[UPDATED] Fore! Bailed-Out Big Shots Exiled to Palm Beach Golf Course

Flickr: AndreJenny.com

Executives whose blunders had to be bailed out by taxpayers must console themselves at golf courses like this one, at the Breakers.

​Much was made of the cold shoulder turned by Palm Beach high society against the Jaffe family and others linked to Bernard Madoff, whose locker at the Palm Beach Country Club was unceremoniously stripped after the scandal broke. Yet other villains of high finance, whose recklessness may have had an even more destructive impact on American investors, are still teeing off on the island.

This New York Times article describes the leisurely exile of Charles Prince III, former chief executive of Citigroup, who got a $12 million bonus on his way out the door. It says of Prince:

He put his Greenwich, Conn., home on the market and spends much of his time in Palm Beach, Fla. (C. Michael Armstrong, the former head of Citigroup's audit and risk committee, is a golfing buddy there.)

So the executive who before his resignation two years ago put Citigroup on a disaster path is hanging out with the executive whose vigilance was supposed to save the company from disaster? Lovely. As this twosome perfects their golf games, the federal government wrestles with a $300 billion bailout.

UPDATE: Scott Sobel, a spokesman for Armstrong, contacted me this afternoon to say that the New York Times article is wrong and that Armstrong doesn't even have a place in Palm Beach and doesn't golf with Prince. At the moment, no correction has been made to the Times story online.