Laura Davis Marshall

t’s taken more than three years for the other shoe to drop, but boy what a shoe this is.

A bit of background: in June 2009, Bryan Burroughs raised questions in Vanity Fair about the role that Kroll played in protecting Ponzi schemester Allen Stanford:

Behind the scenes, Allen Stanford was even more aggressive. As the company grew, he became renowned within law-enforcement circles for aggressive counter-intelligence… His greatest asset may have been a top security firm, Kroll associates, whose Miami office worked with Stanford for years. “Stanford was spending millions of dollars a year trying to figure out who was looking at him, and aggressively combating whoever it was,” recalls the former FBI agent. “Kroll was essentially running a propaganda campaign in defense of Stanford’s good name.

Kroll’s role in defending Stanford’s reputation, in both law-enforcement circles and the wider banking community, was an example of a controversial practice known within the private-security world as “reputational self-due diligence,” that is, vouching for a client’s good name…

The idea here was that if Stanford hired Kroll to protect and burnish the Stanford reputation, then he could continue to raise money for his Ponzi much more easily. But what exactly was Kroll doing for Stanford? Murray Waas has now found out, and it’s not pretty. Essentially, rather than simply sing the praises of Stanford, Kroll would make extremely aggressive ad hominem attacks against anybody who dared raise questions about the firm, including a former senior State Department official named Jonathan Winer.