Jeffery Verschleiser

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Jeff Verschleiser, age 43, was one of two Bear Stearns traders who concocted a scheme that allegedly reaped billions from their own clients during the housing boom by packaging and selling totally dysfunctional mortgage securities that eventually helped bring down the bank. 

Atlantic reporter Teri Buhl, explained that the scheme he helped to devise allowed traders to "double dip" - in other words, get paid twice for the same deal. In much the same way that doctors scam Medicare by billing the pateint, then billing Medicare for the same fee, Verschleiser was collecting legal claims on the bad loans that he didn't have a right to collect. He kept the money and thereby screwed his investors out of their investment secuirty deposits.

Buhl goes on to explain that Verschleiser not only knew the loans were garbage but admonished his lieutenants not to waste time performing due diligence on the bad deals. 

[Atlantic] Jeffrey Verschleiser even said in an e-mail that he knew this was an issue. He wrote to his peer Mike Nierenberg in March 2006, "[we] are wasting way too much money on Bad Due Diligence." Yet a year later nothing had changed. In March 2007, Verschleiser wrote to Nierenberg again about the same due diligence firm, "[w]e are just burning money hiring them."

Verschleiser informed his risk committee in 2007 that he knew big financial problems were on the horizon for the mortgage securities insurers and suggested that they bet against them 10 to 1 to earn even more money. Furthermore, Buhl states in her article that Verschleiser emailed Bear Stearn executives to brag that he had bilked insurer's for $55 million in only three weeks. 

After Bear Stearns went bankrupt, Verschleiser walked away scott free, mega rich and eventually landed a new job at Goldman Sachs. 

While Verschleiser is currently under investigation, he has not been indicted. His personal fortune has not been confiscated and, is in fact, letting the world know how wealthy he is by pissing off the good folks in Aspen.