Octopus: Sam Israel, the Secret Market, and Wall Street's Wildest Con

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%C3%A9g%C3%A9 in the %E2%80%9880s 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 %E2%80%9890s, Israel's independent hedge fund venture, Bayou, was in serious trouble%E2%80%94the 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%E2%80%94as 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. (July)