The Man Who Fooled Everybody

"You have caused terrific loss to many of your fellow Americans," said the judge. The defendant, Anthony ("Tino") De Angelis, folded his hands over his paunch and shifted nervously from foot to foot. He had pleaded guilty to four federal counts of fraud and conspiracy, and last week in a Newark courtroom, the time had come for sentencing.

Federal Judge Reynier J. Wortendyke sentenced De Angelis to ten years in prison--but with a surprising twist. Invoking a new section of the federal criminal code, he turned De Angelis over to the personal custody of U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. FBI agents will continue to question De Angelis about his tangled affairs. In August, U.S. Director of Prisons Myrl Alexander will report to the judge and 1) affirm the sentence, 2) suggest a reduction, or 3) recommend that De Angelis be put on probation immediately. If he cooperates in answering the many riddles that remain, he could go free within three months.

Embarrassed Bankers. So climaxed the latest chapter in the continuing, incredible soybean scandal--the most prodigious swindle in modern times, reaching out from the grimy waterfront of Bayonne, N.J., and involving big commodities dealers in Buenos Aires, recipients of U.S. foreign aid in Karachi, and a numbered bank account in Zurich. Sixteen companies have been bankrupted. Eleven firms controlled by De Angelis have gone under, as have two respected Wall Street brokerage houses and one subsidiary of American Express Co. Embarrassed bankers from London to San Francisco have been taken for many millions. So have De Angelis' customers, notably the Isbrandtsen Shipping Line, and such worldwide commodities dealers as Continental Grain Co. and the Bunge Corp.

The affair is far from over. The Department of Agriculture is studying measures to tighten up the easy rules for trading in grains, oils, pork bellies and other commodities. A wide variety of companies and individuals have filed a total of 160 damage claims contending that Tino De Angelis took them for $219 million.

Compared with that, Charles Ponzi, Lowell Birrell, Eddie Gilbert and Billie Sol Estes were pikers. Only Ivar Kreuger, the Swedish match king who in the 1920s defrauded investors of $500 million, ever topped Tino. More than that, De Angelis presents the classic example of how a man can exploit a complicated situation and use the credulity of high financiers for tremendous gain.

Gut Expert. De Angelis hardly looks the part of an international swindler. Short, fat and 50, he wears pearl grey ties and a perpetual look of hurt innocence. Although he pleaded guilty, he continues to blame his troubles on jealous competitors ("Powerful forces were working against me") and on the Department of Agriculture ("They called me a guinea bastard down there").

The son of poor Italian immigrants, De Angelis was forced to quit high school to support his parents. Starting out as a meat cutter in The Bronx, he devised a method for speedily dismembering hogs by slicing them up on a moving assembly line. That helped him get a $10,000 loan to open his own pork-packing plant. While still in his 20s, he built it into the largest such operation in the Eastern U.S. and sold copious quantities of meat to the federal school-lunch program.

De Angelis wisely saw that a shrewd operator could make a fortune out of two other Government programs: farm price supports and foreign aid. His idea: buy up the bulging soybean surplus, turn it into soybean oil, which is used for everything from salad dressing to paint, and ship the oil abroad--either privately or through the many Government aid programs. Between 1958 and 1962, De Angelis built a sprawling refinery in Bayonne and leased 139 oil storage tanks, many as tall as five-story buildings. Operating in a slippery, fiercely competitive industry, he outdid other companies by buying the most modern equipment, paying the highest wages and putting in the lowest bids for Government export contracts. By 1962, he accounted for three-quarters of the nation's exports of soybean and cottonseed oils, shipping 361 million lbs. All this required considerable capital--and that is how the swindle began.

Paper Mountain. To finance his rapid growth, Tino borrowed huge sums of money, using huge amounts of oil as collateral. But there was one hitch: he never had all that oil. What he did have was a mountain of paper--certificates attesting that he owned the oil. Although Billie Sol Estes at that very time was making headlines for having passed off similarly spurious paper for nonexistent ammonia tanks, the bankers and brokers never bothered to check up on De Angelis' tanks. Nor did they question De Angelis' warehouse receipts, because Tino had them signed by officials of American Express Co.

In a sense, American Express got mixed up with Tino in an effort to spur sales of its famous travelers' checks. Back in 1944, the company figure J that it could induce bankers to push the checks by performing a service for them. A subsidiary, American Express Warehousing, would store, inspect and vouch for the oil that commodities dealers commonly used as collateral for their bank loans. It was a rewarding business--De Angelis paid American Express Warehousing up to $20,000 a week--but terribly risky. If anything went wrong, Amexco's subsidiary was responsible for making good on its warehouse certificates.

Shouting Down. De Angelis' men duped Amexco with surprising ease. Often, one of them would clamber to the top of a tank, drop in a weighted tape measure, then shout down to an Amexco inspector on the ground that the tank was 90% full. Sometimes the tanks were indeed full--with water, topped by a thin slick of oil. Usually many were empty. Moreover, the tanks were connected by a jungle of pipes; Tino's men sometimes sneaked into the casually guarded tank farm on weekends, pumped oil from one tank to another. These machinations gave him an endless supply of oil certificates--and endless borrowing power. At one time he had loans out on three times as much oil as the Bayonne tanks could hold. But Tino figured--rightly--that his various and hotly competitive creditors would never get together and compare their overlapping certificates.

1-c- Equals $12 Million. In 1962 Tino set out on a fantastic scheme to corner the entire market in soybeans. He plunged into commodities futures, a frantic market of paper and promises, where fortunes are made or lost on fluctuations of a fraction of a penny. Betting that the price of soybeans would rise, Tino bought huge contracts for future deliveries of soybeans from other speculators who in turn were betting that the market would fall. He was helped by the fact that commodities markets work on bargain-basement margins of 5% to 15%--that is, big traders need to put up as little as 5% of the purchase price.

Still, his purchases were so enormous that he needed plenty of credit. He got loans from two old-line Wall Street brokers, Ira Haupt and J. R. Williston & Beane, who also handled his futures trading and pocketed commissions totaling up to $100,000 a month. For collateral, they took De Angelis' warehouse receipts for the nonexistent oil. In turn, the brokerage houses used this paper to borrow money from such eminent banks as Chase Manhattan and Continental Illinois.

What made the matter more complex was that Tino by then had grown so cocky and creative that he bypassed even the lax warehouse inspectors, forged some of his own receipts. By mid-1963, he had contracted to buy 20,000 tank cars of oil--an astonishing 1.2 billion Ibs., worth about $120 million. With every 10 shift in price, he stood to gain or lose $12 million.

Assist from the Soviets. For a time it seemed that the gamble would pay off. The market soared, thanks to De Angelis' big buying and an assist from--of all people--the Communists. Russia was clamoring to buy U.S. wheat, and when reports hit Wall Street that the Soviets' sunflower crop had also failed, rumors flared that the Russians would soon be shopping for U.S. vegetable oil. In six weeks during the autumn of 1963, soybean oil climbed from 9.20 per Ib. to 10.30. But on Nov. 15 the market cracked--and so did Tino.

On that day, the U.S. Senate broke off debate on the Russian wheat deal, and prospects looked dim. In the next 48 hours, soybean oil tumbled to 7.60. The commodities exchanges began pressuring Ira Haupt--by far the biggest broker for De Angelis--to put up another $14.1 million in margin to cover Tino's vast contracts. The Haupt brokers frantically called Tino for the money. But Tino could not make it.

Now Haupt was on the hook to the exchanges. The firm desperately undertook to cover Tino's contracts, for which it was responsible. In all, it borrowed some $30 million from U.S. and British banks. But when the soybean market failed to rise, Haupt went under.

Hundreds of Haupt's customers crowded into its 15 offices, demanding the return of the stocks that were held on account in the brokerage firm. In many cases, their stocks were held in Haupt's name, and the bankers were legally entitled to take them in payment for loans made to Haupt. The New York Stock Exchange, fearful that the scandal would shake the public's trust in the market, put up $9.5 million to pay off Haupt's anxious customers. The New York Produce Exchange halted all trading in cottonseed oil. Tino's major company. Allied Crude Vegetable Oil Refining Corp., tumbled into bankruptcy. Wall Street's Williston & Beane was obliged by a capital shortage to merge into a stronger firm, Walston & Co. Tino's dazed creditors finally began peering into those Bayonne tanks. Instead of finding 1.8 billion lbs. of oil for which they held receipts, they found scarcely 100 million Ibs.--a shortage worth $130 million.

Conflicts & Claims. There was no shortage of losers. Among the many firms still tied up in knots of litigation: -- The banks: They have filed towering claims against American Express Warehousing, contending that it must make good the oil that its subsidiary vouched for. The Morgan Guaranty Trust Co. claims $3,273,000, the Bank of America $11.4 million, Chase Manhattan $17 million, and Continental Illinois $34 million.

>The brokers: D. R. Comenzo Co., a firm that handled some of De Angelis' futures' trading, has been reorganized under the Bankruptcy Act, owes about $8,000,000 to various banks, is struggling to pay off. Hapless Ira Haupt faces claims of $38 million, has itself sued American Express for $52 million.

>The oil dealers: Tino's biggest customer, Buenos Aires-based Bunge Corp., claims $18 million from American Express Warehousing. Another customer, Continental Grain, claims $5,600,000 from the same American Express subsidiary.

>The warehouses: Harbor Tank Storage Co., which issued some warehouse receipts for De Angelis, has sued him and one of his cronies. Joseph Lomuscio, for $46.5 million. Harbor Tank, in turn, faces claims from bankers and other creditors for the same amount.

By far the biggest loser stands to be American Express. Though the question of how much responsibility it has for the debts of its subsidiary is open to legal dispute, President Howard L. Clark bravely declared that the company is "morally bound to do everything it can." Claims against Amexco, filed by 43 companies, total more than $100 million. But the claimants have been squabbling among themselves over who should get how much. Lately a group of them called for a package settlement of $80 million--$60 million from Amexco and $20 million from the insurance companies covering it against fraud (American Express Warehousing was insured for $30.5 million).

The Secret. And what happened to all the money? Trustees for De Angelis' bankrupt companies have some estimates. About $40 million of it moved, quite legally, into the pockets of traders who sold soybean futures to Tino and profited when prices plummeted. Another $60 million went to bankroll the fast growth of his refining empire, cover operating losses and pay interest charges on loans. Countless millions probably stuck to the hands of his friends and cohorts. De Angelis' refinery, real estate and other assets have been sold at bankruptcy auctions for a low $3.5 million; most of these assets have since been bought by Theobold Industries, Inc., whose officers had friendly dealings with De Angelis in the past.

Tino himself drew at least $100,000 a year from Allied, boasts that he munificently gave away perhaps $3,000,000 to pals. Now he claims that he is broke. But the court pried out of him the fact that he had $500,000 in a numbered Swiss bank account; this cache has been turned over to his bankruptcy trustees. How much more Tino may have stashed away is a secret locked in the nimble brain of the fat man who fooled everybody. If he values his freedom highly, he may, under the terms of his sentence, still tell quite a story.

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