Dear CIGAs,

The following is the nature of all the beasts.

2 Money Managers Held in New Wall St. Fraud Case
By ZACHERY KOUWE
February 26, 2009

For two decades, Paul Greenwood and Stephen Walsh looked like Wall Street wizards.

Their supposed investment prowess lured hundreds of millions of dollars from public pension funds and universities and earned the two lavish trappings of success: stately homes, a stake in the New York Islanders and, for Mr. Greenwood, a horse farm that once belonged to Paul Newman.

But on Wednesday morning, federal agents arrested the two money managers on accusations filed by the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York in what has become all too familiar on Wall Street: Their investment fund was in fact a $667 million fraud — a small-scale version of the $50 billion fraud that Bernard L. Madoff is suspected of orchestrating.

But unlike Mr. Madoff, who is accused of masterminding a global Ponzi scheme, Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh simply stole their investors’ money, the authorities said. Their two firms, the WG Trading Company and Westridge Capital, misappropriated funds from a host of deep-pocketed investors, including state and city pension funds, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

Theirs is the latest in a series of alleged Wall Street frauds that have come to light as the bear market has deepened, exposing wrongdoing that was hidden in good times, when so many were making money. Indeed, federal agents arrested two other money managers on Wednesday in separate fraud cases.

Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh never developed the sort of wide following that Mr. Madoff had enjoyed. But their arrest is nonetheless a startling turn of events for the pair, who first rose to prominence on Wall Street in the 1980s. They had devised a computerized trading program called Shark, which enabled traders to spot investment opportunities in the stock, bond and futures markets.

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