In years past, if you won every single hand at the Blackjack table for awhile, it wouldn’t be long before you found yourself in a basement room with Robert DeNiro and a ball-peen hammer. Hedge fund clients ain’t no Robert DeNiro.

Grieve, who managed Finvest Asset Management LLC and Finvest Fund Management LLC, created two “sham” firms that purportedly vouched for accounting and profits, the Securities and Exchange Commission said today in a complaint at federal court in Manhattan. He raised more than $11 million from U.S. clients since 2004, and began soliciting Europeans last year with “newly fabricated, fraudulent documents,” the SEC said.
“He represented to potential investors that he had 54 consecutive months of positive returns, which we found to be highly suspicious” and determined to be false, Scott Friestad, an SEC attorney overseeing its lawsuit, said in an interview.

I feel sorry for the fund that actually has a statistically improbable, but legitimate, record since this is going to be the new “smell test” for awhile.