When 77 year old Sarasota hedge fund manager Arthur Nadel left a disingenuous suicide note and went on the lam for two weeks before his arrest in 2010, he drove off grid in a pale green 2006 Subaru with fine leather interior. That Subaru was put on eBay with a “getaway car” label, hoping to fetch a tidy sum for Nadel’s victims. The septuagenarian money manager also left behind offices and homes decorated with “fine art”, including a sad hobo (“tramp”) clown painting by  Chuck Oberstein – of Emmett Kelly reading the Wall Street Journal – and a $75,000 painting by the late Jack Leland Bailey, the appraisal for which says the painting depicts “humanistic pathos.”
Investigators hunted down the rest of Nadel’s assets, including $1 million worth of flawless 7-carat diamond rings and assorted bling and a melange of properties that included a $2 million waterfront condo, a North Carolina land preserve, a Starbucks in Mississippi, a condo in Ohio, a Georgia Shell station and a Sarasota floral shop called “Mr. Florist” that Arthur’s wife Peg bought for $1.2 million and which surprisingly, never turned a profit.
400 victims lost $168 million because of their investments in what turned out to be Nadel’s Ponzi scheme. Nadel pleaded guilty in New York to federal fraud charges and got 14 years in the pen. Whose the sad clown reading the paper now?
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