for $30,000,000+ and acting extremely wealthy. He drove around my neighborhood in a series of different Ferraris at all times of the day and did not seem to work.

He made friends with many of the most important people in the community and started associating with movies stars and others. Everyone liked him a great deal. He regularly went out for dinners where he ordered $1,000 bottles of wine and mesmerized people with his conspicuous consumption. He got on the guest list of the best clubs in town and spent $10,000 or more on “bottle service” at these clubs. He also allegedly owned hundreds of thousands of dollars in watches.

In addition, his wife had things like $30,000 Hermes purses and an extremely expensive wardrobe and jewelry. She was probablyadorned with $100,000+ in clothes, jewels and a purse every time she left the house. Women I knew started looking up to her and considered her to be a real social presence.

I went out to dinner with the guy one night and concluded he might be a gangster.

He told me he was in private equity. When I started mentioning various terms and major firms in this field, he did not seem to know what I was talking about. During dinner, he seemed overly concerned with other people, pecking orders, who owned what house, had a given title, owned a given business, how much money one person had compared to another, and who had a lesser model of a car than another person. He was obsessed with what other