Arthur Nadel, Rod Cameron Stringer And Patrick Rocca – This Week’s Madoffs And Merckles

Arthur Nadel, who we saw running away from the cops last week after scamming people with his inflated hedge fund, was officially charged by the US Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday. It turns out the actual assets he has are worth just over $500,000, rather than the $342m that he said they were worth, and the 11% returns he was offering were actually heavily negative.

Of course this pales next to the dad of Ponzi schemes, Bernard Madoff, but it’s still a good effort from the 76-year-old. He gets bonus points for generating an old-fashioned FBI chase, after he left a suicide note, but didn’t kill himself and instead set off for the airport. Foolishly he used his mobile before he left, and left his car at the airport too. Schoolboy stuff really, I give him five more days.

There’s so much shame, deception and general epic failing going on these days that this blog just writes itself. Who else have we got this week? There’s Rod Cameron Stringer, another hedge-fund fraudster nailed by the SEC this week. He wasn’t approved by them, didn’t have a licence, is a used-car salesman, and claimed he provided returns of 61%, so if you invested with him you frankly deserve to get scammed. Oh, but wait, his investors were “mainly elderly”. Stringer exploited the trust of old people to build “a pool for his office”. They’re renovating an entire wing of the sixth layer of hell just for Stringer as we speak.

Also this week there’s Patrick Rocca, who unlike Nadel actually did kill himself, adding to Merckle and Villehuchet’s post-crisis suicide meme. Rocca is an Irish property investor and developer, who owns buildings occupied by the likes of Argos and Norwich Union. He’s believed to have lost big with Anglo-Irish Bank getting nationalised last week. But he had a Jet Ranger helicopter to run away with! Arthur Nadel could have bought a good few months fugitive status with that thing.

And in Madoff updates, we’ve got a British Virgin Islands hedge fund saying they’ve lost $350m with Madoff (sorry, but tax exiles get zero sympathy chez Bad Idea), and there’s also his business associate Robert Jaffe, who yesterday refused to answer the subpoena issued to him to outline his involvement with Madoff. He received one or two percent on transactions he fed to Madoff, but for his part he claims that he didn’t know anything about Madoff’s shadiness, and his family, including Carl Shapiro, have been some of the biggest losers. Jaffe has already had to face some wrath, when he went to a party full of people who lost money with Madoff, and got involved in some “pushing and shoving”. 

Finally Marc Dreier, the lawyer who allegedly ran a fraudulent investment scheme worth $380m, finds out whether he gets bail today. Yesterday prosecutors recommended he not be allowed bail, as he posed a high risk of fleeing Nadel-style. But in the face of seized assets, major criminal charges, and a mental-sounding son who destroyed dad’s mobile phones after the charges were made, their lawyer is confident: “I’m still confident of our position. I believe we have the better part of the argument”. Good luck with that one!

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Hot Money | January 22, 2009 1:09PM |