Five outrageous scammers that wound up in prison
(CBS) - This Saturday's episode of 48 Hours Mystery concerns the life and violent death of the notorious fraudster Andrew Kissel. In 2006, a few days before he was to plead guilty to bank and mail fraud, Kissel was found murdered in his rented Connecticut home. Kissel was charged with stealing $34 million from banks and $7 million more from real estate investors, but his crimes were actually small potatoes compared with recent history's most infamous fraudsters:
Bernard Madoff ran a wealth management firm in Manhattan that turned out to be the largest Ponzi operation in history. Madoff orchestrated a massive fraud on his investors over a period of more than 20 years. When the scheme collapsed in 2008, his clients lost nearly $65 billion dollars. In March 2009, Madoff plead guilty to 11 felony counts of securities fraud, money laundering and perjury. He was sentenced to more than 150 years in federal prison.
Bernard Ebbers is a Canadian-born businessman who co-founded the telecommunications company Worldcom. In 2005 he was convicted of fraud and conspiracy, stemming from Worldcom's inflated financial reporting. He had defrauded investors out of more than $11 billion. Until the Madoff affair, the Worldcom scandal was the largest accounting scam in US history. Ebbers is currently serving a 25 year sentence in a Louisiana federal prison.
Robert Allen Stanford was a colorful Texas billionaire whose investment firm, the Stanford Group, entrapped investors in a $7 billion criminal Ponzi scheme, according to prosecutors. In 2009 Stanford was arrested and charged with 21 criminal counts. Mr. Stanford is in jail awaiting trial.
Kenneth Lay was the CEO and chairman of the energy services giant Enron that collapsed in a spectacular bankruptcy in 2001, costing thousands of jobs and billions of dollars for investors. Lay was indicted and charged with 11 counts of securities fraud and related charges. In May 2006 he was convicted of all but one of the charges. He died of a sudden heart attack at his vacation home in Colorado three months before he was to be sentenced. He faced up to 30 years in prison.
Raj Rajaratnam was at the center of what has been described as the biggest insider trading case in US history. The Sri Lankan immigrant turned billionaire once ran the Galleon Group, one of the world's biggest hedge funds. On May 11, 2001 he was convicted of 14 counts of fraud and conspiracy. He is scheduled to be sentenced on July 29 and could face up to 19 ½ years in federal prison.
The story of Andrew Kissel will be covered on 48 Hours Mystery Saturday at 10/9c.