Bruce McNall: Fall of the Collector

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The money rolled in; McNall rolled on. Here racehorses, there silver trading with Nelson Bunker Hunt. In 1988 McNall bought a money-losing hockey team, the languishing Los Angeles Kings, and boosted ticket sales by luring the great Wayne Gretzky for $15 million. He bought the Toronto Argonauts with Gretzky and comedian John Candy, and for $14 million signed Notre Dame wide receiver Raghib Ismail; this too paid off in attendance and TV contracts.

Meanwhile, McNall was spending drachmas as if he had his own tombful, except that the treasure was not his to spend, belonging as it did to his investors and creditors. "Enjoy it while you can," he said.

"I have yet to see a Brink's truck following a hearse." Smitten by his swath and style, bankers fairly begged him to borrow their money; Merrill Lynch created three coin-trading funds for him to manage. McNall set up a bogus horse-appraisal firm, listing his chauffeur as owner and appraiser.

It couldn't last. Lately, his sports enterprises were no longer making big money, and the coin trade was ailing. Creditors called, and McNall scrambled for money. His associates began playing shell games with his various "companies," faking coin sales, borrowing from one bank loan to pay on another. The Merrill Lynch funds crumbled, obliging the company to cough up perhaps as much as $30 million in compensation to 3,500 investors and leading the fbi to investigate the disappearance of $3.3 million in coins from one of the funds. Having learned from the horse's mouth, so to speak, that McNall had a certain familiarity with the smuggling trade, federal officials began looking more broadly into his books and found his tangled web.

From jail, the irrepressible faker can be expected to spend his leisure time discoursing to rapt fellow prisoners on his fabulous finagles, the reform policies of the Emperor Augustus and the spellbinding saga of the Honus Wagner baseball card with the $400,000 price tag. Betweentimes he can play Monopoly and catch up on his television. And when he gets out, he may be invited to lecture on collectibles at UCLA.