Some seamy quirks of human nature

There’s no gainsaying that there are Janus-faced persons, or the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde split personalities, like the prim and Victorian ladies but strumpets in the night, and the chivalric knights in shining armor, but also sadistic tormenters on the sly.

Even among Hollywood icons, and few local matinee idols, there have been put up Casanovas and movie heroes, and yet, lurking as gays or homos on the side. There was that swashbuckling Tyrone Power, or the ladies’ heartthrob Rock Hudson, or lately, the epitome of entertainment Michael Jackson, and yet, turned out the opposite. In local showbiz, there’s that talented film idol in Rustom Padilla as the handsome brod of Robin Padilla. But look, showbiz buzz is getting fed-up with his homo antics as BB Gandanghari.

But the sensual quirks among famous figures, especially in the showbiz firmament are just ready examples. Other human sectors are as vulnerable and as prone to eccentricities and oddities of human nature. Surprises and inordinate shockers clutter human experience as thorny quirks in life.

Among the storied human aberrations that abet the split personality syndrome, nothing takes the cake from the filthy rich doubling as money bilkers who cheat others wantonly.

The bilking escapade of Texas billionaire R. Allen Stanford is a case in point. Stanford has been accused of fraud involving an $8 billion scam, lately jailed, and pleaded guilty. His beset Stanford Financial Group reportedly ran a “massive Ponzi scheme” which is basically a pyramid scam. Innocent investors were at first regularly paid returns in post-dated checks that were good by using funds from other innocent investors newly-recruited, not from bonafide returns of investments. As many investors got snagged with early paid checks, they added investments many times over, until other pre-drawn checks bounced.

Stanford’s Ponzi scheme had gone on for ten years, undetected that long. Why would a billionaire be that blatant and brazen, when he didn’t need the money which he had defrauded from others? Is Stanford the personification of man’s innate greed to amass further wealth with no chance to have such avarice reach the point of satisfaction, or satiation?

It’s said that man’s lust for riches is never-ending. And man takes the risk of losing all he has already accumulated, that is, by parlaying his bets in quick-money odds in one whole pile. As in winner-takes-all, as if there’s no tomorrow, he doesn’t stop parlaying bets until there’s no more taker, or he loses all in one quick deal.

That could be the mind-set of billionaire R. Allen Stanford, unsatisfied and discontented until the assets of his investors are all snared into his fraudulent spider web. In fact, in 2005, Stanford who as a cricket patron, shocked the cricket community by offering a 20-million dollar winner-takes-all 20-match between his Carribean Superstars and England.

Such monetary flamboyance in Saville Row elegance of the English aristocracy had victimized some 30,000 investors worldwide. His company alone owed some 54 billion dollars and another $1.8B that could not be accounted for. Perhaps, as he has already pleaded guilty to mega fraud, for one, he could expect his sentencing to be like that of another American eccentric billionaire, Bernard Madoff, who has been sentenced to 150 years in jail for the $65 B he had defrauded from his investors.

What’s scandalously shocking is that these mean money bilkers, like Stanford and Madoff, or Celso delos Angeles on this side of Midas’ greed, don’t need more wealth except for the joy or fun of fooling their victims. How quirky!

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