Word: frankels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Frankel learned a lesson from his failed funds, it was that clients insist on getting their money back. He needed to find clients who wouldn't be so demanding. Even better, if he could somehow become both client and money manager, he could create a truly sustainable scam. That's when the insurance companies entered the picture...
Assuming a new identity, Eric Stevens, and taking up with Sonia Schulte, the wife of his former boss at LaSalle Street, Frankel heard about a troubled Tennessee insurance company, Franklin American Life. In 1991, with money remaining from his derelict investment funds and a few dubious letters of credit, he founded Thunor Trust as a vehicle to take over Franklin. Thunor was run by two Nashville businessmen, who also claim to be victims. Frankel then used Franklin American's assets to purchase at least 10 other insurance companies throughout the South and Midwest. Laxly regulated insurance companies such as Franklin...
...that the bumbling, barred-by-the-SEC Frankel was able to take control of insurance companies, particularly when he had virtually no assets? Oklahoma insurance commissioner Carrol Fisher is as surprised as anyone. "I don't know how in the world this could have happened," she said. "To imagine how one person could have got hold of this much money is beyond...
Having baked a layer cake of fraud, Frankel sought to add some icing by establishing a charitable trust with connections to the Vatican--the ultimate cover. Through a prominent New York City attorney, Thomas Bolan, Frankel met with Father Peter Jacobs, a gadabout clergyman who has ties to New York luminaries, including Walter Cronkite. Jacobs introduced Frankel to Monsignor Emilio Colagiovanni, a Vatican official. Frankel claimed that his St. Francis of Assisi Foundation would distribute more than $2 billion to Catholic charities. He took to obsessively studying the lives of the saints, almost as avidly as he consulted astrological charts...
...ultimate aspirations for the St. Francis Foundation are not clear, the fund was his scam's undoing. State regulators balked when the Virgin Islands-registered Foundation sought to take over U.S. insurance companies. But by early May, when Mississippi and Tennessee regulators began seeking the return of assets from Frankel's Liberty National, Frankel was gone, leaving behind, among other things, a half-million-dollar charge for jet fuel on his credit card. At his house, FBI agents recovered astrological charts intended to answer, among other questions, "Will I go to jail...