Cat Sitter Among the Pigeons by Blaize Clement

vaguely remembered skimming over newspaper headlines when Myra Kreigle was indicted for fraud in connection to her real estate investment company. A vivacious, attractive woman in her fifties, Myra’s photo had usually been in the paper in connection to her investment seminars or because she’d donated money to a charity or an arts association. I had been surprised to learn of her dark side, but since I didn’t travel in Myra’s social circle, she had only been a name to me, not a real person.
    Tom said, “She’s used up all her trial postponements. They’ve already selected the jury, and her hearing starts Monday.”
    I hadn’t even known a trial date had been set. I wondered if the young woman I’d seen at Myra’s window was her daughter. If she was, having a notorious liar for a mother would explain why she looked so unhappy. My mother had been a liar too, so I could relate.
    I said, “Can you tell me in twenty words or less exactly what Myra did?”
    “It’ll take more than twenty words, but I’ll condense it as much as possible. You know how flipping works, right?”
    “Somebody buys a house at its real value, then gets an appraiser to inflate the value. He does a bogus sale to an accomplice at that inflated price. The accomplice gets a mortgage, a banker who knows what’s going on lends the money and gets a bonus, and the accomplice either passes the money he borrowed to the seller or they split it. Then the buyer walks away and lets the house be foreclosed on.”
    “That’s how small flippers worked. Big flippers formed a bunch of post-office-box companies or limited partnerships and sold the same property back and forth between them with ever bigger appraisals, larger mortgages, more profits. Myra Kreigle bought and sold hundreds of properties that way. That in itself was a crime, but Myra had formed a real estate investment trust, otherwise known as an REIT, through which she suckered investors by telling them they would get double-digit returns if they gave her money to invest in real estate. About two thousand people fell for that, but it was a scam.”
    Any time people talk about big money, I always feel like my eyeballs are rotating. Maybe they really were, because Tom grinned and began to speak more slowly.
    “A Ponzi scheme is when a lot of people invest in something too good to be true. The con pays the first investors from the money the later investors put in, so word spreads and more people rush to get in on a good deal. As long as new investors are pouring in money, it works. There’s enough money to pay off people who ask for their profits, and the con running the scheme can live high on the hog on other people’s money.”
    “So Myra never really invested in real estate?”
    “Oh, she bought some mortgages, but most of them were high risk, and none of them paid back what she was promising her investors. The fraud was in sending her investors false monthly reports showing huge profits she claimed she’d made for them by brilliant real estate trades. Most people let their profits ride, but if somebody wanted to collect, she paid them from the investment money. She took in nearly two hundred million dollars that way. Her investors will never get their money back. I imagine most of it is socked away in offshore banks.”
    “I don’t understand how she got away with it for so long.”
    He rolled his eyes. “If pigeons are getting fed, they aren’t picky about who’s feeding them.”
    I nodded, but I still didn’t see how intelligent people could be fooled so easily.
    Tom said, “Ponzi schemes are called affinity crimes because the criminal preys on his own people. Fundamentalists hoodwink fundamentalists, New Agers manipulate New Agers, Catholics scam fellow Catholics. Myra went after her own kind.”
    Myra’s own kind were the cream of Sarasota’s society, the smart set who ordered three-hundred-dollar wine when they lunched at Zoria’s. Smugly confident, they were the