Talk about your young heavy hitters, London International Group's 26-year-old Global Managing Director Jack Hu boasted that his December financial summit in Irvine would include George W. Bush's treasury and Interior secretaries, Henry Paulson and Dirk Kempthorne, then-Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, former House speaker Dennis Hastert, former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Richard Myers, two-time National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and many more D.C. luminaries.
Fast forward 11 months, and Hu and his 62-year-old mother, both of Irvine, are accused in a federal grand jury indictment of being fraudsters touting phony political connections.
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Hu, whose Facebook page cites Ronald Reagan and both Bush presidents as his heroes, told mostly Chinese immigrant investors in his company that their funds wound be used to sponsor China trips by Dubya and Bill Clinton and a goodwill visit to Taiwan by Al Gore, the indictment charges.
The whiz kid is also accused of having passed out a business card bearing the Great Seal of the United States and falsely identifying himself as “chairman” of the United States Senate Advisory Committee.
Rubes were promised returns of 3 to 10 percent on their investments, but the funds were actually used to support the lavish lifestyles and Las Vegas gambling jaunts of Hu and his mother, Kuei Fuang Tsuei Hu.
Arrested in October, the mother and son are each charged with three counts of wire fraud. Jack Hu faces an additional count of misusing of the Great Seal of the United States. Both are being held without bond. Conviction on the wire fraud counts bring maximum
sentences of 60 years in federal prison.
Meanwhile, Steven Martinez, assistant director in charge of the FBI in Los Angeles,
and André Birotte Jr., the U.S. Attorney in LA, announced more possible victims of the pair are being sought. Anyone who thinks they were duped is asked to call the FBI's Santa Ana office at 714.542.8825.
For that London International Group summit, Hu said he would be moderating panels with Fox News business and financial journalist Stuart Varney. It'll be interesting to see how Varney covers this story on the cable news channel.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.