Peregrine Financial Group (PFGBest)

As employees reported to Peregrine Financial Group (PFGBest) in Cedar Falls, Iowa, to begin work on Monday morning, July 9, 2012, something was amiss. Some workers noticed a car in the parking lot with a hose running from the tail pipe into the passenger compartment. In the vehicle was the firm’s founder and chief executive officer Russell Wasendorf Sr. The police were summoned and discovered that Wasendorf was alive but unconscious and that the vehicle also contained his suicide note, confessing that he had masterminded a long-standing fraud against his firm.

PFGBest was a commodities brokerage firm that Wasendorf had founded more than 20 years earlier in Chicago and had moved to the small town of Cedar Falls in search of a lower cost of living ...