Word: loncar
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Salesman Ventura refuses to comment, but others who hawked junk for First Investors are less reticent about the company's high-pressure tactics. "I feel like a prostitute," confesses one of them, Mark Loncar, 27, of Aurora, Ill. "But I didn't know any better...
Ruckdeschel, Ventura and Loncar inhabit the lower end of the food chain that fed Michael Milken and a handful of others hundreds of millions of dollars in personal profits during the leveraged-buyout binge of the '80s. Now the continuing collapse of the junk-bond market is starving more than 270,000 First Investors clients, many of whom were lured in by deceptive tactics like those used by Ventura and Loncar. Customer losses nationwide could top $500 million...
Within a year of his hiring in 1986, Loncar had dumped enough high-risk junk, most of it on unsophisticated buyers and senior citizens with fixed incomes, to become one of First Investors' "Top 100" salesmen. "When clients asked if these investments were safe, we were taught to mislead them," says Loncar. "I didn't even know these were junk bonds. I learned more about those funds after I left the company three years later...
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