Walter M. Noel, Jr.

MA, Harvard University LLB, Harvard University

If you are reading this book in the normal, tried-and-true manner—starting at the beginning and working your way toward the end—you already know about J. Ezra Merkin.^* So we’ll make it easy for you. Think of Walter Noel and Ezra Merkin as the same person.

The End.

Sigh. Okay. Like Merkin, Walter Noel is a former alleged money manager,^* but transposed to the key of WASP (as in Greenwich, Connecticut, although he was spawned in Alabama). Noel’s firm, the Fairfield Greenwich Group, like Merkin’s Ascot Partners, pretended to know what it was doing—superior knowledge of the marketplace, due diligence, a principal who wore nice clothes and was a good salesman, blibbity blah blah—but in fact, like Merkin’s organization, was simply cramming its customers’ money down the Bernie Madoff Asset Incinerator^®. With your kind indulgence, we will now switch metaphors to state that Fairfield Greenwich was in fact the largest-diameter sewer pipe flushing money to the Cesspool of Madoff^®, more than $7 billion vs. Ascot’s puny $2.4 billion.

There are more stories to be written about Noel—about his wealthy Brazilian wife; their beautiful house in Greenwich; their beautiful apartment in Manhattan; their five beautiful, highly accomplished, multilingual, Ivy-educated (well, three out of five) daughters with five rich, handsome, internationally bred spouses; the way Walter had to pay back only a fraction of what he took from his clients, which is why he was able to maintain the lifestyle of a Wall Street genius even after he was revealed to be a simpleton and a cheat—but face it, we couldn’t stand to write those stories, and you couldn’t stand to read them.

So: The End.

Okay, we will do one more thing for you. We’ll reveal the headline of the current, up-to-the-minute-as-of-this-writing Fairfield Greenwich Group website:

Welcome to the Fairfield Greenwich Securities Litigation Class Action Settlement Website*