Obviously, it won’t be possible to chronicle all of the fawning media coverage the various finance world moochers and looters received back when they were still viewed as conquering heroes. But this Vanity Fair piece about Walter Noel’s family is probably representative of the worst of it:
The Noel sisters of Greenwich, Connecticut, are turning tabloid-fodder sister acts (that is, Nicky and Paris Hilton) on their heads. In lieu of dancing on tables, the five Noel women have made a name for themselves by shoring up the virtues of a nearly extinct aristocracy. They’re well educated and well married, and they’re raising a pack of well-behaved, multi-lingual children while keeping their string-bikini figures intact.
[…..]The eldest sister, Corina, graduated from Yale and, while raising four daughters, works alongside her Colombian husband, Andrés Piedrahita, at the London office of the Fairfield Greenwich Group, an international hedge fund founded by Walter Noel. Lisina, a Georgetown graduate, met Yanko Della Schiava, an Italian alumnus of Aiglon College, in Saint-Tropez. She married him, and he now works at the Lugano, Switzerland, office of the Noel-family hedge fund. Ariane followed Lisina to Georgetown and Corina to London with her husband, Marco Sodi, an Italian who works for the Veronis Suhler Stevenson media-investment firm. Alix went to Brown and later married Philip Toub, an alumnus of Deerfield Academy and Middlebury College, who now works at the family office in Rio. Marisa, an all-American in lacrosse, graduated from Harvard after serving as president of its Hasty Pudding Club. She met Matt Brown, her fiancé, through Alix and Philip, and—surprise—he works not for the Noel-family hedge fund but for his own.
The Noel sisters—with not a divorce or scandale among them—seem to have heeded the wisdom of their grandmother Trudy Haegler, who once wrote up her own 10 commandments for the family’s future brides, including: “Make your husband believe that he is your Lord and Master, no matter what the feminists say”;
I like the fact that most of these of these Lords and Masters were errand boys for their wives’ fraudster father. It’s also hard not to compare with Burke’s famous description of Marie Antoinette:
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and splendor and joy.
And the enterprise that funded all the Brazilian nannies and houses in Palm Beach and Park Avenue and Southampton? You can probably guess.
Mr. Noel’s firm, including four sons-in-law as partners, now has the distinction of being the biggest known loser in the Madoff scandal, to the tune of $7.5 billion.
[….]The Fairfield Greenwich Group charged clients an annual fee of 1 percent of assets invested for providing access to exclusive hedge funds and performing due diligence on them, in addition to a fee of 20 percent on investment gains each year, according to people close to the fund’s operations. At that rate, an investment of $7 billion would have paid Mr. Noel’s company $70 million annually, and then $140 million more in a year in which Mr. Madoff reported a 10 percent gain (he steadily reported returns of 10 to 12 percent).
If Obama’s slight tax increase causes people like this to go Galt, we’re all in a lot of trouble.
Update. Sad news:
Friends of Andrés Piedrahita and Corina Noel were exchanging e-mails last week, trying to ascertain whether their Christmas trip to Mustique was going ahead as planned. It was supposed to be the usual affair; meet on Boxing Day in Barbados, then fly to the exclusive island by private jet. There they would eat their turkey in the sunshine at Yemanja, the Noel family holiday home, and enjoy views that are reputed to be the best on the island.
