Customer Reviews

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

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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".

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.

This is a very good read, in many senses better than many novels on the market. Yet I ultimately found the book quite empty and deficient in explaining just HOW the scam that Frankel pulled off actually worked and who was actually harmed in the process. I was with Pollock through the early part of the book when Frankel is in Ohio, living with his parents and working at Dominick and Dominick, but then I got completely lost by Pollock's account of Frankel moving to his mansion in Greenwich, setting up Thunor trust and Franklin American. Just how did he get the resources to do all this? Pollock doesn't tell us (at least not in my reading). It is as if he just instantly became a multi-millionaire. Moreover, the actual scamming Frankel perpetuated doesn't become at all clear to this reader until page 195 where Pollock quotes the neat 4 paragraph summary of Tennessee's chief examiner. Nowhere in the book does Pollock come even close to matching the clarity of that statement and nor does she seem to spend any effort in extrapolating from the concerns articulated there. This is a pity. Certainly this is a well researched book and is probably the definitive account of the Frankel case. But in her myopic journalistic attention to details, what she leaves out is a certain analytical or critical dimension which would explain in simple terms the nature of Frankel's crimes and how they fit into broader categories and contexts of white collar crime. I was hoping in the final chapter that some of these issues might be raised by Pollock, and was disappointed when they were not. I think Pollock would have done well to answer Frankel's lament (that appears as the last paragraph in her book)..."This is just a white-collar crime. Why are they making such a big thing about it?" Pollock fails to answer that basic question and as a result the whole book fails, too. On a final note, what is up with the maps on the inside covers of the book? Since when is Mississippi in the Pacific Ocean and Germany near the North pole? And why isn't Ohio listed?

This is a great read. Pollock finds enough twists and turns and has enough insight into human nature to turn a story of a very weird guy in the insurance biz into a fascinating tale of money, sex and greed. Easy to get through, fun to read.

This is an *amazing* story.

Marty Frankel was an expert trader, but he had a block against actually executing a trade. He was Jewish but not only had ties high up into the Vatican, he actually fought extradition to remain in a German jail. He was more than seriously challenged in the sex appeal area, but had a harem of women to cater to his decidedly kinky tastes.

A very strange man.

A "very"must read.

How was this man not caught sooner? It shows how greed affects us all. The seemingly educated, powerful people that Frankel was able to take in with his house of cards was amazing.

That he did most of the damage while still living at his parents house in Toledo, OH makes it even more amazing. Here is a man who was facinated with financial markets which he read about and studied for over 10,000 self confessed hours. He knew brokers and investors at all the major brokerage houses near his home. He was a "paper trader" and was more often than not correct. Yet he couldnt bring himself to pull the trigger and actually trade.

The gist of the scheme was started when Frankel started a phony stock brokerage and used a ponzi scheme to lure investors. But he was too afraid to make trades for his customers. He then decided to use his ill-gotten cash to buy a bank and in the process of shopping for one he came accross a "pre-need buriel insurance" firm that was in play. You'll have to read the rest.

I couldnt put this one down. Just when you think it cant get any more strange, it does.

Such a strange man. It is amazing how many people he was able to con and how long he was able to keep it up. Hard to believe that he never really made an exit contigency. He seemed to always fly by the seat of his (baggy) pants.

The middle of the book, relating to the Vatican, etc. seemed to drag. I was tempted to skip pages, but was afraid I would lose the thread. The pacing could have been better and a lot of questions are left unanswered, but altogether an eye-opening book

Having followed this story in the newspaper (WSJ & NYT) as it happened, I was really looking forward to this book. Unfortunately, the book shed little new information. The book does not even wrap up by telling us what happens to all the players in any depth. It seemed little more than a compilation of the news articles. I was hoping for a lot more.

after receiving this book as a christmas gift i was extremely pleased over how an important subject could also be a great read.