“Octopus: Sam Israel, the Secret Market and Wall Street’s Wildest Con” Guy Lawson, Crown, $26
Lying came easy to Sam Israel, the Connecticut hedge-fund manager who faked suicide in 2008 to escape a 20-year prison sentence for running a $450 million Ponzi scheme.
Within two years of starting the Bayou hedge fund in 1996, Israel, trader Jimmy Marquez and chief financial officer Dan Marino began cooking the books to hide a 14 percent loss.
Confessing would have driven investors to withdraw their money, depriving the trio of the chance to show the world that the fund’s Forward Propagation strategy — a crazy-quilt of technical-sounding palaver and marketing — worked. Though of course it didn’t.
In “Octopus,” Lawson tells two tales. One is a diligently researched, lively account of ambition gone bad. The other, in the book’s second half, is a story of the con artist himself getting scammed in what reads like an episode of “The Twilight Zone.” Nina Mehta, Bloomberg News
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