Old Mrs Grey

Final domino falls in Gryphon fraud case

The final domino has fallen in the federal case against Gryphon Financial, a Staten Island boiler room with alleged ties to the Gambino crime family.

Baldwin Anderson, a salesman at the firm, pleaded guilty to fraud charges last week shortly after his trial kicked off in a Brooklyn federal courtroom. All of the 18 Gryphon employees charged with helping cheat investors out of $20 million between 2005 and 2010 have now pleaded guilty and face sentencing next month.

Mr. Anderson, who is 57 and sold mattresses before landing a job at Gryphon, faces up to 21 years in prison according to a spokesman for the federal prosecutor's office in Brooklyn. His lawyer, Michael Padden of the federal public defender's office, didn't return a call.

Gryphon was a pretty brazen fraud. Its employees falsely claimed to be graduates of the most elite universities and falsely claimed that investment legend George Soros lauded them as "incredible."

Another member of this not-so-crack sales team was Michael Scarpaci, a former general sales manager at Nissan of Queens and, according to a federal indictment in a separate case, an organizer of "various illegal gambling operations" for the Gambino organized crime family. Those operations included an online sports-betting venture and a regular high-stakes poker game. Mr. Scarpaci, a father of four, pleaded guilty to racketeering in the Gambino case and last month was sentenced to up to 18 months in prison.

Gryphon was founded and run by Kenneth Marsh, a broker who bounced around Wall Street's dodgier precincts for years. He worked at 14 firms, including Barron Chase and Salomon Grey, which regulators expelled from the industry in 2002 and 2006, respectively. In 2007, Mr. Marsh was also barred from the business. Nonetheless, he continued to operate Gryphon out of a Staten Island shopping center, although he told clients that his firm was located in a Wall Street office tower. Among the assets Mr. Marsh agreed to forfeit as part of his guilty plea was his black 2007 Porsche 911 Turbo, valued at $60,000.

A former attorney for Mr. Marsh said the broker suffered from bipolar disorder and regularly overstated his accomplishments. While Mr. Marsh fleeced brokerage customers, he also seems to have scared some of the people who lived near him.

One of his neighbors in Staten Island, Joan Gilchrist, said in a letter to the court that she feared Mr. Marsh, calling him the "raging bull in our neighborhood" who "deemed it upon himself to harass and threaten us daily." The 77-year-old Mrs. Gilchrist and her husband, a Korean War veteran, sought police protection.

The Fortnightly Review › · Mrs Yeats and her husband, old and grey.

By JAMES LONGENBACH [The Nation] – The time is 1917; the place, London. The war is on. You are a young woman, attractive, well-off, fluent in French, German and Italian. Since no adequate translation of Pico della Mirandola exists, you translate the Renaissance Neo-Platonist’s Latin yourself. But while your interest in esoteric philosophy leads you to become a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, your eyes are wide open. You volunteer for the Red Cross. You are immersed in London’s literary avant-garde. After all, your best friend is married to the American poet Ezra Pound. Your friend’s mother was once the lover of W.B. Yeats, whom Pound considers the greatest living poet—hardly an idiosyncratic opinion.

You have had no love affairs of consequence. When Yeats, a 51-year-old bachelor, once again proposes to Maud Gonne (the Irish actress and political activist with whom he’d fallen in love as a young man), she declines. When Yeats then proposes to Maud’s daughter, Iseult, she also declines; Iseult would later have an affair with Pound. A month later, when Yeats proposes to you, you accept. At 11:20 in the morning on October 20, 1917, you are married in the Harrow Road Registry Office; the witnesses are Pound and your mother.

“I think [this] girl both friendly, serviceable & very able,” writes Yeats to an old friend. “She is under the glamour of a great man 30 years older than herself & with a talent for love-making,” reports your mother. Honeymooning in the Ashdown Forest Hotel in Sussex, you cast a horary (an astrological chart designed to answer a particular question at a particular place and time). “Per dimandera [domandare] perche noi siamo infelice,” you write in a language you know your husband does not understand—“to ask why we are unhappy.” The discombobulated Yeats is writing letters to Iseult; he is writing poems: “O but her heart would break to learn my thoughts are far away.” A decade later, now the mother of two young children, the wife of a Nobel Prize–winning poet, you write “burn this when read” at the top of a letter to a close friend: “had I known that all this might happen I should certainly never have had a family!”

This is one way of describing the life of Bertha Georgie Hyde Lees Yeats…When asked how it felt to “live with a genius,” George replied, “Oh alright, I never notice.” Her devotion did not wobble, but she was no one’s fool.

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