The Pretender: How Martin Frankel Fooled the Financial World and Led the Feds on One of the Most Publicized Manhunts in History [Hardcover]

Ellen Pollock (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2002 | Series: Wall Street Journal Book

A respected Wall Street Journal senior writer tells how Martin Frankel fooled the financial world and led the Feds on one of the most publicised manhunts in history. It's a story with all the makings of a television drama: a reclusive financial whiz bilks insurance companies out of 200 million dollars, attracts a harem of young women, outsmarts a posse of bumbling federal agents in a chase across Europe, and leads some ver famous people down the garden path. Yet it's all part of the very real life of Martine Frankel. The Pretender chronicles how a nerdy thirty year old used his financial skills to build an intricate Ponzi scheme based on lies and his amazing gift for luring businessmen, including Democratic power broker Robert Strauss, into his web. While Frankel's stolen millions allowed him to easily transform himself from mama's boy to corporate mogul, his attempts to go 'global' proved more challenging. Nevertheless, his creation of a phony Catholic charity drew the attention of priests with close Vatican ties and a new group of mysterious business partners, until increasing paranoia caused Frankel to vanish from his Greenwich estate, beginning a bizarre chase across Europe that would climax in a German hotel room.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Ellen Joan Pollock's The Pretender is a biography of Martin Frankel, an unsavory financial savant whose vast illicit empire reached into very high places on two continents before collapsing with thundering suddenness. By the time of his arrest in 1999, Frankel had bilked various insurance companies out of $200 million via an elaborate (and oddly haphazard) Ponzi scheme. Pollock chronicles not only Frankel's phantom stock trades, fictional portfolios, asset skimming, and money laundering, but his mind-boggling personal extravagances--both financial and sexual. (His Greenwich, Connecticut, headquarters served both as business office and home to a shifting harem devoted to Frankel's sadomasochistic interests.) Pollock is a scrupulous writer, but for those unversed in financial subtleties, her novelistic treatment too rarely steps back to present overviews of the tangled crimes and their implications. Absent as well, finally, is any compelling psychological portrait of the bizarre and saurian Frankel. --H. O'Billovitch

From Publishers Weekly

A senior Wall Street Journal writer, Pollock (Turks and Brahmins) expands on her articles about the FBI's four-month manhunt for scam artist Martin Frankel, engagingly chronicling his journey from mama's boy to corporate mogul to international fugitive. Though he refused to grant Pollock interviews, Frankel comes to life here thanks to her exhaustive research in court documents, newspapers and Frankel's diary, plus interviews with lawyers, government and law enforcement officials, insurance executives, clergy, Frankel's girlfriends and business associates. In the 1980s, he launched the fraudulent Frankel Fund investment firm from his Toledo, Ohio, bedroom. Sued by investors in 1992, he was barred by the SEC from trading stock, but two years later undertook an intricate insurance scam from his new Greenwich, Conn., compound, where he surrounded himself with a "multitude of women." Frankel became an expert on Catholicism and St. Francis of Assisi and established a phony Catholic charity, duping priests with Vatican connections into a $55 million deal. Frankel's fiefdom crumbled in 1999 when insurance regulators became suspicious. After the eccentric embezzler fled, investigators found among his shredded and charred files an intact to-do list including a conspicuous item: "launder money." The final, suspenseful chapters track Frankel's flight across Europe and his 1999 capture at a posh Hamburg hotel. Some readers might recall the fugitive financier from the Court TV documentary House of Cards or ABC's 20/20, but Pollock's account delivers fresh, in-depth details. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (Jan. 22)Forecast: First serial in the Wall Street Journal and a 20-city radio satellite tour will help this juicy book win respectable sales.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 276 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; 1st edition (January 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743204158
• ISBN-13: 978-0743204156
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #714,216 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Twisted Tale of Geek Greed, April 14, 2002

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Pretender: How Martin Frankel Fooled the Financial World and Led the Feds on One of the Most Publicized Manhunts in History (Hardcover)

Martin Frankel was an odd genius. In his twenties, he was still living with his parents and had only fantasies about women, not dates. He had fantasies about making millions in investments, too, and took as heroes Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. He had a truly encyclopedic knowledge of financial markets, and yet he relied on casting astrological charts to make his millions. And it is certainly true that he made his millions, and lived a geeky nerd's version of a millionaire's life. But Frankel was a genius in insurance fraud, and his huge but ephemeral fortune was built on a pyramid scheme of robbing one insurance fund to pay into another. Ellen Joan Pollock covered Frankel's scam for The Wall Street Journal, and has put together a page-turner, full of socialites, celebrity priests, custom limousines and aircraft, sadomasochistic sex, and of course the boom and bust that was Frankel's career. The Pretender: How Martin Frankel Fooled the Financial World and Led the Feds on One of the Most Publicized Manhunts in History (Wall Street Journal Books) is not an uplifting tale, but it is exciting, and lots of it is over-the-top unbelievable, except that much of the unbelievable parts come from solid, stolid, financial reportage.

For starters, Frankel would never make it as a character in a novel; he and his even temporary success are just too unlikely. He was, indeed, vastly knowledgeable about the financial world he moved into. He was good at picking successful trades. But besides being generally amoral, his great fault as a trader was an almost comic one: he could not trade. Once he had accounts and investments to make, he froze. But he must have talked a good game to get financiers interested in him, and women interested in his sadomasochistic hobbies. Instead of making money on trades, he was essentially making it by looking constantly for new investors so that he could pay off the most recent ones and could continue to produce bogus quarterly reports which showed how many millions he was pulling in. He used the services of a celebrity priest to try to tap the vast resources of the Catholic Church in what would have been for him a huge money laundering scheme. Instead, of course, the house of cards eventually fell down, taking Frankel with it, along with real con men and other conned men.

Pollack's story is of one spectacular financial crime of the nineties. There is no pedantry here about how such crimes are to be avoided, but it is frankly amazing that regulators and usually savvy business investors allowed themselves enough laziness or greediness to be convinced by a very unappealing character. It was a time of the dot.com phenomenon, and "the millionaire next door." There never has been a time when get-rich-quick schemes weren't there, ready to take money from the credulous. Frankel's story, however, with remarkable details, cameos from famous politicians and businessmen, and silly sexual exploits, represents a unique, diverting, and worrisome contemporary variation on the theme.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Astounding how a village idiot rips off America, January 21, 2002

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R. Spell "raspell" (Memphis, TN USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Pretender: How Martin Frankel Fooled the Financial World and Led the Feds on One of the Most Publicized Manhunts in History (Hardcover)

This guy is a buffoon but somehow fooled many. I had heard of this case but didn't know prior to his investments in small insurance companies he had already been charged with improper handling of money and denied the ability to manage money by securities regulators.

Frankel was a shy, slight built man with minimal self-confidence. While very young, he developed an interest in the stock market and performed substantial research. Living in a small Ohio town, this took on somewhat of a mystique and people assumed he knew more than they did and would entrust him with money. Amazingly, once he had this money, he complained of "traders block" and executed very few trades. Oh well, there was still something else he could do with the money. Spend it. Amazingly, this guy parlays this Ponzi scheme into an insurance empire all the time spending the investments of the companies. It's absolutely amazing he was able to do this.

Even more bizarre, the goober then develops an interest in S&M sex. Well, since he has no social skills, he puts ads in alternative newspapers. When he meets the girls and none resemble Playmates, he quickly moves through them but keeps them on payroll. Imagine a Mormon and his wives but he isn't married and all them women want to marry him for money. What a crazy cast of characters!!!!

This book will make you want to be a thief once you see how easy it was for this idiot. The writer did an excellent research job consistent with her past as a Wall Street Journal reporter. I recommend this book if you like business "whodunits".

23 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Astonishing, January 9, 2002

By 

Kim I. Eisler (Bethesda, Maryland United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Pretender: How Martin Frankel Fooled the Financial World and Led the Feds on One of the Most Publicized Manhunts in History (Hardcover)

Anyone familiary with Ellen Joan Pollock's life and work, her history with Steve Brill and American Lawyer Magazine knows in their heart that this is the book she was born to write. For the story of Marty Frankel, ultimately a rather small time swindler from Toledo Ohio of all places is really bigger than this sick moron's life. On the surface one might think this is just another tale of a stock trading scam artist who if he hadn't fled the country and made us authorities find him would barely have made the papers. But this is such a degrading and astonishingly bizarre account of a lifestyle that one wouldn't really think could exist is civilized society. It is a condemnation of the internet culture where women can be purchased, bound, abused and discarded. It is a condemnation of the greed that allowed even lawyers at such a firm as akin gump, supposedl one of the top law firms in the country, to lend its imprimatur to a scumbag, as long as the scumbag had the money for a retainer and they didnt care where it came from. it is the story of loose regulation and of crimes that can go because authorities can either be bought up, lobbied out, or are just too busy harrassing innocent people to care about an actual thief. These are gigantic themes in the hands of a master craftsman of gossip and innuendo, a woman known for hiding behind pillars to get her information. When Ellen Pollock says she has interviewed 400 people, you know she has. You see it in the detail of every page which you leaves you wondering- how did she learn that. Her audacity in telling the entire story, even though small minded superiors urged caution is a giant reward for the reader. For days after I finished reading the Pretender, I wondered why we should care about this guy. He is so moronic, so Toledo, and yet rolls along. Does he deserve a book ? He doesn't deserve anything but years in a Taliban prison, he is now serving time in Connecticut. One expects he will be back with a new scam. That will be good news if it results in Pollack being back on his tail.