Five Years After Bernie
The Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Bernie Madoff on Dec. 11, 2008. His guilty plea and 150-year prison sentence were almost non-events, at least compared with the finger-pointing, lawsuits and trials that have ensued. They turned the Ponzi scheme into a gift...
Five Years of Bernie
Bernie Madoff confessed his Ponzi scheme on December 10, 2008. This Thursday, November 21, 2013, the Wall Street Journal is running my column, Five Years of Bernie. Mark your calendars. In the article, I list several lessons from Madoff’s fraud. Hopefully,...
How To Fire Your Client
"Clients are always right." I wish. Sometimes, it pays to send them packing. It's a question of when to do it and how. "You're fired," may work on reality television, but it's a bad choice of language for wealth managers. Word gets...
The Abduction of Europa
Because The Pell Heist is about the recovery of six priceless paintings stolen during October of 1986 (while the Red Sox were busy losing the World Series), I'm obsessed with all things art. My friend and Harvard senior, George Pocheptsov, recently sent me this photo...
End Game
My name is Jack Legare. I live in a small, weather-beaten cape near the end of Dock Street in Hale Harbor, Rhode Island. The roof is new. But the weather shingles date back to the 1950s, and I bet half of them blow away the next time a hurricane comes storming up the...
The Pell Heist (coming soon)
New York City – I don't miss it. Not one bit. The streets reek of food carts and gas fumes, and the smell of garbage is ferocious during the summer when the city turns into a concrete sauna. Outside my former office at Gulag Sachs, if you tilted your head at just the right angle and paid careful attention, you'd get a strong whiff of anxiety from desperate people who couldn't wait to get the hell off the hamster wheel.
Wealth Management’s New Dinosaurs
"Fee-sucking, evergreen income." That's how Bill Michaels describes our industry's reliance on asset allocation. The problem, he says, is that it doesn't make money for clients. But here's what "diwussification"–his play on diversification–does for advisers: It minimizes risk, locks in annuity revenues, and frees them "to go play golf."
A Big Shout-out to my Friends in Pampa, Texas
Recently, my good friends, Kathryn and Wesley and Green, forwarded this photo from Pampa, Texas. They're turning a wing in their home into a bed and breakfast. And I can't wait to go back!
Norb Vonnegut
The New York Times describes my novels as “money porn,” “a red-hot franchise,” and “glittery thrillers about fiscal malfeasance.” Through fiction I explore the dark side of money and the motivations of those who have it, want more, and will steamroll anybody who gets in their way.