Andrew W. W. Caspersen

BA, Princeton University img JD, Harvard University

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If you’re wondering how to know whether you’re leading a privileged life, here are some telltale signs:

• Your father is a graduate of Harvard Law School. As are your three older brothers. As are you.

• Your family name is affixed to the façade of the student center at Harvard Law School.

• Your family name is Caspersen.

Check, check, and check. Congratulations, Mr. Andrew Caspersen.

Andrew’s father, Finn, who graduated from Brown before going to Harvard Law, was the chairman and CEO of the Beneficial Corporation.* It was surely beneficial to him when the company sold for $8.6 billion in 1998. In the years following the sale, it was not unheard-of for tabloids and financial rags to refer to Finn as a “billionaire.” He was, without question, rich, with “seaside estates” in Rhode Island and Florida, and a strong interest in showy philanthropy. In addition to the $30 million* that bought the name of the student center and other tangible items at Harvard Law, he endowed two professorships. And supported the United States Equestrian Team. And various rowing programs. Not to mention the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies at Drew University. And much more!

Yes, it’s an inspiring American story about benefits and corporations—but, as so many such stories do, this one now takes a strange and sad turn.

Weak and depressed from a long battle with kidney cancer, Finn shot himself in the head in 2009. Or maybe he didn’t have cancer. Maybe that just became the family line to sidestep the allegation that he was insolvent and under investigation by the IRS for the millions of dollars in taxes he owed. (Ultimately, the government dropped the case against Finn’s estate.)

Oh but, dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to discuss Finn’s youngest son. Andrew, like his brothers—all three of whom work for banks or investment firms—followed the money: after Harvard Law, he took a job with a private-equity firm, rose through the ranks, and made a lot of money. In 2013 he started at another firm and continued making a lot of money.*

And then things went all bizarro for Andrew Caspersen. In late 2014, he started soliciting investors for a deal he claimed would return 15 percent a year with minimal risk.* With his impeccable credentials, connections, pedigree, personal and family wealth, wardrobe, manner of speaking, and cut of jib, he collected… well, as of this writing no one seems to know exactly how much he collected. It’s said to be at least $40 million and could be considerably more. Which would have been perfectly wonderful if the money had been going where he said it was going. But it wasn’t.

There was no “deal.” It was, in fact, a “fraud.”

Caspersen took money from wherever he could get it—old Princeton friends, a charity run by a hedge-fund billionaire, his brothers, even his actual biological mother. Then, after passing it through a shell corporation he’d set up, he gambled it away on high-risk short-term stock options. Unfortunately for him and his unwitting investors, he was an extremely bad stock-options gambler. By the end of his bender, all but $40,000* of the money he’d collected was gone.

On March 26, 2016, on the way home from a Florida vacation, Andrew Caspersen was arrested at LaGuardia Airport, on federal securities and wire-fraud charges, in front of his wife and two young children. He was released on a $5 million bond—secured by his $1.1 million house in Bronxville, his $2.3 million Manhattan co-op,* and guarantees from his wife and one of his brothers.* As a condition of his release, he had to be treated for alcohol abuse and, for obvious reasons, undergo psychiatric evaluation. Needless to say, he was summarily axed from the job in the financial-services sector that had been paying him nearly fifty cents a second.

Andrew Caspersen has had a lot of bad news over the past several years, including learning of, and having to come to terms with, his inadequacy as a Ponzi schemer.

The good news for him is that, although he faced a maximum sentence of up to forty years in prison, he’ll end up doing a mere four. Having the resources to know, hire, and pay for an excellent attorney is one of the privileges of privilege.

And while it’s unlikely that he’ll ever work in Big Money again, and will no doubt be barred from practicing law, Andrew Caspersen will always have the comfort of knowing that there’s a building with his surname on it at ultraprestigious Harvard Law School.