I WANT MY CORNERS

Marc Stuart Dreier was a lawyer and in 2009 he was arrested for a litany of fraud charges. I know it is a shocker. Imagine a lawyer committing a crime who would have thought. I watched a documentary titled Unraveled about Drier. A camera crew hung with him for thirty days prior to his sentence.

 

The meat of the crime was Drier approached a hedge fund company and claimed his client wanted to borrow money on the QT. The hedge fund company was interested and so Drier supplied them with bogus financial statements and brokered the phony deal. What began as a one million dollar fraud escalated to the tune of several hundred million bucks. That my friend is a whole lotta fritters.

 

Drier built a huge law firm that had offices in New York, Los Angeles, Connecticut and a few other places. What no one knew was he was funding the law firm with stolen money. Drier owned a super cool apartment in New York, a huge house in the Hamptons, a nice place in Anguilla and a kick ass Aston Martin. His life amounted to being the boss of a law firm and the boss of a fraud firm.

 

In the documentary Drier talked about being in a situation where he needed to create more fraud to pay off the old fraud. Again, this was a situation where a thief had no exit plan. He kept the hamster wheel spinning and swindling more and more money.

 

Drier stated that when the market turned around and slipped it became more difficult to locate new marks to rip off. What I found interesting about Drier was when he was in Dubai he knew the end was near. He claimed he had one hundred million dollars in the bank and claimed that Dubai has no extradition. I do not know if true or not. He was thinking of staying but did not want to be away from his children.

 

Drier returned to the US and headed up to Toronto to try one last fraud but it blew up in his face. He was arrested, convicted and sentenced to twenty long ones.

 

These white-collar fools spin their wheels hustling here, defrauding there only to end up in the big house. To a degree, they are like drug lords. We all know that most drug lords will share the same destiny. The dirt nap or the gray bar hotel in Terra Haute. What is it about those lifestyles that both breeds have serious amounts of money but neither of them gets out of the game?

 

Some say the money is the point system in the game of big crime. Perhaps it is not about disappearing off the grid with millions. Maybe it is about waking up and doing the hustle. Drug Lords want their cartel, white collars want their Ponzi but I can tell you this Frank M. Ahearn would take Dubai and a hundred million in a heartbeat.