Octopus; Sam Israel, the Secret Market, and Wall Street's Wildest Con
New York, NY: Broadway Paperbacks, 2012. First Paperback Edition (stated). First printing [stated]. Trade paperback. xv, [1], 352 pages. Footnotes. Author's Note. Index. Minor scuff to rear cover. Inscribed by the author on the title page. Sticker inside front cover. Inscription reads: To Len & Janice--I hope you enjoy the investigative reporting in this. With Admiration, Best, Guy Lawson. Guy Lawson (born 1963) is a Canadian American journalist and true crime writer who has been published in GQ, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. Lawson's first journalism job came in the field of politics, when he was assigned to cover the Quebec referendum. Lawson had a breakthrough cover story for Harper's about small-town Canadian hockey players. He later moved onto the Canadian broadcast television. Lawson has been published in numerous major publications throughout his career. In addition to War Dogs, several of his other works have been optioned, including Octopus (about hedge fund and Ponzi scammer Sam Israel), by HBO. Born into one of America's most illustrious trading families, Sam Israel was determined to strike out on his own. After apprenticing with one of the greatest traders of the 1980s, he founded his own fast-growing hedge fund, promising investors extraordinary returns. But it was all an elaborate charade. After suffering devastating losses and fabricating fake returns, Israel know it was only a matter of time before his real performance would be discovered. So when a former black-ops agent told him about a "secret market" run by the Fed, Israel bet his last $150 million on a chance to make billions. Thus began his bizarre journey into “the Upperworld”—a society populated by clandestine bankers, shady European nobility, and spooks issuing cryptic warnings about a mysterious cabal known as the Octopus. Samuel Israel III (born July 20, 1959) is an American-born former hedge fund manager for the Bayou Hedge Fund Group, which he founded in 1996. In 1996 Israel founded the Bayou Hedge Fund Group, which raised $450 million from its investors and for which Israel was CEO. Bayou and Israel misappropriated these funds for personal use, running what would later be revealed as a Ponzi scheme. After poor returns in 1998, the firm founded a dummy accounting firm, which they hired to audit themselves in order to keep up appearances to investors. In 2005, Bayou was indicted. On September 29, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) filed charges against Bayou, Israel, and Bayou CFO Daniel Marino. The next year, the hedge fund filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy-court protection. On April 14, 2008, Israel was sentenced to 20 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $300 million after pleading guilty to defrauding investors in his now-bankrupt firm. Condition: Very good.
Keywords: Wall Street, Rampant Fraud, Finance, Sam Israel, Bayou Hedge, Freddy Graber, Dan Marino, Jimmy Marquez, Robert Nichols
[Book #79126]
Price: $45.00