"Soon, the clergyman who collected rare valuables, who was driven around in a fancy car and who boasted of lecturing at the University of Oxford, was served three different search warrants and questioned by the FBI.
He traveled to the UK six times a year or more. As Stajduhar recalls, he would regularly pay up to $6,000 for a roundtrip ticket in first class.
According to documents from an Ohio-based insurance company, Sigillito owned a fifteenth-century book from Germany, insured for up to $120,000. His copper oil lamp, unearthed in the Holy Land some 2,000 years ago, was valued at nearly $30,000. He also collected expensive antique maps, Persian rugs and British jewelry. Stajduhar says he was the kind of man who spent $5,000 on a bottle of wine, $1,500 on a pen and hundreds of dollars on lingerie (purchased for whom, she did not know)."
More from my "oh, how the once mighty are falling" file.
"We're stuck in the high school mentality," she says. "Everybody wants to be popular in the group, talking about how smart they were to invest. And, there's a lot of trust here. A shocking amount."
ReplyDeleteI laughed out loud on this - describes the ex-Mrs. Bing to a T