In the leafy lanes of "backcountry" Greenwich, Connecticut's old-money set has long been accustomed to rubbing shoulders with Wall Street's latest nouveaux riches. Mansions dating from the 1920s, riding their well watered lawns, signal the stock market's last great high-water mark. The giant fraud that has just shaken the wealthy suburb 30 miles from New York City, however, is pure late-twentieth century melodrama.
Not far from Lake Avenue, scene of this alleged fraud, staid New England families mingle with the international jet set at the polo club at White Birch Farm. Mr Hector Barrantes, who married Sarah Ferguson's mother, was a frequent player: the Duchess of York cancelled a visit planned for last weekend.
These bastions of old money stand side-by-side with the brash emblems of new Wall Street fortunes. Faded parodies of Tudor villas and clapboard Colonials are being renovated and extended. New dry-stone walls, the latest fashion for a generation striving to adopt the ways of the landed class, line the wooded roads.
Mr Martin Frankel slipped into this secluded haven with ease. A young and reclusive mid-westerner, he might once have seemed out of place in Stockbroker Belt. But Stockbroker Belt has been transformed, in the late twentieth century, into an outpost of modern high finance.
This is a place where young men like Mr Frankel, dressed in jeans and T-shirts, are just as likely to be juggling the odd $100 million (€96.65 million) as turning up to fix the cable system.
Mr Mike Vranos, once one of Wall Street's most powerful bond traders, manages a Greenwich hedge fund, and wears jeans and casual shirts to his unassuming office beside a golf course. From behind a low-rise office in Greenwich last autumn, Mr John Meriwether and his partners at Long-Term Capital Management succeeded in shaking the international financial system to its core.
It seems fitting that Mr Charles Davidson, who sold Mr Frankel one of the two mansions he bought in recent months, is himself a former partner of hedgefund superstar Michael Steinhardt. Even by the standards of the secretive world of modern high finance, however, Mr Frankel's behaviour stood out.
No sooner had he bought the back-country mansion he had been renting for some years than he threw up elaborate security around the premises. According to the FBI, the modern stone dwelling was converted into a warren of offices.
In fact, say federal investigators, the whole enterprise was nothing more than a giant money-laundering factory. And Mr Frankel himself, far from being a latter-day Gatsby, they say, was busy pulling off one of the biggest frauds of recent years, siphoning more than $300 million from a group of insurance companies located hundreds of miles away.
According to an affidavit filed by the FBI, an investment fund set up by Mr Frankel had gained control of a handful of private insurance companies in Mississippi and other southern states. Insurance premiums collected by these companies were channelled to Liberty National Securities - a company that Mr Frankel operated from his Greenwich home. But rather than investing the money in safe US government bonds, as the insurance companies thought, he is alleged to have laundered the cash through a web of bank accounts, front companies and charitable foundations.
The insurers have now launched a lawsuit seeking $950 million. Most of the money is now missing - as is Mr Frankel, leaving behind a bizarre trail. Though born a Jew in Toledo, Ohio, the high school drop-out controlled his financial empire through two Catholic charities. One, the St Francis of Assisi Foundation, claimed assets of nearly $2 billion and the support of the Vatican. Using a false name and claiming to be a devout Catholic, Mr Frankel won the support of influential people. Everything about the foundation now appears to have been falsified.
Other scraps of evidence hint at the nature of Mr Frankel's business - and his growing unease as his scheme began to come to light. Among the remains of burnt and shredded documents left behind when he disappeared, according to the FBI, was a handwritten list of things to do. Its first item: "Launder money". Astrological charts had been drawn up to answer questions which included: "Will I go to prison?"
The most mysterious thing about Mr Frankel, however, may be just how he managed to hide behind his facade of high-finance for so long. A lifetime ban from the securities business, imposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1992 after complaints from clients of an earlier investment business, was publicly available, an official says.
Yet it was not until this spring, when insurance commissioners from Mississippi, home to several of the defrauded insurers, became suspicious, that the facade on Lake Avenue crumbled.
