Andrew Ross Sorkin writes: “I’m a proven liar. Don’t believe
anything I say.” That was what Samuel Israel III told me last week. He is the
hedge fund manager convicted of running a $450 million Ponzi scheme who faked
his own suicide in the summer of 2008 to avoid his prison sentence before
turning himself in after a worldwide manhunt.
He was sitting across from me in the visiting center of the
Butner prison complex, about 45 minutes north of Raleigh in eastern North
Carolina. (Bernard L. Madoff is in the same complex.)
….I was there to talk to him because his story is a
cautionary tale of the highly sophisticated, often endemic, fraud that still
lurks on Wall Street. People I spoke with who dealt with him are still
mystified about the breach of trust and how no one had a clue about his
deception until it was too late.
“Everyone cheats,” he said as a matter of fact. “I’m not a liar,” he insisted, affably. “I
became a liar.”
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