SPOT SCAMS

Carlo Ponzi was an Italian immigrant in Boston who gained international fame in the 1920s as the con man who bilked millions of dollars out of thousands of hopeful investors, in what has since become known as a Ponzi Scheme.

Marty Frankel got it into his head that he needed to set up a charitable foundation with visible links to the Catholic Church and the Vatican. The exact reasons for this obsession are not entirely clear. Most likely, Marty was looking for an impeccably respectable cover for his insurance fraud and embezzlement. Perhaps he believed that it would make it easier to buy large insurance companies, without their lawyers and accountants doing potentially dangerous investigations into the operations of Thunor Trust, if Thunor was allied with the Vatican. Or possibly he was convinced that a respectable sounding charitable foundation offered irresistible opportunities for money laundering. And certainly somewhere in his motivation was the huge boost to his ego if he had an alliance with such a lofty institution as the Catholic Church.

Story of Marty Frankel