Some of my crazy career

Sometimes I feel like the Forrest Gump of project managers with some of the situations in which I end up being a bit player. This latest project is about the Office of the Controller of the Currency trying to prove that 9 major banks screwed  over the public by violoating foreclosure procedures.  The banks are scrambling to avoid $400MM in fines each if the OCC finds them liable.  I'm at Bank of America and we are spending money hand over fist to build out our computer systems to allow over 2000 loan reviewers look over every one of the 1.4 million foreclosures done between 2009 and 2010.  All the legal documents, fees, correspondence, filings, etc.

Other projects that prove my point...Congress coming down on NASA because NASAs bookkeeping is such a shambles they don't know where they spent money, so KPMG tries to build a common accounting system for them.  NASA couldn't decide on a common chart of accounts that all the centers agree to....project fails, KPMG loses millions on the project.

Then with KPMG, none of California counties have a child support enforcement system so we help Cty of San Diego build a great one, but because they are a republican dominant county, the state throws it out for a piece of shit built by Kern Cty, Managed building part of the first integrated justice system in California only to watch KPMG get screwed out of $2MM of billings by the D.A.

Feds come down on LAPD with the consent decree after the Rodney King and Ramparts scandals, so KPMG tries to build them a profiling data warehouse. Two years later LAPD makes a big announcement that they have a system for capturing the racial make up of witnesses and victims - a 2x3 postcard the cops fill out on the scene.

BAC takes over CFC and I help move all of BACs mortgages onto CFC's systems, then move CFCs systems into BACs data centers. Just for our department - had to bring up over 400 servers in 9 months, some with high performance clustering technology and several multi-terabyte databases.

Helped facilitate the merger of the municipal and superior courts in CA, thereby promoting a bunch of hack muni judges into the Superior Courts when I was at Deloitte. Spent an hour next to Grey Davis on a flight to Sacramento, thinking he seemed really capable and sincere. Boy, was I fooled!

Implemented part of a network for Western Union Telegraph in their last dying grasp to make money out of telex before faxing and email destroyed their market.   Their concept for email was to put terminals in peoples houses that would print the email in the post office, where it would be delivered by the postman.

Managed the international computing department for SPNB and listened to an international banking rep explain how they had to keep lending money to Latin America that they'd never be able to pay back, or else he wouldn't have a job. That logic brought down SPNB and almost BAC.

Worked for Bankers Trust across the street from the south tower...ultimately BT was bought by Deutsche Bank and the building heavily damaged in 9/11 21 years later.

Took one of the last rides on Angel's Flight in LA, the day that the brakes failed and a guy was killed.

Watched the KPMG Consulting partners cheer their impending IPO and two weeks later find themselves broke when the stock tanks.

Worked on an implementation of Steve Job's NeXt system for the LA County Sheriff's...Fail.

Worked in Quality Control on a project at Deloitte for State of Arizona's medicare system, after spending $18MM, Deloitte had delivered one of 10 or so modules and decided, that since they were only going to collect $12MM on the project, that it was time to fold their tent and go home.

Worked on an audit for the Bicycle Club Casino where we found that the IT manager used the payroll system to skim FICA withholdings into his paycheck.

Worked in a building downtown LA that was shot up overnight in the LA Riots.

Worked on a project for Dept of Corrections for CA and visited Corcoran prison to interview guards about procedures. The following week, FBI busts the guards for staging gladiator fights between the inmates. (Sirhan Sirhan and Charlie Manson are held there too.)    In the annual report on the state of the prisons they actually stated that they had used prisoners to code the Inmate Trust Accounting system and one of the inmates of course coded in a way to skim money into his account.  Another had not documented anything and after he was released was given a contract to document his code.  Another put a time bomb in his code that crashed the system after his release.  One time they sent a HP Unix server out to a prison and it was put into the warehouse.  When time came to install it, it was missing.  A short while later a lieutenant at the prison called the help desk asking how to boot this strange PC on his desk.  It came with a 20" monitor, so he thought it would make a nice PC for his office.

Worked for the manager at SPNB who Stan Rifkin worked for. Look him up for the public story...here's the real one:
He became a security consultant after he got out.  But, he really wasn't all that clever. All he did, since he had access to the wire transfer room, was try to figure out the calculation for the security code that a branch uses to authorize a money transfer. Then from inside the wire room, called the operators in the wire room and pretended to be a branch manager. He screwed it up the first time and on the second call the operator helped him out and made the transfer. He got screwed in Switzerland when he bought the diamonds and they were worth a lot less than he paid. Then he was dumb enough to come back to the states where the FBI picked him up at the airport. The way they caught him was after the bank discovered they were out of balance, they played back the dictaphone tapes from the wire room phone calls and one of the wire room operators recognized his voice.