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    Octopus: Sam Israel, the secret market, and Wall Street's wildest con
    Unavailable
    Octopus: Sam Israel, the secret market, and Wall Street's wildest con
    Unavailable
    Octopus: Sam Israel, the secret market, and Wall Street's wildest con
    Ebook357 pages5 hours

    Octopus: Sam Israel, the secret market, and Wall Street's wildest con

    By Guy Lawson

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Octopus is a real-life thriller that tells the inside story of an audacious hedge-fund fraud and the wild search for a secret financial market.

    Sam Israel seemed to have it all — until his hedge fund imploded and he became the target of a nationwide manhunt. Born into one of America’s most illustrious trading families, Israel was determined to strike out on his own. He founded his own hedge fund and promised his investors guaranteed profits: with the proprietary computer program he’d created, he claimed to be able to predict the future.

    But his future was already beginning to unravel.

    After suffering devastating losses and fabricating fake returns, Israel knew it was only a matter of time before he would be discovered. When a former black-ops intelligence operative told him about a ‘secret market’ run by the Federal Reserve Bank, Israel bet his last $150 million on a chance to make billions. Thus began his yearlong adventure in ‘the Upperworld’, a society populated by clandestine bankers, shady European nobility, and spooks issuing cryptic warnings about a cabal known as the Octopus.

    Whether the ‘secret market’ was real or a con, Israel was all in — and as the pressures mounted and increasingly sinister violence crept into his life, he struggled to break free of the Octopus’s tentacles.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribe Publications
    Release dateJul 25, 2012
    ISBN9781921942822
    Unavailable
    Octopus: Sam Israel, the secret market, and Wall Street's wildest con
    Author

    Guy Lawson

    Guy Lawson is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning investigative journalist whose articles on war, crime, culture, and law have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, GQ, Harper’s Magazine, and many other publications.

    Read more from Guy Lawson

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    Reviews for Octopus

    3.5/5

    33 ratings9 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      A fantastic tale about a fantastic money caper. I hope the author has not been conned by Sam Israel. the Octopus is the account of Sam who is from a prominent business multi-generation family, who wants to learn stock trading to break away from the family business, and eventually establishes his own hedge fund which is based on a faulty trading program. The fund, naturally, goes in the hole which is where the fun begins as Sam desperately tries to make up the losses through shadowy high yield bond markets which of course turn out to be scams. Sam meets up with a possibly fake black ops figure, fake financiers, and aristocratic poseurs. The lethal combination of alcohol and drugs fueled by greed lead Sam into territory that smacks of a bad Hollywood script and a smattering of every adventure book written in the last 20 years. I would have liked to know a bit more about the investigation once the whole thing unraveled and a little less about what Sam said happened. I personally like more concrete evidence. Sam is a very adept liar which gives the whole tale seem as if he has his eye on his life story as a movie.
    • 3/5
      Octopus is the story of a stock trader who steals from his investors and looses the money in an outlandish gamble. The stock trader is not a likable guy: "My name is Sam Israel and I am a Criminal," he said, "I am a liar and a cheat. I would like to believe that is not what I am, but it is certainly what I have become. The whole time I wanted to make back the money I had lost. I spent a year chasing dreams to do so."In 2005, Sam Israel and Dan Marino pleaded guilty in Federal Court to conspiracy and fraud. Sam and Dan were each sentenced to 20 years in prison and Sam was ordered to forfeit $300 million stolen from the Bayou Hedge Fund, which Israel had founded and operated. Canadian journalist Guy Lawson interviewed Sam Israel in prison to get his version of the how the fraud came about. Lawson cross-checked Sam's unreliable and self-serving testimony with public records to write an account of the swindle that is readable and informative, but the story left me shaking my head in disbelief.On his way to turn himself in for incarceration, Sam tried one last con: he staged his own death. That didn't work either; Sam lived to serve time and tell his story to the author of this book. If you enjoy a wild lie or a tall tale you may enjoy this tale, I did.Carto
    • 2/5
      This hedge fund manager cheated his investors out of $75 million back when that was a lot of money - before Madoff and the financial crisis of 2007. The tale has a typcial theme of small distortions turning into faked audit reports and major coverups, with drugs, Swiss banks, pseudo-CIA agents, and a faked murder to boot. The con game within the con game leads the reader to wonder how much is really non-fiction. This is a readable book but a better movie script: Hunter Thompson does bond trading in Europe. More to come.
    • 4/5
      It seems it is easy to con a con man. For the first part of the book, Octopus shows the reader a fairly normal portrait of a young man who gradually works his way to the top of a trading company. But the action really heats up during the second part. The first part is fairly straightforward show Israel going from legitimate trades to covering his losses with Ponzi-style schemes. The second part comes off like the TV show Leverage, in which you see the con and then are shown how it all takes place. In order to cover his losses, Israel believes an ever increasing series of cons which could not have been more obvious if the villain had been twirling a handlebar mustache and had a maniacal laugh. The best part is reading about all of the scams from a secret government trading program, to a secret stash of U.S. bonds and gold, to the Kennedy assassination. This acts like a thriller with an incredulously true story.
    • 5/5
      Guy Lawson takes you down the rabbit hole of high-flying international finance and hedge funds in a story that is almost too incredulous to credit. This is not yet-another-dissection of everything that is wrong with Wall Street (or the City of London), though it features plenty of ammunition for critics of the system of global finance as well. It is the story of one man’s long journey from the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange to the murky world of multi-billion dollar scams. Sam Israel was a talented trader but a lousy hedge fund manager, and as he tries to cover up his ineptness with fraudulent earnings reports, he becomes an easy mark for a net of conmen that spins the tale of fantastic investment opportunities in a global shadow market operated by the very wealthiest and most powerful families in the world.Readers who enjoyed reading about the shenanigans of Enron executives in Kurt Eichenwald’s Conspiracy of Fools would like this one too. They are both fast-paced, suspenseful and set in the rarefied reaches of corporate finance, although Lawson clearly implies that there is far less fiction involved in this book. Whereas Eichenwald admits he freely filled in the blanks with fiction, Lawson says he got his story straight from Sam Israel. Much of the story could not be verified, however, so the reader is left to take it at face value.What really kept me reading was sheer incredulity. Incredulity that the custodians of hundreds of billions of dollars in the financial system can act so recklessly and irrationally (not just Sam); incredulity that Sam’s fraud could go on for so long without being discovered; incredulity that Sam was not the victim of a “one-off” sort-of scam. He was merely a very receptive and very lucrative victim for what appears to be a large cottage industry of various scams designed to relieve honest and dishonest investors of their money. The higher the promised returns by these conmen, the stronger the allure and the willingness of their victims to trust them, it seems. Sam desperately wanted to believe the schemes he was embroiled in were real, up to the very last minute. That, perhaps, is a comment on human nature.Although suspenseful, the book is a little repetitive at times. We become very familiar with Sam’s demons after a while as he descends slowly into madness and paranoia. But it’s not a very long book and the suspense and plot twists compensates. And all the while, it is hard not to root for Sam, hoping against hope that he would turn things around or somehow get out of the hole he keeps digging for himself. Of course that didn’t happen, but you should go find out for yourself how it all unfolded.
    • 4/5
      I received my copy of Octopus as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewer's program. This book was at once hard to read yet even harder to put down. The story as told confirmed my intense distaste for all things Wall Street. Sam Israel seems to be the prototypical Wall Street trader, that is, a self-described criminal. His story is incredible though.Reading Israel's take on Wall Street as a big con made my heart sink and blood boil. I am not naïve enough to believe the quaint notions of Wall Street as babies making trades on iPads using a cool app, but when the curtain is pulled away, the scene is uglier than I had imagined. That was the hard part for me.Yet as his story unfolded, it was completely engaging. Suspense, drama and even a bit of James Bond action. Who's to know fact versus fiction, but engaging none-the-less. And difficult to put down.Lawson has done a fine job in this retrospective, definitely recommended.
    • 2/5
      In the first half of this book Sam Israel starts a hedge fund, using his rich family's connections. Soon he loses money and turns it into a medium sized Ponzi scheme. We have seen similar stories in the news.Then Sam is said to fall for the Octopus story. Yes, as in Danny Casolaro, Inslaw, and Promis. Supposedly the Promis court case citation software had been rewritten to turn it into a NSA like system to spy on financial flows. (Software developers will laugh at that. You really, really, need need to start over from scratch.)The book claims Sam thinks he can go to the top man of the operation, get Promis turned over to him, and take over the world financial markets.Sam may have been relatively dim for a swindler, but would he think he could do that? I do not believe it. At that point the book loses credibility as nonfiction. Read the rest of the book as a thriller novel. Some may be entertained. I was not.In the note at the start of the book the author says that while writing the book he found major international scams that are still in operation. Some readers may want to believe that claim and read the second half as a guide to a hidden reality. But Lawson has not yet developed a reputation as a major investigative reporter.
    • 5/5
      An amazing story told extremely well. Lawson spent years researching this book, and it shows.
    • 3/5
      Sam Israel will soon be yet another footnote in the plethora of frauds running hedge funds and those yet to be uncovered and on into the future, and on and on. This book about his escapades that led to a saga of worldwide adventure and intrigue lays out how Israel supposedly unintentionally got caught up in some bad trading of his own that culminated in wild schemes to bail himself out of the mess.Lawson briefly states early in the book that credibility of the stories related by Israel now serving time have to be acknowledged as coming from a con man who eventually surrounded himself with con men as the played out their real life drama.So if anything it makes for an action packed fantasy world of hit men and secret world trading markets. Israel living an incredibly opulent lifestyle, well by standards for most of us, winds his way through the increasingly complex and crazy plot becoming what he fancied as not only the ultimate finance czar but a very competent self defense expert not to be trifled with.Ultimately ending up in a low security federal prison. So at least he will have a good health care plan and does not have to deal with the depressing economy like the rest of us, so maybe not such a bad gig after all.