tell their full of ish before they even complete a sentence. This isn’t a situation where I’m throwing stones – we all aren’t saints – but I’d still trust my instinct to say ‘RAT’ when I smell one.

Gonna steal from Roger Angell here from a recent ny’er baseball column:

“Baseball, we’ve discovered once again, is always better as a sample of American business life than as a place for moral lessons.”

Replace Baseball with Horse Racing. There’s no moral lesson or story here. Just a bunch of crooks who are being put up on a pedestal. There’s a lot of that going on in the good ole USA these days.

Posted by o_crunk on May 29, 2008 @ 12:23 am

One thing you need to keep in mind is that despite the shady happenings in his past it may not be a true reflection of how he would choose to operate. The firm he worked for was unscrupulous and I know from my experience in the financial world that there are plenty of those places and they place enormous pressure on their employees to do shady/illegal things. All this really tells me is that he lacks the moral courage to stand up and get fired for refusing to do wrong. It doesn’t tell me how he would choose to operate a business of his own.

Posted by Kennedy on May 29, 2008 @ 10:29 am

Kennedy, point taken, and I think it’s important to add here that there’s no evidence or any allegations of anything shady or dishonest concerning the operation of IEAH.

Posted by Jessica on May 29, 2008 @ 10:38 am

Yeah, that’s all true and righteous of us to say that he wouldn’t run a business of his own that way, but that’s also like saying there’s not much to be divined from ‘past performances’ in the form.

Interesting to note … I was looking at the IEAH group on their website and Mike Jarvis’ name popped up. There’s another one with a not so clean past, though I do think the NCAA is pretty bananas about the way they enforce rules.

Posted by o_crunk on May 29, 2008 @ 1:00 pm

The article indicates that he’s been deliberately dishonest on at least one occasion, and there are certainly suggestions that he’s been dishonest other times. No, it doesn’t mean that he’s still dishonest, but nor does it look like integrity is one of the guy’s core values.

Posted by Brooklyn Backstretch on May 29, 2008 @ 1:06 pm

Well, Gary Tanaka is under indictment, and he gets featured on the cover of Bloodhorse. So, other than the obvious snark factor, what exactly is the big story here?

Posted by alan on May 29, 2008 @ 3:20 pm