David Namer had the perfect place for your retirement money: mid-yield corporate bonds – Private Placement Memorandums – backed by insurance from a top-rated company. It was perfect until the pyramid collapsed. Learn how this convicted former banker took thousands of small investors for almost $35 million.

In the faux economy of the 1990s everybody was making money or so it seemed. The expanding economy and rapidly rising stock market, combined with the overall lessening of world tensions, created an environment of unbridled optimism – and ripe for fraud. Here we’ll focus on a significant investment-bond scheme that the perpetrators conceived to bilk millions from investors and went unnoticed for some time as the stock market’s paper profits accumulated.

Significant fraud schemes all have common elements. They:

This fraud was a modern interpretation of the classic Ponzi scheme, set in the highly specialized world of investment bonds. It would require the active cooperation and collaboration of individuals from insurance, investment banking, securities trading, brokers, real companies, and innocent investors. Despite the protections ostensibly in place, a single man stole almost $35 million from the American investing public.

The Players