“Master Manipulator; Power, Personality, Persuasion: The Critical Mass for a Major Fraud” tells how a powerful executive gained total control of his firm and ruined it and his seven partners. And it tells how an alert SEC examiner with a healthy skepticism and dogged determination brought an end to a decade-long scam that opened the eyes of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the New York Stock Exchange, and the Securities Investor Protection Corp. years before the latest wave of financial scandals. Financial fraud was not invented by Bernard Madoff or the gang at Enron Corp. This is the true story of a $47 million fraud in the 1980s that caused the collapse of the venerable 85-year old Bell & Beckwith brokerage firm, within months of two other similar frauds in St. Louis and Des Moines. Although “Master Manipulator” reads like a crime novel, it’s real stuff. real people, real fraud, real hurt, real prison time, and real lessons. The story begins on a cold, blustery February day in 1983, when an SEC examinerbegan to question several seemingly minor discrepancies. But within days his seeds of doubt blossomed into a full-blown investigation that quickly uncovered the massive fraud. The accounts of 7,000 customers were frozen, and the resulting bankruptcy lasted 14 years and cost $14.3 million in legal and accounting fees. The bankryuptcy court eventually dealt with $132 million in assets. At the center of the fraud was Ted Wolfram, the brokerage’s managing partner who had used phony collateral to leverage his margin account into enough money to buy the Landmark Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, a $2 million jet plane, a horse farm in Florida that trained championship racehorses, a stable of 17 exotic sports cars, two cattle farms in Arkansas, oil and gas properties, and a home designed by a Frank Lloyd Wright disciple along the banks of the Maumee River in Grand Rapids, Ohio. Wolfram served 10 years of a 25-year federal prison sentence, and later gave lectures on the dangers of white-collar crime to thousands of students and business executives. The hardcover edition of “Master Manipulator” became required reading at several universities for classes in fraud detection and prevention. The book focuses on the “master manipulator” who caused the demise of Bell & Beckwith, but it also looks at the other frauds in the same timeframe that had amazing similarities. The methods used by the embezzlers, and the lack of diligence by auditing firms, offer many valuable lessons to accounting professionals, regulatory agencies, and financial executives.
You must log in to post a comment.