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

Rating:
Summary: What an account..
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Very Odd, very charismatic man
Review: I read this book over a couple of days and I was thoroughly entertained. Martin Frankel was an ultimate sleazeball, basically a financial psychopath who was willing to rip off thousands of people while quoting St. Francis on "helping the poor."

It's a remarkable, horrifying story. Frankel's sexual perversions magnify to the point where his slutty entourage is actually plotting to have baby girls to groom for his pleasures. (Fortunately, that plot seems to have gone astray.)

Pollock tells a complex story that begins with the nerdy Frankel "trying" to trade stocks and bonds out of his parents' home. I say trying, because the one over-riding theme of the book is that while Frankel talks the talk, he can't actually pull the trigger on trades. In a rare actual trade early on, he accidentally makes $20,000 for a client, and his ego takes off. He compares himself to Warren Buffett, and while Frankel may have had a lofty IQ, his delusions and mental limitations keep him from ever really making money in the stock and bond markets.

Instead, he meticiously plots to take over small insurance companies and raids their funds -- deceiving a host of employees and regulators.

As the scam grows, so does his preverted and bizarre lifestyle.

As I told a friend, "You feel like you need a shower after every chapter."

And of course ... I loved it!

I highly recommend this book to those who like financial literature with a kinky twist.

Rating:
Summary: Impeccably researched
Review: It is obvious that Pollock dedicated about two years of her life or more to research the details, and it shows. I was constantly amazed at the details that were uncovered and the collections of conversations.

Rating:
Summary: Impeccably researched
Review: It is obvious that Pollock dedicated about two years of her life or more to research the details, and it shows. I was constantly amazed at the details that were uncovered and the collections of conversations.

Rating:
Summary: A Twisted Tale of Geek Greed
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, Well written Account of A Real Pretender
Review: The bizarre truth of this con-man makes a great read.
Hopefully ,there will be later editions that will lay out
the inevitable convictions and sentencing of Frankel and
those who helped him. It's shocking that his scams did not
come to the surface sooner. Frankel's story predates more
recent corporate scandals, and helps illustrate why federal
governmental oversight of the securitie/insurance industy
need more manpower and wider jurisdiction to aggressively
investigate these corporate felons who do more damage to
the national community than the fabled mafia or common
bank robbers---I'd highly recommend this book to true crime buffs who may need relief from grisly homicide books

Rating:
Summary: Wow!
Review: This is a great book. Its a page turner, with everything from audcious greed to stomach-turning S&M details. The author does a great job not bogging down in arcane financial minutiae, and keeps the story moving along. I read it in two sittings. For NW Ohio readers, the first 1/3 of the book has a lot of familiar settings and many recognizable names. I would recommend this book to anyone--it would also make a great move. Billy Bob Thornton should play Frankel.

Rating:
Summary: But HOW did he do it?
Review: 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?

Rating:
Summary: ANNOYING.
Review: WHAT AN ANNOYING SCREWHEAD. I keep trying to read this book and have given up. Frankel's lying is one thing, but good Lord, his inability to actually consumate a trade (or anything else, evidently) is BEYOND annoying and makes for frustrating reading. At 2 bucks for a used copy, it's overpriced.