“My religion? Money is my God, kiddo, I love it, I adore it, I dream of it.” S.J. Perelman
After being astounded and possessed by schadenfreude when reading about the colossal financial shenanigans of Mr. Madoff, my moral world did a somersault when I heard about Neil’s problems.
Greatest guy you’d ever wanna meet, Niel. A Century City investment manager accused of running a Ponzi scheme, a paltry five-million-dollar grift. You can’t buy a dog house west of Doheny Drive for that.
Neil and I collaborated on the writing of a self-help investment book aimed at people of modest means who might never have dreamed of investing. It started with the premise—what can I do with $500? I guess our next book is going to be titled, “What Can I Do With Five Million Dollars?” You can do quite a lot: you can be generous as Elvis with Cadillacs, bankroll friends’ businesses, travel to American Samoa, and I may add, make a freelance scribe very happy.
Let me say at the outset, Neil has a heart of gold—that it may be somebody else’s is beside the point. Was I taken in? Dude knew his stuff. To be able to write about the intricacies of investing, I had to understand how it worked. It meant examining and cross-examining the guy with the expertise. Luckily, Neil had a talent for taking esoteric financial transactions and illustrating them in a way six-pack Joe could understand.
“Think about world currencies as a six-pack of beer,” he’d say. “And you will easily understand how their prices rise and fall in relation to other currencies. Corona is like the Euro and the peso is Pabst.”
A few months into our collaboration, I happened to have an extra couple thousand dollars parked in my bank account for two weeks. Good capitalist that I was, I seized on the arbitrage—i.e. a temporary condition that savvy traders and investors know how to exploit. I asked Neil if he knew of a good short-term investment to take advantage of these ephemeral funds. Amazingly, he did. The return was an impressive 30 percent on my money, expected within two weeks. . . In our many sessions together Neil had taught me that reward is proportionate to risk; the greater the reward, the greater the risk. I had to question how this inflated profit-margin could be. His explanation for profits gleaned from the sale of a rare financial product got a little exotic yet, I swear, it made sense. It boiled down to selling at a strategic window in time. This was also the first occasion the name Goldman Sachs and the kind of fat profit margin they routinely enjoyed entered my consciousness.
The time came to pay me back. Neil had me wait a few extra days, keeping me, and the person to whom I owed the initial two thousand, in mounting suspense. After three full weeks, the money came exactly as promised—just in time to pay for my new car.
During months the investment book languished. It always seemed to be in the hands of a new secretary, who would edit it and come back with suggestions. Then last August, after the message system on Niel’s office phone went screwy, I stopped by his office in Century City. I found there was no office. The security people in the lobby were like, “Lawyers swarmed in and shut them down, but it wasn’t Neil. He’s a good guy. It was the people working for him.” Heart of gold.
I got the overwhelming impression something nasty was in the air. Out of tribute to the man who taught me so much about money, shared so much wisdom, and always left me inspired to face new challenges, I deliberately stayed oblivious to what was happening, and yet half expected to open a newspaper and see the worst.
It happened last fall. A paper reported the Ponzi scheme that betrayed clients, who all felt Neil was their friend, and which may land him to jail. The movie producer who introduced me to Neil, later kidded me, “You’re the only one who made out.”
He’s right, you know. I look at my car, and the front-right fender probably belongs to some guy in Brentwood, smarting from Neil’s betrayal. Now for the sake of avoiding future betrayals, I recommend that people ought to put little name tags on their currency like parents do on the clothes of children bound for summer camp.
