Octopus
The Secret Market and the World's Wildest Con
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2.3 • 3 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Octopus is a real-life thriller that tells the inside story of a GBP300 million hedge fund fraud and the wild-goose chase through Europe by its drug-fuelled manager for a lucrative "secret market" beneath the financial market we all know. Sam Israel was a man who seemed to have it all. Born into one of the world's richest families, he founded his own hedge fund, promising his investors guaranteed profits. But, after suffering devastating losses and faking tax returns, Israel knew his real performance would soon be discovered. So when a former CIA-operative turned conman told him about a "secret market" run by the Federal Reserve, Israel bet his last $150 million of other people's money on a chance to make it all back. So began his crazy year-long adventure in a world populated by clandestine bankers, conspiracy theories, and gun-toting spooks issuing cryptic warnings about a mysterious cabal known only as the Octopus.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Relying on "hundreds of hours interviewing Sam Israel in prison" and "thousands of pages of legal documents," Lawson (The Brotherhoods) reveals the inside story of the infamously fraudulent hedge fund trader who in 2008 faked his own suicide in an attempt to escape imprisonment. As a prot g in the 80s to the successful but ethically dubious Frederic J. Graber, Israel quickly learned that shirking the rules was the quickest way to a buck. But by the late 90s, Israel's independent hedge fund venture, Bayou, was in serious trouble the promise of guaranteed returns had driven the greedy financier to engage in increasingly unsavory business practices. Things hardly improved, but Israel's willingness to dissemble grew as time went on, Israel became involved with ever shadier individuals; the job of upholding Bayou's manifold lies amounting to a kind of full-time counter-espionage. One such contact, intelligence operative and contract killer Robert Booth Nichols, informed a desperate Israel of a secret market run by the world's 13 most powerful families and for which the Fed is ostensibly "nothing but a front." Needless to say, things didn't turn out well for Israel, but the tale of his fraught journey makes for an exhilarating page-turner.
