Bloomberg – In “Octopus: Sam Israel, the Secret Market and Wall Street’s Wildest Con,” Guy Lawson tells two tales. One is a diligently researched, lively account of ambition gone bad. The other, in the book’s second half, is a story of the con artist himself getting scammed in what reads like an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”
Israel came from a New Orleans family that owned a commodities trading powerhouse, and wanted to prove that he could make his own financial luck. He worked summers at Frederic J. Graber & Co., a New York brokerage, then dropped out of Tulane University to pursue a Wall Street education.
