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Octopus: Sam Israel, the Secret Market, and Wall Street's Wildest Con
Octopus is a real-life thriller that tells the inside story of an audacious hedge fund fraud and the wild search, by a colorful cast of rogues and schemers, for a “secret market” beneath the financial market we all know.
Sam Israel was a man who seemed to have it all – until the hedge fund he ran, Bayou, imploded and he became the target of a nationwide manhunt. Born into one of America’s most illustrious trading families, Israel was determined to strike out on his own. So after apprenticing with one of the greatest hedge fund traders of the 1980’s, Sam founded his own fund and promised his investors guaranteed profits. With the proprietary computer program he’d created, he claimed to be able to predict the future.
But his future was already beginning to unravel.
After suffering devastating losses and fabricating fake returns, Israel knew it was only a matter of time before his real performance would be discovered, so when a former black-ops intelligence operative told him about a “secret market” run by the Fed, Israel bet his last $150 million on a chance to make billions. Thus began his year-long adventure in “the Upperworld” -- a society populated by clandestine bankers, shady European nobility, and spooks issuing cryptic warnings about a mysterious cabal known as the Octopus.
Whether the “secret market” was real or a con, Israel was all in – and as the pressures mounted and increasingly sinister violence crept into his life, he struggled to break free of the Octopus’ tentacles.
Sam Israel was a man who seemed to have it all – until the hedge fund he ran, Bayou, imploded and he became the target of a nationwide manhunt. Born into one of America’s most illustrious trading families, Israel was determined to strike out on his own. So after apprenticing with one of the greatest hedge fund traders of the 1980’s, Sam founded his own fund and promised his investors guaranteed profits. With the proprietary computer program he’d created, he claimed to be able to predict the future.
But his future was already beginning to unravel.
After suffering devastating losses and fabricating fake returns, Israel knew it was only a matter of time before his real performance would be discovered, so when a former black-ops intelligence operative told him about a “secret market” run by the Fed, Israel bet his last $150 million on a chance to make billions. Thus began his year-long adventure in “the Upperworld” -- a society populated by clandestine bankers, shady European nobility, and spooks issuing cryptic warnings about a mysterious cabal known as the Octopus.
Whether the “secret market” was real or a con, Israel was all in – and as the pressures mounted and increasingly sinister violence crept into his life, he struggled to break free of the Octopus’ tentacles.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2012
73 people are currently reading
1368 people want to read
About the author
Guy Lawson
13 books79 followersGuy is the New York Times bestselling author of Arms and The Dudes: How Three Miami Beach Stoners Became the Most Unlikely Gun Runners in History. He is also the author of the Octopus: Sam Israel, the Secret Market, and Wall Street’s Wildest Con, and The Brotherhoods: The True Story of Two Cops Who Murdered for the Mafia.
For two decades Guy has traveled the world reporting on a wide range of subjects—conflict in the Balkans, the Mexican drug wars, ice hockey in northern Canada, life in a Bowery flophouse, fútbol in Brazil, Hezbollah suicide bombers, the Rwandan genocide war crime trials, and FBI-fabricated domestic terrorism cases, among others. His work has appeared in many international publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, GQ, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, The Australian, and the Globe and Mail.
Guy has four projects in development for film. Arms and the Dudes is currently being filmed by Warner Brothers, with Jonah Hill (The Wolf of Wall Street, 21 Jump Street) and Miles Teller (Whiplash, The Spectacular Now) starring and Todd Phillips (The Hangover I, II, II) directing. In April 2015, Guy’s Rolling Stone article The Dukes of Oxy was optioned by New Line/Warner Brothers, with Mike De Luca (The Social Network, Moneyball) attached to produce and Ansel Elgort (Divergent, The Fault in Our Stars) to star. In addition, Guy’s book Octopus is with HBO, to be written and directed by Peter Gould (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Too Big to Fail). The Brotherhoods is with Warner Brothers, to be produced by Dan Lin (The Lego Movie, Sherlock Holmes I, II, III).
Guy was born in Toronto and holds degrees from the University of Western Australia and the University of Cambridge. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and two daughters.
For two decades Guy has traveled the world reporting on a wide range of subjects—conflict in the Balkans, the Mexican drug wars, ice hockey in northern Canada, life in a Bowery flophouse, fútbol in Brazil, Hezbollah suicide bombers, the Rwandan genocide war crime trials, and FBI-fabricated domestic terrorism cases, among others. His work has appeared in many international publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, GQ, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, The Australian, and the Globe and Mail.
Guy has four projects in development for film. Arms and the Dudes is currently being filmed by Warner Brothers, with Jonah Hill (The Wolf of Wall Street, 21 Jump Street) and Miles Teller (Whiplash, The Spectacular Now) starring and Todd Phillips (The Hangover I, II, II) directing. In April 2015, Guy’s Rolling Stone article The Dukes of Oxy was optioned by New Line/Warner Brothers, with Mike De Luca (The Social Network, Moneyball) attached to produce and Ansel Elgort (Divergent, The Fault in Our Stars) to star. In addition, Guy’s book Octopus is with HBO, to be written and directed by Peter Gould (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Too Big to Fail). The Brotherhoods is with Warner Brothers, to be produced by Dan Lin (The Lego Movie, Sherlock Holmes I, II, III).
Guy was born in Toronto and holds degrees from the University of Western Australia and the University of Cambridge. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and two daughters.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 102 reviews
December 4, 2012
The definition of modern schadenfreud is reading about how a hedge fund manager’s life goes down the toilet, and the dirtier and more foul the toilet, the better. Octopus promises such a tale but it becomes, almost literally, a tale told by an idiot. As the main protagonist in the book develops from being an apprentice Master of the Universe on Wall Street to inhabiting a different Universe altogether, I began to feel I could be told a similar story from a number of patients on a mental ward who think they’re either Nelson Mandela or Napoleon. As you read of how this hedge fund trader became duped by a series of con-men trying to rob him of his millions, you actually begin to feel sorry for him. He’s clearly mentally ill but the author resists making this diagnosis, instead trying to con us, the reader, into thinking that there may well be a “shadow market” in the world, run by the rich and powerful for the rich and powerful. Baloney. Wall Street isn’t much more than a casino that outlandishly rewards dumb luck and privilege. Books like this try to lend it an aura that it doesn’t deserve.
To be fair, the book was well written and the plot keeps moving, but I found it difficult to believe in the main characters as they became increasingly unlikeable and disconnected from reality. As ever, one guy with the ability to stand back and ponder the old adage that if something looks too good to be true then it probably is, begins to unravel the whole scheme. It seems, however, that there’s no fool like rich fools and that while in the world of finance, greed might not be good, it is almost endemic. I finished the book thinking that there was a deeper and better story to be told from this tale, one that looks at just what is wrong with the systems and psychologies that allow the worst excesses of capitalism to happen. When we begin to understand that then we might start to make the world a better and fairer place.
To be fair, the book was well written and the plot keeps moving, but I found it difficult to believe in the main characters as they became increasingly unlikeable and disconnected from reality. As ever, one guy with the ability to stand back and ponder the old adage that if something looks too good to be true then it probably is, begins to unravel the whole scheme. It seems, however, that there’s no fool like rich fools and that while in the world of finance, greed might not be good, it is almost endemic. I finished the book thinking that there was a deeper and better story to be told from this tale, one that looks at just what is wrong with the systems and psychologies that allow the worst excesses of capitalism to happen. When we begin to understand that then we might start to make the world a better and fairer place.
February 11, 2017
A poorly written book I'd say.
The author & his subject start off by aggrandizing him,
later he's shown for the idiot loser he always was,
at the end the author feels sorry for him and says his sentence was "unjust".
Who's conning who?
18 people have pseudonyms, do these people really exist?
The author says: Trust me.
The author & his subject start off by aggrandizing him,
later he's shown for the idiot loser he always was,
at the end the author feels sorry for him and says his sentence was "unjust".
Who's conning who?
18 people have pseudonyms, do these people really exist?
The author says: Trust me.
August 1, 2012
There were a few different reactions I had to this airport thriller-style account of the life and career of Steve Israel, a hedge fund con artist. One is that it's just another rise-and-fall tale of a Wall Street jerk who got shown that he wasn't as smart as he thought he was, and whose life story would be ignored if he had been, say, a blue-collar worker from the South Side with a gambling problem rather than a rich-kid trader who turned his hedge fund into a Ponzi scheme. The book is full of lurid psychodrama and the standard "this is larger-than-life" kind of writing where the smallest bits of detail, like what kind of tattoo the main character gets, have Immense Significance. It's a bit mysterious to me exactly why and how someone else's mundane personal problems with drugs/alcohol/money/family/their marriage seem more interesting when that person has more money, and even though I'm obviously not immune to this effect (after all, I read the whole book), I found myself getting impatient with all the chin-stroking about the psychological roots of Israel's behavior, like his relationship with his father and so on.
Another way to look at the book is that an example like Israel helps give more weight to its detailed look at how silly the self-image of the finance industry is. If people like him are really smarter than the rest of us, then society is fucked, because as the lengthy quotes from interviews show, he and the rest of the Masters of the Universe crowd he hung out with were basically idiots. Cut to its core, all he and his compatriots did was steal from people, using flimsy cover stories of a magical automated trading program, regulatory loopholes, and his clients' ignorance and willingness to be deceived. That's it. Some people might find the book's depictions of cocaine parties and trips to whorehouses and jamming with the Allman Brothers thrilling or shocking or whatever, but while I'd also have had a great time with all that decadence if it were my story, anyone who has watched a few Behind the Music specials of hair metal bands will be more than familiar with how lifestyles of wild partying usually end. Furthermore, I just can't be impressed with what guys like him do: the way he eventually gets stuck doing business with a cartoonish CIA agent and his pack of shady friends with ludicrous stories of secret financial cabals and hidden conspiracies (the Octopus of the book's title is your garden-variety banking/political/power Illuminati) is more funny than anything else. How smart can you really be if you actually believe someone who says they're pals with the people who shot JFK and can get you access to a magical bond market with free money, especially when you went to a psychic beforehand and seem to base your sense of reality on cheap spy novels? Sure, you were on a lot of drugs, but come on.
Another reaction was simple disgust. The way he and his other partners in the fund talk about their exploits as acts of cleverness is sickening. There's plenty of anecdotes about the sense of power they got from being surrounded by rich and powerful people, about how great it is to be incredibly rich, and about the huge rush that they got from spinning straw into gold. But when I read these stories about fooling their clients with fake audits, or tricking regulators, or other financial crimes, I just got depressed. Maybe these people's lives of making and losing hundreds of millions of dollars are "great stories" in the kind of Greek tragedy sense that seems to infect writers like Lawson and Michael Lewis (the inevitable Icarus analogy is trotted out a few times) because they show what happens when familiar human flaws are magnified by lots of money. Or maybe these people are just small men made big by the collapse of the rotting institutions of society, nothing more admirable or impressive than your everyday loan shark, and one of the best ways to handle them is to see them for the demented idiots they actually are. Lawson is a good writer so it's likely that you'll make it to the end of the book, but knowing the damage that asshole finance types can inflict on the world, it's as hard to actually cheer for Israel and his increasingly deranged schemes to make his company solvent again as it is to cheer for a termite that's burrowing into your house, especially when his attempt to fake his own death after the jig was up didn't even last a month. "I cheated my partners, wrecked my company, and destroyed zillions of dollars in wealth based on my own inflated sense of self-worth and inability to tell the truth, and all I got was a ruined marriage and 22 years in prison." Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
Another way to look at the book is that an example like Israel helps give more weight to its detailed look at how silly the self-image of the finance industry is. If people like him are really smarter than the rest of us, then society is fucked, because as the lengthy quotes from interviews show, he and the rest of the Masters of the Universe crowd he hung out with were basically idiots. Cut to its core, all he and his compatriots did was steal from people, using flimsy cover stories of a magical automated trading program, regulatory loopholes, and his clients' ignorance and willingness to be deceived. That's it. Some people might find the book's depictions of cocaine parties and trips to whorehouses and jamming with the Allman Brothers thrilling or shocking or whatever, but while I'd also have had a great time with all that decadence if it were my story, anyone who has watched a few Behind the Music specials of hair metal bands will be more than familiar with how lifestyles of wild partying usually end. Furthermore, I just can't be impressed with what guys like him do: the way he eventually gets stuck doing business with a cartoonish CIA agent and his pack of shady friends with ludicrous stories of secret financial cabals and hidden conspiracies (the Octopus of the book's title is your garden-variety banking/political/power Illuminati) is more funny than anything else. How smart can you really be if you actually believe someone who says they're pals with the people who shot JFK and can get you access to a magical bond market with free money, especially when you went to a psychic beforehand and seem to base your sense of reality on cheap spy novels? Sure, you were on a lot of drugs, but come on.
Another reaction was simple disgust. The way he and his other partners in the fund talk about their exploits as acts of cleverness is sickening. There's plenty of anecdotes about the sense of power they got from being surrounded by rich and powerful people, about how great it is to be incredibly rich, and about the huge rush that they got from spinning straw into gold. But when I read these stories about fooling their clients with fake audits, or tricking regulators, or other financial crimes, I just got depressed. Maybe these people's lives of making and losing hundreds of millions of dollars are "great stories" in the kind of Greek tragedy sense that seems to infect writers like Lawson and Michael Lewis (the inevitable Icarus analogy is trotted out a few times) because they show what happens when familiar human flaws are magnified by lots of money. Or maybe these people are just small men made big by the collapse of the rotting institutions of society, nothing more admirable or impressive than your everyday loan shark, and one of the best ways to handle them is to see them for the demented idiots they actually are. Lawson is a good writer so it's likely that you'll make it to the end of the book, but knowing the damage that asshole finance types can inflict on the world, it's as hard to actually cheer for Israel and his increasingly deranged schemes to make his company solvent again as it is to cheer for a termite that's burrowing into your house, especially when his attempt to fake his own death after the jig was up didn't even last a month. "I cheated my partners, wrecked my company, and destroyed zillions of dollars in wealth based on my own inflated sense of self-worth and inability to tell the truth, and all I got was a ruined marriage and 22 years in prison." Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
Read
April 20, 2014In this article:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/...
Matt Taibbi writes:
The other thing that led him to believe in the Octopus? The Fed’s response to, among other things, the 1987 crash. Israel saw that whenever Wall Street screwed up, the Fed jumped in and rescued everyone with cheap cash. His reaction to 1987:
Sam Israel saw that Wall Street made its money cheating, and he also saw that the government enabled the cheating. He then drew what seemed to him a logical third conclusion, which was that the two realms were conspiring in secret to make a second shadow market for the elite of the elite, one bursting with fantastic riches. He didn't realize that the real market was the shadow market.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/...
Matt Taibbi writes:
The other thing that led him to believe in the Octopus? The Fed’s response to, among other things, the 1987 crash. Israel saw that whenever Wall Street screwed up, the Fed jumped in and rescued everyone with cheap cash. His reaction to 1987:
…the Fed had propped up the market. To pay for the massive rescue, the Fed had created money out of thin air. The end of the gold standard had turned the dollar into a fiat currency, effectively giving the Fed the power to print money. It was a kind of Ponzi scheme, Israel thought, but at the highest level of abstraction – and secrecy.
Sam believed he’d discovered the central illusion at the heart of modern capitalism. He had the dizzying sensation that there was nothing underneath the whole edifice of Wall Street, the dollar, the American economy.
Sam Israel saw that Wall Street made its money cheating, and he also saw that the government enabled the cheating. He then drew what seemed to him a logical third conclusion, which was that the two realms were conspiring in secret to make a second shadow market for the elite of the elite, one bursting with fantastic riches. He didn't realize that the real market was the shadow market.
October 2, 2012
Big disappointment. Sammy was a conman, and he found a mark in Guy Lawson. (And me too, I guess, since I shelled out $12.99 for this.) I've written about these conman-conspiracy types myself -- Chris Sugre, Lenny Dykstra and even Bayou itself -- and I think you have to be ruthlessly skeptical. I figured Lawson would be too. But he's a big disappointment, providing little perspective. He just lets Sammy spin out his delusional conspiracy theories, culled from the Voice circa the early 90s. There's way too much time spent with Sammy fondly reminiscing on his blow-and-babes exploits. I mean the guy is a monumental asshole, maybe Lawson could have cut him off. Don't waste your cash.
August 28, 2012
I didn't finish this book. The writing was fine but the characters were rotten. I've read about this mixture of ego, greed, ruthlessness and immorality on Wall Street before. I decided that there were better things to read, and better people to read about.
July 29, 2012
Octopus opens with a suicide, and by the end of the book you've encountered frauds, spies, scam artists, lunatics, killers, Chinese gold, shadow markets, thirteen families that run the world, the lost Zapruder footage, and General Zod's henchman. None of this is an exaggeration.
This book is insane. It's supposed to be about Sam Israel, who is Bernie Madoff light: a Ponzi scammer, but one who retains a degree of sympathy - he at least didn't mean to defraud his victims. But the text reads like Wiseguy, nee Goodfellas, and ultimately descends into a world of madness that I don't know how to describe without spoiling it for you.
If you are interested in a look behind the scenes of Wall Street and global finance, read this book. If you are interested in a tale of madness and desperation, read this book. If you believe in the New World Order and think the CIA teamed up with the Mafia to kill Kennedy, read this book. You will not be disappointed.
This book is insane. It's supposed to be about Sam Israel, who is Bernie Madoff light: a Ponzi scammer, but one who retains a degree of sympathy - he at least didn't mean to defraud his victims. But the text reads like Wiseguy, nee Goodfellas, and ultimately descends into a world of madness that I don't know how to describe without spoiling it for you.
If you are interested in a look behind the scenes of Wall Street and global finance, read this book. If you are interested in a tale of madness and desperation, read this book. If you believe in the New World Order and think the CIA teamed up with the Mafia to kill Kennedy, read this book. You will not be disappointed.
September 19, 2013
I entered a goodreads contest for this book because I thought it would be a look behind the scenes in the financial meltdown. It is not. It is about con men getting conned. The "secret market" is essentially a story that a favored few can buy dollar bills for 50 cents. Yeh sure. Sam Israel is probably mentally ill. If not, he is conning the author.
It is fun to win boks on goodreads but I am really sorry that I wasted the time to read over half of this one.
It is fun to win boks on goodreads but I am really sorry that I wasted the time to read over half of this one.
November 13, 2012
Octopus tells the weird, wacky and true story of Sam Israel III, a member of a very rich American family, who had been making money the old fashioned way - via trading and the market - for decades, heck since the mid 1800s. Sam III decided he wanted to make his own mark, so off he went to trade on the market, this time as a day trader, working on minor fluctuations of the market.
He learned how to turn inside information into cash and then decided to go one better and start his own hedge fund. Now, I am still not sure what a "hedge fund" does, but in this case, it basically masked a big fraud, as soon after starting the Bayou Funds, it started losing money due to bad trades. But they came upon a brilliant strategy for cooking the books and they kept things rolling.
As it got deeper into debt, while showing a brilliant bottom line, Sam started going crazy looking for a killing somewhere. Thinking back to his days illegally trading on inside knowledge, he kept looking for that big score, no matter how illegal or far fetched it may sound.
Thus he became the perfect target for a "long con". And about halfway through the book, this true story becomes a story of truly bizarre happenings, as Sam gets carefully reeled in by a big group of sharks. He keeps thinking the big score is right around the corner, when him and his partners would be able to right the books and everything would come out okay.
But of course it doesn't and finally it all comes crashing down on him, in a myriad of ways. He even goes on the lam in a camper but ends up in jail, still believing his own tall tales. Very odd.
This wasn't really the book I was thinking it was going to be. I thought it would tell the tale of a nefarious hedge fund and how it broke the market. Instead, it told the tale of a seriously deluded rich playboy, who thought he had the golden touch, when really he was crazy. But we're not sure if he was singularly crazy or just crazy enough to get caught.
The greed rampant in the book is perhaps the most sickening. Sam tells tales of his father regaling the family with talk of how the family money was earned, by crass market manipulation. They would buy futures in a good, then surreptitiously buy all the goods and hide them until the prices went up, sell their futures and then dump the goods on the market. Ha ha, isn't that fun.
No really it is just sad and infuriating. At no point in the story does anyone show the slightest bit of remorse, like the markets are just sheep for the plucking. Everything goes and nothing seems to get checked, as long as the fake money makes the cycles around. Nothing gets added to society, nothing gets produced, just money sucked off the top, and you can do whatever it takes to get it. Just sickening really.
And when he falls into the clutches of the outrageous scam artists? Wow, does the book take a turn into the surreal. But the long con went out way too long. I am not sure why it went on for so long. But it sure played out over about a third of the book, as they would bring Sam ever so close to the mysterious "bond market", where billions could be made. Frankly, I got bored after a while, as only a deluded idiot would believe what was going on.
So, in the end, only three stars I think. It didn't really tell all that interesting a story, just one that gets you mad. And despite the claims made that Sam was gregarious and likable, he sure didn't come across like that in the book. Just a rich pampered fool who never needed a reality check. I wish they would all just take a boat out of town and never come back.
He learned how to turn inside information into cash and then decided to go one better and start his own hedge fund. Now, I am still not sure what a "hedge fund" does, but in this case, it basically masked a big fraud, as soon after starting the Bayou Funds, it started losing money due to bad trades. But they came upon a brilliant strategy for cooking the books and they kept things rolling.
As it got deeper into debt, while showing a brilliant bottom line, Sam started going crazy looking for a killing somewhere. Thinking back to his days illegally trading on inside knowledge, he kept looking for that big score, no matter how illegal or far fetched it may sound.
Thus he became the perfect target for a "long con". And about halfway through the book, this true story becomes a story of truly bizarre happenings, as Sam gets carefully reeled in by a big group of sharks. He keeps thinking the big score is right around the corner, when him and his partners would be able to right the books and everything would come out okay.
But of course it doesn't and finally it all comes crashing down on him, in a myriad of ways. He even goes on the lam in a camper but ends up in jail, still believing his own tall tales. Very odd.
This wasn't really the book I was thinking it was going to be. I thought it would tell the tale of a nefarious hedge fund and how it broke the market. Instead, it told the tale of a seriously deluded rich playboy, who thought he had the golden touch, when really he was crazy. But we're not sure if he was singularly crazy or just crazy enough to get caught.
The greed rampant in the book is perhaps the most sickening. Sam tells tales of his father regaling the family with talk of how the family money was earned, by crass market manipulation. They would buy futures in a good, then surreptitiously buy all the goods and hide them until the prices went up, sell their futures and then dump the goods on the market. Ha ha, isn't that fun.
No really it is just sad and infuriating. At no point in the story does anyone show the slightest bit of remorse, like the markets are just sheep for the plucking. Everything goes and nothing seems to get checked, as long as the fake money makes the cycles around. Nothing gets added to society, nothing gets produced, just money sucked off the top, and you can do whatever it takes to get it. Just sickening really.
And when he falls into the clutches of the outrageous scam artists? Wow, does the book take a turn into the surreal. But the long con went out way too long. I am not sure why it went on for so long. But it sure played out over about a third of the book, as they would bring Sam ever so close to the mysterious "bond market", where billions could be made. Frankly, I got bored after a while, as only a deluded idiot would believe what was going on.
So, in the end, only three stars I think. It didn't really tell all that interesting a story, just one that gets you mad. And despite the claims made that Sam was gregarious and likable, he sure didn't come across like that in the book. Just a rich pampered fool who never needed a reality check. I wish they would all just take a boat out of town and never come back.
April 1, 2013
When I got this book, for some reason I thought it was a financial thriller novel. I was surprised to learn after a few chapters that I was reading non-fiction -- a biography, no less. Yet, the story is quite novel-like anyway. I kept thinking of the people as "characters" (which they certainly were).
About halfway through the book the story joins just about every wild conspiracy theory ever heard; the JFK assassination, the Yamashita gold treasure, and the vaguely understood new-world-order conspiracies that control the markets and chart the courses of empires.
It is hard not to feel pity for Sam Israel, the lowest rung in the great con. This book colors him as a pitiable character, and suggest that his intentions were noble from beginning to end, even if his methods were criminal. This is hard to reconcile with his flamboyant and self-aggrandizing lifestyle, but the author barely pulls it off anyway.
The effectiveness of the confidence games described in the book relies on the fact that no one quite knows how the markets work; not even the traders and brokers who make a living there. Since the author does not explain any of it to the poor, confused reader, there is no way to judge the plausibility of the proposed schemes. For all I know, there really is some magic spell that effortlessly turns $100 million into $4 billion. This seems obviously incredible at first, but so does the true fact that people make millions by clicking computer keys and yelling into telephones. It would have been nice to have some brief background on how the market is supposed to work and how it really does work.
About halfway through the book the story joins just about every wild conspiracy theory ever heard; the JFK assassination, the Yamashita gold treasure, and the vaguely understood new-world-order conspiracies that control the markets and chart the courses of empires.
It is hard not to feel pity for Sam Israel, the lowest rung in the great con. This book colors him as a pitiable character, and suggest that his intentions were noble from beginning to end, even if his methods were criminal. This is hard to reconcile with his flamboyant and self-aggrandizing lifestyle, but the author barely pulls it off anyway.
The effectiveness of the confidence games described in the book relies on the fact that no one quite knows how the markets work; not even the traders and brokers who make a living there. Since the author does not explain any of it to the poor, confused reader, there is no way to judge the plausibility of the proposed schemes. For all I know, there really is some magic spell that effortlessly turns $100 million into $4 billion. This seems obviously incredible at first, but so does the true fact that people make millions by clicking computer keys and yelling into telephones. It would have been nice to have some brief background on how the market is supposed to work and how it really does work.
March 24, 2013
The book reads like a thriller, and doesn't get bogged down in the minutia of high finance. It's kind of like FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS goes to Wall Street.
Sam Israel was a prominent Wall Street investor, and the founder of the Bayou Hedge Fund. He was a greedy, larger-than-life character, and OCTOPUS is the fascinating story of his downfall. Although he deftly conned his investors for more and more cash to keep the fund afloat, he falls prey to one of the wildest cons of all. Robert Booth Nichols, a shadowy figure with questionable links to numerous espionage outfits and international investment firms talks Israel into believing in a fantastic and secret, global investment market which is available only to the powerful people who control all the money on the planet. At face value, you would think that a serious trader such as Sam Israel would instantly smell a rat. But, I guess this is what the book is about. If you are a schemer, you are more than likely to fall prey to another schemer.
Sam Israel was a prominent Wall Street investor, and the founder of the Bayou Hedge Fund. He was a greedy, larger-than-life character, and OCTOPUS is the fascinating story of his downfall. Although he deftly conned his investors for more and more cash to keep the fund afloat, he falls prey to one of the wildest cons of all. Robert Booth Nichols, a shadowy figure with questionable links to numerous espionage outfits and international investment firms talks Israel into believing in a fantastic and secret, global investment market which is available only to the powerful people who control all the money on the planet. At face value, you would think that a serious trader such as Sam Israel would instantly smell a rat. But, I guess this is what the book is about. If you are a schemer, you are more than likely to fall prey to another schemer.
August 14, 2021
I read /Octopus: Sam Israel, the Secret Market, and Wall Street's Wildest Con/, by Guy Lawson:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/octopus-...
Guy Lawson is the author who wrote the book that became the movie "War Dogs", which I just ordered and will read soon. (That one is called /Arms and the Dudes: How Three Stoners from Miami Beach Became the Most Unlikely Gunrunners in History/)
This book is crazy. Truth is stranger than fiction.... or in this case, non-fiction.
When I'm browsing through books at bookstores, I read the first page or two to see if I'm immediately hooked. This book has an AMAZING hook (which I'm not going to tell you about, so you can be fully hooked too).
The protagonist, Sam Israel, comes from a wealthy family (billions) who made their money over two generations trading commodities. But Sam starts at the bottom of Wall Street, working for no pay for years, rather than be pampered and join the family business.
He eventually founds his own hedge fund and gets investor LPs, partially based on a computer program he wrote for trading.
I'm not going to tell you what happens from there, but like Joe Bob Briggs I will tabulate the elements of a good movie (or in this case book).
This book has intrigue, deception, backstabbing, and out-of-control hedonism including whoring and lots of drinking and drugs... Interesting people, huge amounts of money, and conspiracy theories, some of which are true. This is pre-QAnon and our reptilian masters, post-Illuminati.
We've got European nobility, JFK's assassination, a ponzi scheme, and Yamashita's gold and treasury bonds. The book also features the CIA, movie stars, heads of government, Goldman Sachs, ostentatious displays of wealth, suicide, and Donald Trump (whose estate one of the protagonists rents).
For criminal junkies, we've got assault, murder, and rampant securities fraud.
Finally, it has at least two levels of confidence game, with the con men getting conned.
What's not to like?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/octopus-...
Guy Lawson is the author who wrote the book that became the movie "War Dogs", which I just ordered and will read soon. (That one is called /Arms and the Dudes: How Three Stoners from Miami Beach Became the Most Unlikely Gunrunners in History/)
This book is crazy. Truth is stranger than fiction.... or in this case, non-fiction.
When I'm browsing through books at bookstores, I read the first page or two to see if I'm immediately hooked. This book has an AMAZING hook (which I'm not going to tell you about, so you can be fully hooked too).
The protagonist, Sam Israel, comes from a wealthy family (billions) who made their money over two generations trading commodities. But Sam starts at the bottom of Wall Street, working for no pay for years, rather than be pampered and join the family business.
He eventually founds his own hedge fund and gets investor LPs, partially based on a computer program he wrote for trading.
I'm not going to tell you what happens from there, but like Joe Bob Briggs I will tabulate the elements of a good movie (or in this case book).
This book has intrigue, deception, backstabbing, and out-of-control hedonism including whoring and lots of drinking and drugs... Interesting people, huge amounts of money, and conspiracy theories, some of which are true. This is pre-QAnon and our reptilian masters, post-Illuminati.
We've got European nobility, JFK's assassination, a ponzi scheme, and Yamashita's gold and treasury bonds. The book also features the CIA, movie stars, heads of government, Goldman Sachs, ostentatious displays of wealth, suicide, and Donald Trump (whose estate one of the protagonists rents).
For criminal junkies, we've got assault, murder, and rampant securities fraud.
Finally, it has at least two levels of confidence game, with the con men getting conned.
What's not to like?
June 8, 2018
I'm addicted to these stories. An addiction not as bad as to alcohol but worse than Twizzlers, these panoramas of greed and fraud just fortify the belief that larceny is perhaps larceny is the essential linchpin of capitalism. But as cool as it is to read about yet another Ponzi scheme (and "Sam was sure that there were hundreds-if not thousands-of hedge funds that were Ponzi schemes but that few would ever get caught."), the Fall resulting from hubris being many times greater than talent and incessant lying becoming an art form, the great Octopus con sets this book apart from run-of-the-mill post-2008 recession recounts of Wall Street suited and coiffed crooks. Shadow governments, secret markets, and the "Upperworld," a cast of thousands of con men, and women, princes and heiresses, black op intelligence figures out the wahoo, and another plethora of seemingly sane people whose greed propels them down the rabbit hole. Though not greed exactly. Avarice is a factor but the main stimulus-which observers fail to appreciate when they view any hare-brained scheme, financial or religious- is simply belief. I've come to think that the will to believe is our strongest impulse. Now certain characters in this weirdness do make you come to think that our entire government intelligence apparatus is one big con job. Following is my favorite quote- "Walking up the driveway of 52 Oregon Road in Mount Kisco, Sam knew he'd found the spot. The house wasn't so much a mansion as a monument to excess. The owner was Donald Trump. The self-promoting tycoon had lived there himself. Like Trump, everything about the house was comically over the top-so impossibly huge for one person to live in that it signified only massive insecurity."
March 5, 2025
This is a wild tale of deception and fraud. The first portion of the book, describing Sam Israel's early life and rise to prominence and gradual descent into scamming and fraud is a fairly standard Wall Street tale of a certain era. Many wall street types found they were unable to meet the unrealistic expectations they set for themselves and started cooking the books. But then, this book, and also Sam Israel's life takes an unexpected turn as Sam is drawn into a consulted fraud populated by alleged CIA agents and shady foreign actors, ever tinted with the flair of global conspiracies from the JFK assassination to wealthy families that secretly run the world. At times, the author is insufficiently credulous about the story being told. At one point I had to check that the narrative was indeed non-fiction. While the underlying facts and facially absurd, the author underemphasizes the sheer lunacy of the details being recounted. Perhaps the author is trying to put the reader inside Sam's mind, convincing the reader that believing these tales was plausible, but the effect is disorienting--like being gaslight. Ultimately, the story ends where one expects, with Sam's ruination and all is made clear-the scammed got scammed but not all of the bad actors received comeuppance. On the whole, this book is wilder than the typical Wall Street scam story with much the same results.
January 22, 2019
It's counter-intuitive that people who run cons are also generally the most susceptible to them - the picture in your head is a devious criminal mastermind. But Octopus does a really good job of showing how confidence tricksters are often successful in part because of their ability to truly believe in their own shit. By being necessarily so steeped in the testimony of a known liar, this is obviously not the most objective account. As long as you keep that in account while reading, though, it's a perfect way to show the sort of delusional world that the hyper-rich can live in, free of all links to common sense, and how those who get everything they need in life always have the hunger for more. If you want to understand the sort of mental twists that lead to things like "Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sent beard shavings to Azealia Banks so she could make an amulet to protect him from ISIS ", you could do a lot worse than Octopus, even if the circumstances of how Guy Lawson got this information make it more fluff than crunch.
July 12, 2023
The story is very interesting, but the author gets bogged down in describing the details of every last con, especially in the second half. They're all basically variations on the same set of lies, so it is not all that intriguing to hear whether it is the Swiss or Zimbabwean gold mine or shadow market or whatever for the nth time. Also, kind of got the feeling he was taken in by some of the cons by the end (not that surprising, Maria Konnikova in her book about cons has a story about an author writing a book about a conman getting taken for thousands by the guy who he knew for a certainty was a con, since he was writing a book about it!)
July 23, 2018
It starts off as your normal ho-hum ponzi scheme run by a hedge fund. Then the book takes a HARD left turn where you start to realize how stupid rich people are. Like, good god, it is unbelievable how stupid these people are. It goes into hidden markets, and then the hidden markets have even more hidden markets, and SHOCKER: None of these actually exist. It's a very fun read.
December 11, 2023
I skipped over about 150 pages of lurid conspiracy theory fodder. The book lost steam in the leadup to its supposed climax -- the scam that Sam Israel fell victim to -- instead of quitting while it was ahead. (It was ahead after it described how he lost his investors' money and lied to them. Classic fraud. You love to read a book about it.)
November 14, 2023
A book which is fast paced, yet difficult to follow or care much about. The story of a con artist, working the American financial market with many twists and near misses. Generally interesting, more so towards the end, but not a book to saviour
January 29, 2024
I understand why this was written by a crime writer instead of a finance writer because the second half truly is an insane ride of conspiracy theory fever dreams but I just wish the financial aspects were more thought through… why did anyone involved think this made any sense
April 20, 2025
it could be an interesting story, but it doesn't get started until halfway through the book. at the 50%. mark, the con starts to be laid out. the first half is just about a sad, egotistical man trying to make a quick buck
April 26, 2025
This was an entertaining book but I wish the author tried to adjudicate more of the conspiracy rather than just telling the story blandly. The reader leaves the book not knowing quite how much is a con and what has a shred of truth.
August 17, 2017
good at the start, padded out a lot (and a bit tedious) particularly around the conspiracy theories in the middle and a little too quick at the end ...
October 7, 2018
Good Book
Very interesting story. Thought it was just about a Ponzi scheme but it's much more than that I would recommend
Very interesting story. Thought it was just about a Ponzi scheme but it's much more than that I would recommend
April 21, 2024
Like Madoff but smaller, amateur, and unhinged. Hardly the wildest con ever on wall street..
June 19, 2024
Reads like a thriller but nonfic
Read
December 6, 2024Truth is stranger than fiction
A crazy - but true - story about fraud, wealth, the stock market, A shadow market, spies, conspiracies, treasure and more! A fun read
A crazy - but true - story about fraud, wealth, the stock market, A shadow market, spies, conspiracies, treasure and more! A fun read
May 3, 2025
Extraordinary story of a con man who himself falls victim to an elaborate con. The author tells this story with nuance and complexity. A pleasure to read.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 24, 2025
This one went pretty crazy! Audiobook
December 3, 2019
Fascinating read. How does one man of such intelligence become so dependent on another who takes them down and destroys their life?
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