From fraudsters to Mafia masterminds, author uncovers ‘100 Years of Wall Street Crooks’

Southington writer Phil Hall was not short of material for his new book “100 Years of Wall Street Crooks.” published this month by Bicep Books.

The book features multi-page descriptions of 33 separate fraudsters and swindlers, which averages out to one major financial scam for every three years of the past century. The criminals range from household names like Howard Hughes, Bernie Madoff and Martha Stewart to lesser-knowns (though they were no less rich) such as Billie Sol Estes, Pat Vesco and Jordan Belfort. Some chapters are devoted to institutions rather than individuals, including Enron, Adelphia Communication, Bre-X Minerals and the Mafia.

Billions and billions of dollars are bilked from trusting saps, and Hall explains how.

Hall, a Southington resident who has lived in Connecticut since 2000, is a financial freelance journalist who is also well-known for his books and articles about movies. He also hosts the “Nutmeg Chatter” talk show on Torrington’s WAPJ-FM. This is Hall’s 11th book and his first on financial skullduggery.

Given its proximity to New York and its reputation as a place where the wealthy like to live, Connecticut comes up fairly often in Hall’s stories. Westport resident Martha Stewart earns a chapter — “She’s the only one in the book who got the last laugh,” Hall reflects, saying the home decor goddess’ popularity seemed to grow following her conviction for obstruction of justice in an insider trading scandal.

Another Connecticut crook is Thomas F. Quinn, whom Hall says “worked for the Mafia, peddled bogus gold mines, orchestrated a global securities scheme that defrauded investors out of $500 million and co-owned a horse that won the Irish Derby.” Quinn bought a home in Greenwich with the spoils from his swindles.

A diagnosis from Yale New Haven Hospital figured in a successful plea that kept penny stock “pump and dump” scheme conspirator (and Suffield resident) Christian Meissenn from serving prison time, only to have Meissenn die in a car accident elsewhere in Connecticut while serving under house arrest.

Philip Musica committed suicide in his Fairfield home in 1938 shortly after he was revealed to have perpetrated one of the biggest business frauds in history using his company McKesson & Robins as a front for illegal operations and tax scams. Not long before his demise, Musica, who was born in Naples, Italy, was approached by Republican party operatives who knew him as one of his aliases to run against Franklin Roosevelt for President of the U.S., on the basis of his presumed business expertise. Hall calls Musica “wonderfully unsavory. It’s like he’s a villain out of a B-movie. His story is so bizarre. He’s the ultimate flimflam man.”

Partly because of the legends that spring up around such grandiose characters, Hall says that writing “100 Years of Wall Street Crooks” required “a ton of research. Some sources contradict each other.

“One thing I’m proud of involved a fellow, Court Randall, in Chapter 11,” Hall says. “None of my sources knew if he was still alive; even Wikipedia didn’t know. I was the first person to confirm that he was not. It was a real pain getting all of this information together, but it paid off.”

While suggesting that any given century of history could yield a plethora of major financial crimes, Hall thinks the past hundred years were an easy way to encapsulate this history of wrongdoing. His subjects “share so much in common” and the book wraps up with Elizabeth Holmes, showing how constant and recent such grand-scale criminality is.

“I thought it was interesting to do this chronologically,” Hall says.

He describes how many of the crooks latched on to popular trends of their times. The securities dealer whose name became synonymous with a certain larceny scheme, Charles Ponzi was bilking immigrants during the 1920s, following an Industrial-era immigration wave. “Preston Tucker was taking advantage of automobile owners,” he says about the car manufacturer who used suspicious stock-selling practices to fund his business. “Joseph P. Kennedy was getting away with financial murder,” Hall says of the patriarch of the Kennedy political dynasty, who honed in on post-Depression changes in entertainment and real estate to build his fortune.

While there are some obvious similarities between swindlers such as Ponzi and Madoff, Hall doesn’t think of one necessarily inspiring another.

“I don’t think anybody saw themselves as role models,” he says. He also doesn’t see them as remorseful.

“Some people went through the motions of ‘I regret what I did,’ but mostly they were sorry they got caught,” Hall says. He does note a possible exception, junk-bond icon Michael Milken, whose philanthropic works following his incarceration seem like atonement, though Hall notes that “his post-prison experience has not been without issues.”

Regardless, Milken was pardoned by then-President Donald Trump in 2020.

Everyone in the book is “larger than life,” Hall says. “It’s a rogue’s gallery of the most outrageous and audacious of the rogues. It’s not a word that people use much these days, but these people are scoundrels.”

Was anyone considered for this Wall Street crooks pantheon that didn’t make the cut?

“I thought of John Delorean,” Hall says, “but he wasn’t really a Wall Street scoundrel. And I thought of the savings and loan crisis, but that seemed like more Washington than Wall Street.”

Christopher Arnott can be reached at [email protected] .