From fraudsters to Mafia masterminds, author uncovers ‘100 Years of Wall Street Crooks’
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
Billions and billions of dollars are bilked from trusting saps, and Hall explains how.
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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
“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,
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
Regardless, Milken was pardoned by then-President
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
“I thought of John Delorean,” Hall says, “but he wasn’t really a
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