Mini-Madoff Costs Floridians $350 Million
Down in southwest Florida, they are calling Arthur Nadel the mini-Madoff. It’s a lesson in proportion, I guess. Sixty days ago, we’d have considered a $350 million financial scam to be huge. Next to Madoff’s $50 million effort, though, it looks rather puny.
John Hielscher & Michael Pollick of the Herald Tribune are covering the Nadel case closely, and their coverage is well worth a read.
Investors in a Sarasota-based hedge fund could be out $350 million, and the man behind it has vanished. Managers of the fund are telling clients that their money is gone, and they do not know if any will be recovered.
Fund principal Arthur G. Nadel, a prominent player in Sarasota social and philanthropic circles, disappeared this week. His wife, Peg, filed a missing person report with law enforcement after finding a suicide note.
Investors — from individuals to the Sarasota YMCA Foundation — in the funds branded Viking, Valhalla and Scoop were stunned this week to learn they may be victims in what could become the largest investment swindle in Southwest Florida history.
While the size of total investor losses makes headlines, those headlines tend to obscure the individual stories that make up the real tragedy. In his classic The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis disproves the idea of aggregate pain. While there may be more people in pain in certain circumstances than others, he points out, no single person is experiencing that aggregate pain.
The individual stories are what matter, therefore. That’s where the full impact of financial fraud shows itself, and that’s the level at which investors can stop it.
You can do something about this wave of financial fraud. You can refuse to become part of it. But for the same reasons that will lead tens of thousands of smart, well-meaning investors to fall victim to it, you cannot do it on your own. For your sake, do not try.