Steve Mandala is the guy who took Merrill Lynch for $780,000, and with some of the cash, bought himself a red 2006 Ferrari F430 Spider. Prior to joining the bank, he was a broker at Maxim Group who earned about $100,000 annually. He sensed that there was some money to help himself to at Mother Merrill but didn’t think he’d be able to land the gig. So, he lied and told them he was a partner at Maxim, where he managed $300 million in assets and took home $765,000 a year. This probably would not have worked at some other firm, but Merrill was a special, special bank.
“Somehow you got them to hire you because you told them you had big-time clients?” acting state Supreme Court Justice Carol Berkman said to Mandala in court, referring to Merrill Lynch.
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Reason number one that Steven Mandala not only helped himself to $780,000 from the firm, but lied to get the job in the first place: he’d obviously tasked himself with testing MER’s due diligence and background checks on prospective employees, which he rightly assumed were not up to snuff:
Mandala, who earned about $100,000 annually at Maxim, last year applied for a job at Merrill Lynch, falsely claiming he was a partner at Maxim, that he managed $300 million in client assets and earned $765,000 in compensation against $1.5 million in revenue he generated, the Manhattan DA’s Office said. After Mandala produced fake pay stubs and tax forms to substantiate his bogus claims about his Maxim work, Merrill hired him on April 24, the DA said.
Over the next few months, after Mandala had his new boss loan him the 780 grand as “an incentive,” deposited the money into his parents’ bank account, and withdrew $245,589 to buy a red Ferrari, Mandala “frequently” failed to show up to work and only brought in two or three clients, which was undoubtedly part of his undercover work to see if management was keeping tabs on people. Determining he’d seen enough, SM the “resigned via e-mail” and “asked Merrill Lynch to throw out his personal effects,” so he could focus on other projects, like scamming his woman’s father, which required a bit more attention than taking ML for a ride.
Among [his personal affects] were credit cards obtained in the name of Carlos Gomes — the dad of Mandala’s girlfriend — which the broker had allegedly used to rack up tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Mandala’s lawyer, Franklin Rothman, said Gomes’ ID had been stolen by his daughter, “who had a bone to pick with her own father.”
