Marcus Schrenker Swaps Golden Parachute For Real One

In a bid to make “Financial Crisis: The Movie”, Marcus Schrenker, a fraudulent Indianapolis financial advisor, has faked his own death in a plane crash. Only he wasn’t very good at it. After reporting a windscreen blowout to ground-staff, causing military planes to scramble, he set the plane on autopilot, bailed-out of the plane, and parachuted to the ground, no easy feat according to these pilots. After fooling police who questioned him after the crash, he escaped on a motorbike that he had prepared in advance. Hollywood can look away now, because he has been found alive, camping in the woods, having tried to slash his wrists.

The wealth-manager has all of his three companies under investigation for multi-million pound fraud, and he was going through a messy divorce. If you’re thinking of faking you’re own suicide, you could perhaps pay closer attention to the in-flight showing of MacGyver; though a friend who was sent an email by Schrenker after the crash has claimed that the pilot has Special Ops training and a dual personality. Which is, frankly, a badass combination.

Another pilot offers Thucydides’s advice: “The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.” Said pilot is a bit like those goons who said how brave the 9/11 hijackers were; what’s brave is facing the music rather than going off on some Special Ops jolly while your clients get shafted. Schrenker merely joins French investor Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet who killed himself after losing a billion-dollars to the Madoff scandal, and Adolf Merckle who walked in front of a train after seeing his family company get broken up, in the ranks of rich men who left a legacy of sheer recklessness.

Posted by Mike Smith in Hot Money | January 15, 2009 10:33AM |