Dreier, Marc - "Crime of Destiny" - Vanity Fair

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Marc Dreier’s Crime of Destiny

November 2009

Great things were always expected of Marc Dreier, and he expected them for himself. He needed the hotshot litigating career and a life stuffed with rich men’s toys. He needed a Hamptons beachfront house. Thus began a four-year Ponzi scheme—involving audacious impersonations and $380 million stolen from 13 hedge funds—which all unraveled just days before the Madoff scandal broke, bringing the 59-year-old attorney a 20-year prison sentence. In conjunction with CBS’s 60 Minutes, the author gets Dreier’s blow-by-blow account of what it’s like to turn bad.

By Bryan Burrough

The sun-drenched apartment, perched high in a Midtown Manhattan building looking down on the famed restaurant Le Cirque, is as luxurious as one would expect for space that cost $10.4 million. Lined with floor-to-ceiling glass, the living room features low divans wrapped in rich golden fabric. On the vast outdoor deck, as big as many apartments, the views stretch north and east, all the way across Long Island Sound toward Connecticut.

Yet even a casual visitor would notice that something is amiss. Dozens of bare hooks line the white walls; all the paintings are gone. Boxes of paperwork litter the floors. In the kitchen, the knives are missing. Bags of trash overflow. The dining-room table is strewn with containers of half-eaten Chinese food. In an adjacent nook, an older man slumps on a sofa watching CNN on a wall-mounted flat-screen television. Unpaid bills are piling up. As nice as this apartment once was, it now feels like a $10 million dorm room.

That’s because it’s a jail. Sort of. On the orders of a federal judge, its owner is living here under house arrest. That man watching CNN? He’s a retired F.B.I. agent, one of several who rotate through all week long. One morning I arrive after 11. The owner, the man the security guards are watching, is just getting out of bed.

His name is Marc Dreier, he is 59 years old, and his life is over. A smallish, tightly wound man with red, stubbled cheeks and a silvery pompadour, Dreier was once a hotshot New York litigator with multi-millionaire clients. Then he stole $380 million from a bunch of hedge funds, got caught, and was arrested in Toronto under bizarre circumstances, having attempted to impersonate a Canadian pension-fund lawyer as part of a scheme to sell bogus securities to the big American hedge fund Fortress Investment Group. Now, as he wanders into the living room rubbing sleep from his eyes, Dreier is waiting for the judge to tell him just how many years he will spend in prison.

Dreier leaves court with his son, Spencer, after being released on bail.From Zuma/Newscom.

As he takes a seat across from me, he is wearing a loose-fitting black sweater and black jeans. And then, in the lifeless monotone of a death-row inmate, Marc Dreier begins to tell his story.

Maybe you remember the Dreier case. Or maybe you don’t, given that just five days after Dreier’s arrest, last December, federal authorities announced the discovery of the largest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history and the detention of its mastermind, Bernard Madoff; ironically, you can just glimpse a corner of Madoff’s 53rd Street headquarters from Dreier’s kitchen windows. Once the Madoff scandal hit, Dreier all but vanished from the headlines. If he’s remembered today, it’s probably for the details of his arrest, the sheer audacity of impersonating that Toronto attorney inside the man’s own offices.

The Canadian incident turned out to be the tip of one very dirty iceberg. Re-arrested upon his return to La Guardia Airport, Dreier was revealed to have defrauded more than a dozen hedge funds, not counting the $45 million or so he stole from his own clients’ escrow accounts. His 270-lawyer Park Avenue firm, Dreier L.L.P., imploded practically overn