Word: stanley
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Generally, investors got into this private, no-prospectus game through a trusted family friend. In our case, the trusted friend was an affable, debonair fellow named Stanley Chais, who ran the Brighton and Popham investment groups for decades. We were in two sub-groups of Brighton, and they were small, 10 to 15 people - possibly so they would fly under regulator radar, victims now tell me. Brighton, it turns out, fed the money into Madoff. I'd sit next to Stanley at year-end holiday parties and, knowing my family's money was in his hands...
...better or worse, our decision to invest was based on our faith in him, not unlike the way one puts trust in any stockbroker or financial adviser, but more so. If Stanley's running things, we'll go with it. This trust, the history of success, made it as good, if not better than any investment out there. Had we-and the many other devastated investors I've talked to over the last week-heard the name Madoff perhaps we would have checked him out, seen some of the red-flags, and maybe made a different decision...
...class action suit filed in United State District Court in California last week. Silverton's family, in another Chais group called Caroline, also lost everything. It's unclear how many sub-groups Chais had going, but there were at least six I know of in the Los Angeles area. Stanley says he's lost everything, too, including his substantial Chais Family Foundation, which has shut down...
...Gist: Chances are you underestimate your capacity for cruelty. Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiments in the 1960s and '70s demonstrated that we're conditioned to inflict pain on complete strangers when impelled to do so by an authority figure. Milgram's experiments - linchpins of any freshman psych class - were simple. Volunteer participants were enlisted to help with a study purportedly tracking the effects of punishment on learning. When the "learner" made an error, the volunteer was told to administer an electric shock. Milgram found volunteers were disturbingly willing to follow orders, even as voltage levels increased in intensity...
...they, everyone in this fraud, are all wiped out. Even Stanley says he's lost everything. It's the kind of news that's been known to cause shortness of breath, sudden cardiac arrest, revolvers pulled from bedside drawers. It harks back to December of 1929 and the image of bodies falling from buildings. But what can you do? (See the top 10 scared stock traders...