The Bishop
I recently wrote about Victim, Failure, Crook or Unlucky (VFCU) in a recent post. Here is the story about a Crook who ran a Ponzi Scheme that, in a way, warmed my heart.
The St. Louis Racquet Club on North Kingshighway is one of those relics of the 20th Century that, at that time, was open to anyone unless they were Female, Catholic, Black or Jewish. More recently, when it was in need of members to pay the bills, it broadened its membership.
I’ve been to a few functions at the club, as a guest. When one enters, a doorman makes sure that one is either a member or an invited guest. If a member, a pin is placed on the list of members in the lobby to show that he is present. Even when women were admitted as guests, they were not until recently allowed above the first floor. There are no membership applications, but merely recommendations. Any member can blackball a new one. Expelling a member is difficult. (I know of a notorious drunk who is tolerated.)
The Racquet Club’s claim to fame is that it was where Charles Lindbergh met with his backers and signed the contract to build the Spirit of St. Louis in 1927. Today, a guest can have his picture taken at the “Lindbergh Desk.”
In this context a lawyer, Martin Sigillito, arrived and gained membership in the early 2000’s. He was not only a lawyer with an office in Clayton, Missouri, but a bishop complete with vestments in the American Anglican Church. It's not clear to me whether this church had anything to do with the Anglican Communion or the Episcopal Church in America. I hesitate to say call the American Anglican Church a “phony church” because it’s hard to define that term.
Martin claimed to have a "can't miss proposition." (Don’t they all.) He had a colleague in England who had the opportunity to buy undervalued land and then flip it. Of course, the friend was just a little short of cash and needed funding. So Martin offered the members (and others) 18% on large investments, many of which exceeded $1 million. It was so obviously a fraud that it was shocking that the monied "married wells" and "born wells" as well as the self-made members of the Club fell for it. When it came tumbling down, it turned out that the bishop had bought the usual houses, jewels, cars and the like for himself, and there was no record of any land purchases in England.
He was indicted, tried and convicted, and is currently serving 40 years on a scam that beat the hoity-toity out of $52 million, supposedly the largest Ponzi scheme in St. Louis. While I’m not a Sigillito fan, it's nice to see that he mainly, but not exclusively, scammed the rich who thought their s*** didn’t stink. It did.