Topps Co. will feature Charlie Ponzi and Bernie Madoff in a series of trading cards due out in June, covering the “world’s biggest hoaxes, hoodwinks and bamboozles.”
Unfortunately, scores of lesser Ponzi schemers will never stack in this deck.
Like Wayne Puff.
I don’t know who gives millions of dollars to a guy named Puff. But last week, this 61-year-old founder of a New Jersey real-estate company pleaded guilty to bilking more than $80 million from hundreds of people.
Puff liked puffing fine cigars and taking trips to the Cayman Islands. He ran ads on the radio and in newspapers, touting his NJ Affordable Homes and annual returns of 15 percent to 22 percent.
Prosecutors called it a “classic Ponzi scheme,” using funds from new investors to pay off the old. But with the damages at only $80 million, it doesn’t even rank as a rounding error beside the $60 billion scheme that Madoff ran.
So, as it turns out, Puff was no magic dragon.
Three victims in an alleged $40 million Ponzi scheme in Folsom, Calif., recently put their homes up as collateral to spring the alleged perpetrator from the Sacramento County Jail.
Anthony Vassallo, 29, who reportedly once promised his investors returns of 42 percent, was released on $500,000 bond last month.
So far, Cynthia Harris and her husband have recovered $70,000 of the $700,000 they had invested with Vassallo, The Sacramento Bee reported.
“He needs to get out of jail so he can make this right,” she said in an interview with The Bee. “He was making investments that — like the rest of the stock market — went down.”
With the market down, it is getting more and more difficult to keep track of all the Ponzi schemes. We have become a Ponzi nation. Lawyers, real-estate gurus, options traders, hedge-fund managers, ministers, socialites and even kids on the Internet are being accused of outright swindling.
The SEC claims to have halted more than 75 Ponzi schemes since 2007. The Better Business Bureau, meanwhile, has counted nearly 23,000 videos advertising apparent Ponzi schemes on YouTube.
Last week in Colorado, the SEC sacked a former Mormon bishop with Ponzi allegations. Shawn R. Merriman fraudulently obtained as much as $20 million from at least 38 investors in Colorado, Minnesota and Utah, the SEC alleges.
Merriman, a former stockbroker, has yet to comment. He collected Rembrandts and took twice-yearly trips to Africa to shoot black rhinos. But they were old rhinos, he once explained.
“If a black rhino bull that is past breeding age and is therefore of no use in perpetuating the species dies in the field, he’s fertilizer,” Merriman said in a 2005 interview with Conde Nast Traveler. “But if someone will pay $150,000 to hunt it, that money can be used to help.”
Blasting aging rhinos with other people’s money should be worthy of a trading card someday.
Al Lewis: 201-938-5266 or al.lewis@dowjones.com. Read Al’s blog at .
