FINANCE
How Starting an Investment Firm Almost Landed Me in a Federal Prison
A wild, true story of finance, racism, and international money laundering
So many prominent people get away with criminality these days that we sometimes forget that incarcerating the average American isn’t that difficult.
I’m personally familiar with how easy it is to find oneself in legal jeopardy. A few decades ago, I came dangerously close to being indicted, not because I’d broken the law but due to a bizarre confluence of circumstances.
Only a few people know this part of my history. Those who do tell me the following story sounds like a tale from a book or a movie. Long before I began writing, people encouraged me to write a book about this episode of my life.
So about a year and a half ago, I decided to do just that. I began working on a memoir. In addition to the story that follows, the final product will chronicle my finance career, a journey that began in the early eighties in the Deep South and ended decades later on Wall Street.
The following long-form piece is not an excerpt from my manuscript, which is just under 40k words thus far, but rather a glimpse into my complete story. ~MSW
