Red State Ripoff
Insurance tycoon Greg Lindberg fleeced conservative retirees. Now he wants a Trump pardon.
“The life insurance industry has been a smug sacred cow feeding the public a steady line of sacred bull.” - Ralph Nader
White Collar Crook 101: The time to complain about a weaponized justice system is BEFORE you plead guilty to federal charges
Billionaire insurance fraudster Greg Lindberg, who was once the biggest Republican donor in North Carolina, got it backwards.
In 2019, state regulators began seizing control of his insurance companies after determining they were financially unstable and dangerously overexposed to risky, affiliated investments tied to … well, who else but Lindberg himself?
In November 2024, Lindberg, 55, pleaded guilty to a $2 billion fraud and money laundering scheme. Then last week, a county judge ordered him and his companies to repay $526 million while he languishes in a county jail.
Lindberg built his empire buying multi-state life insurance companies and moving them to North Carolina where he lavished Republican and independent politicians with millions. His companies included Eli Global, Global Bankers Insurance Group, Southland National Insurance Corp., Bankers Life Insurance Co., and Colorado Bankers Life Insurance Co.
These firms marketed annuities and life insurance – the most conservative financial products on the shelf – to retirees, small-time savers and people who wanted guarantees instead of gambling on Wall Street. Many of them were from rural areas in Southern states where his companies operated.
Then he left them to drown as he diverted funds through complex, circular transactions. Payments were frozen, benefits were capped, and thousands of policyholders were forced into years of bureaucratic limbo while courts and guaranty funds cleaned up the wreckage.
In the end, Lindberg was not so much underwriting insurance policies, but underwriting a luxe life that included mansions, a private jet and a $45 million super yacht named “Double Down” registered in the Cayman Islands. He’d also set up bank accounts in 18 countries, including Switzerland, Malta, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom, according to prosecutors.
It was so bad, North Carolina’s Republican Insurance Commissioner Mike Causey has begged Donald Trump to deny the pardon that Lindberg is so earnestly lobbying for now.
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Pardon My Ponzi (Business Blunders
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Marc Rich – Glencore (Business Blunders)
Here’s what Causey, who Lindberg tried to bribe, wrote the president:
“Mr. Lindberg’s criminal conduct was not incidental, technical or victimless. It was deliberate, sustained and directly aimed at corrupting a state regulatory system charged with protecting the public so he could enrich himself.”
North Carolina’s Republican U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis seconded that motion:
“There should be no pardon given the troubling nature of this crime and all the evidence that supported the conviction,” Tillis wrote on X in December.
It puts our pardon-happy president (with more than 1,600 clemency grants so far this term) in a tough spot.
Lindberg is singing Trump’s song, complaining of a justice system that has been weaponized against fine, upstanding, Republican patriots like him. But he also defrauded a demographic that overlaps with Trump voters.
If only we could put a tax on irony. Lindberg’s blunder could fund Social Security.
