Marin County has always been fertile ground for writers. From Anne Lamott and Martin Cruz Smith to Isabel Allende and Dave Eggers, many a tome has been launched from the land of organic milk and small-batch honey.
Add Brad Stinn’s name to the list of Marin residents who have penned a book. His effort, The Roadside Scholar: Amazing Money Lesson from Behind the Fence is a self-published investment book for those new to the idea of putting money to work. It contains plenty of tips on a higher plane than “buy low and sell high” and “be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.”
Please understand, this column isn’t a review of Stinn’s book. Rather, I want to alert readers to an interesting story—that this new paperback is smack dab in the middle of. The book is an admirable effort to help those looking for investment wisdom.
The Tiburon resident is Harvard-educated and a former corporate officer, fine qualities for an investment author. However, the book is more than a how-to on growing a portfolio. It spends plenty of time on basic finance education before rolling into how the reader might benefit from net asset value and understanding human emotion is an investor’s enemy. And like every investment book I’ve seen, its dense with information making it both informative and less than a page-turner.
But the author’s backstory is anything but boring. While Stinn played football for the Crimson and served as a CEO for Friedman’s, a Texas-based jewelry retailer, he’s also an ex-con, prisoner #75016-05. Stinn did time at the federal facility at Herlong in Lassen County behind convictions on securities fraud, conspiracy and mail fraud. In 2009, a federal judge in Brooklyn sentenced Stinn to 12 years and he was released into a residential reentry program last year.
Stinn wasn’t the original target of the investigation. The Justice Department opened an investigation into allegations of fraud attached to the bankruptcy of Cosmopolitan Gem, a product supplier to Friedman’s. The probe followed a lawsuit by Capital Factors, Cosmopolitan’s primary lender. That lawsuit alleged a conspiracy between Cosmopolitan execs and some of its retail customers. The CFO and controller of Friedman’s were tied to the $20 million fraud and this is where Stinn comes in.
While he wasn’t named in the DOJ action, the CFO and controller were. In the book, Stinn explains he was offered up to federal prosecutors as a bigger fish. Stinn maintains he was the victim of overzealous Brooklyn-based prosecutors and represented a get-out-of-jail-free card for the Friedman’s employees.
The reality is the “bigger fish” strategy is a standard play in the federal justice system.
Refreshingly, Stinn stops short of claiming total innocence, as he signed financial filings containing false information that injured investors, a federal crime—though he makes it clear he didn’t know the information wasn’t accurate. And he points out he never sold a share of Freidman’s stock, so he didn’t profit from the fraud. The CFO and controller received probation for giving Stinn up—and Stinn went into the system.
While a guest of the feds, Stinn became a convenient cause. In 2015, attorney Sidney Powell penned an article for the observer.com (owned by Jared Kushner, former President Trump’s son-in-law), making the case Stinn had been wrongly incarcerated. While Powell advocated for Stinn, the series of articles was more of a cudgel to batter the nomination of Attorney General Lorretta Lynch. Powell made the case that Stinn was a victim of Lynch’s corrupt prosecutors as Lynch appeared for Senate confirmantion.
If Powell’s name sounds familiar, it’s no accident. Powell, along with Trump’s personal mouthpiece Rudy Giuliani, led an effort to keep Trump in office, following his defeat. In numerous legal filings and news conferences, the pair made a case that Trump was the victim of vast conspiracy to steal the election involving rigged voting machines, a dead Venezuelan dictator, Cuba, Antifa, billionaire George Soros and the Clinton Foundation.
They say you can’t make this stuff up. Clearly, that’s not the case. Making it believable is a different matter altogether.
Stinn points out his jury initially didn’t return a unanimous verdict, that one juror was unconvinced of his guilt. But that juror changed her mind, and then recanted. Stinn says that should have resulted in a mistrial.
Instead, the juror was replaced, and Stinn was found guilty.
His case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, where the court declined to hear the appeal.
I admire Stinn’s courage, it takes bravery to stand up today and talk about being in the slammer. On the flipside, it’s an intriguing book hook.
