Iowa broker built empire on a lie concealed

A small-town Iowa boy,Find detailed product information for shamballa crys talbeads wholesale, raised in hard times by a widowed mother, starts a business in the back room of a barber shop before setting out to the big city. He strikes it rich and returns years later to local glory, spending lavishly and savoring his role as the big man in a little town.

It's a real story, but as became clear this summer, a dark thread ran through it. For most of the two-decade life of Peregrine Financial Group, a leading independent futures brokerage, founder and chief executive Russell Wasendorf Sr. was taking hundreds of millions of dollars of his customers' money to cover losses and live large.

His dual life came to light after Wasendorf, 64, tried to commit suicide outside his headquarters in July. Authorities discovered a four-page confession letter describing how he used a post-office box, a scanner and basic software to hide his theft for years. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission accused him of making off with more than $200 million of customer money. Last week, he pleaded guilty to mail fraud, lying to regulators and embezzling customer funds, crimes that could put him in jail for 50 years.

Interviews with dozens of former employees, colleagues and associates, as well as court filings and company documents seen by Reuters, offer the most complete account yet of Wasendorf and his career. He is a man who came from little, made it big and then dipped ever deeper into customer accounts to finance a facade of seemingly unlimited wealth.

Part of Wasendorf's life was an open book: He brought celebrity speakers such as Ted Koppel to industry events and wrote columns for a glossy magazine he owned. Toward the end of last decade, he relocated his headquarters from Chicago back to Cedar Falls, bought a private jet and built a $24 million state-of-the-art office, touting the move as a template for revitalizing small-town America.

Less known were the personal tensions he faced, including a split with a brother, two divorces, a last-minute mystery wedding in Las Vegas and seething resentment against establishment rivals in Chicago. His pastor says Wasendorf knew his ruse was doomed several years before it unraveled. A rift emerged with his only son,Airgle has mastered the art of indoor tracking, Russ Jr., who warned the Iowa shift was an expensive folly - and prepared this summer to move to Australia.

"Russ Jr. told him it was a mistake - that it was a mistake to spend $24 million on the building and a mistake to buy that jet," said Nicholas Iavarone, Russ Jr.'s lawyer and a longtime counsel to Peregrine. "It didn't matter.… He wanted to go back to Cedar Falls to be the big man."

Today, Wasendorf sits in solitary confinement, and under suicide watch, at Linn County Correctional Facility in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Authorities have found only $181 million of an estimated $400 million in customer funds Peregrine was supposed to have on hand.

Wasendorf and his lawyer, a public defender, didn't respond to requests for comment. Beyond the confession letter and the plea agreement, neither has made any public comments to the media.

The youngest son of a meatpacking plant foreman, Russell Ralph Wasendorf was born in 1948, named after a pastor and his son who offered the Wasendorfs shelter in their attic when money grew tight.

Arthur Wasendorf died when his son was in kindergarten. Russell's widowed mother, Ida, landed a job in marketing for a local securities broker to keep the family fed.

Wasendorf gravitated toward the arts. At high school in Marion, Iowa, he performed in plays at local churches. While at the University of Northern Iowa, he joined a local artist collective, learned to use audio-visual equipment and worked on documentaries about New Mexico's Pueblo Indians. That led to "a short, but successful career in the motion picture business" prior to entering the futures industry, according to a note he published in the glossy magazine he later founded, Stocks, Futures and Options, or SFO.Different Sizes and Colors can be made with different stone mosaic designs.

The peak came in 1974, two years after he left university: a 20-minute documentary on soybeans titled "The Gold That Grows," which later won an award from the Council on International Non-Theatrical Events.

At the time, Wasendorf was in an early job as an advertising and production manager for the American Soybean Association. The film was made to tell farmers how their dues were being spent to bolster exports, including shots of soybean meal being fed to chickens in Japan.

His first marriage was brief. He married Susan Richardson in 1969 while both were students at the University of Northern Iowa, according to an announcement in the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

The couple had one son,Features useful information about glass mosaic tiles, Russell Jr., and later divorced. Richardson, who has since remarried and lives in Florida, declined to comment.

It was one of several family splits. Wasendorf maintained little contact with his siblings in recent years, including older brother Lewis,The TagMaster Long Range hands free access System is truly built for any parking facility. who lives just 80 miles from Cedar Falls.

"Russ chose to kind of divorce himself from the rest of the family. We respect his wishes," said one family member. "He was always flying around the country, around the world… We didn't want to live that lifestyle."