Missing: One Man, Many Millions

At the end of a decade in which a bull market and initial public offering mania have made millionaires seem commonplace, we have a financial villain whose outsize chicanery and supersize embezzlement may be a match for our gaudy times. Martin Frankel, 44, a.k.a. David Rosse, a.k.a. Eric Stevens, accused of absconding with as much as $335 million through a bewildering web of insurance companies, bogus investment funds and phony charitable organizations, was, in his own charmingly inept manner, pursuing a twisted but very '90s version of the American Dream.

Few businessmen, straight or crooked, in any era have ridden that dream harder or farther than Frankel. By the time police and fire fighters responded to an alarm at his arcadian Greenwich, Conn., mansion last month to discover smoldering file cabinets full of incinerating and incriminating documents--item one on his to-do list: launder money--Frankel had constructed a financial whiz kid's Xanadu, complete with 80 trading terminals, satellite dishes, a fleet of imported cars and a bevy of female retainers he had attracted by answering personal ads and trolling the Internet. In his $3 million residence and the adjacent $2.6 million house, both paid for in cash, Frankel had accumulated all the trappings of a depraved mogul. But everything--the women, the houses, the computers, the jet and six-figure shopping sprees, even the riding crop and bondage videos--would turn out to be illicitly funded by an elegantly complex scheme reflective of Frankel's flawed brilliance and bizarre character. "He was the best I've ever seen," says Aubrey Harwell, a Nashville, Tenn., attorney investigating the case. "This will prove, over time, to be one of the greatest scams successfully perpetrated in history."

In a statement given to police during an investigation of a suicide on one of his properties two years ago, Frankel provided a glimpse into life on his estate: "The females are mostly my ex-girlfriends that I met through personal advertisements. I date a lot of women, and these girls are special to me." He went on to say he had "sexual contact" with some, but not all, of the women, and that they were not paid a salary but were given money "as they need it." Neighbors recall constant streams of limousines to and from Frankel's house at all hours. "Nobody knew who this guy was," says Phillip Russel, an attorney representing Frankel's neighbors, who are themselves financial-services professionals. "And if you spend that kind of money, then somebody knows who you are."

As a high school student in Toledo, Ohio, Frankel obsessed over financial markets. As an adult and college dropout, he fretted over the opportunities he perceived were passing him by. Of medium build, with brown hair and a diffident, stumbling, yet loquacious manner, Frankel came across as a possessor of arcane knowledge that would empower him and his clients. "He is the most inconspicuous guy you can imagine," says Jeff Creamer, a Toledo lawyer who represented two of Frankel's earliest victims. "That, coupled with what appears to be an Einstein-like devotion to the financial world, makes [people] think they have found a financial genius."