Saturday, July 14, 2012

Sigh. Another thieving Wall St. CEO

Some men rob with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen.
At least this guy had the decency to try to commit suicide after embezzling millions from his clients.

According to the Associated Press,
The chief executive of an Iowa-based brokerage firm admitted in a tell-all suicide note that he carried out an elaborate fraud scheme in which he embezzled at least $100 million from customers over two decades, federal investigators said Friday.
FBI agents arrested Peregrine Financial Group Inc. Russell Wasendorf Sr. at a local hospital Friday and he appeared in federal court later in the day on charges of lying to federal regulators. Court documents detail a wide-ranging fraud scheme in which Wasendorf apparently fooled colleagues, customers and regulators by creating fraudulent financial records. 
Those documents detailed a note found in Wasendorf's car Monday, when authorities found him unresponsive in the vehicle outside the company's headquarters in Cedar Falls. "Through a scheme of using false bank statements I have been able to embezzle millions of dollars from customer accounts," Wasendorf wrote, adding that the fraud had gone undetected "until now."