Laurie Schneider, alleged "Ponzi princess," NY Post
As we rounded up our first group of inductees, we knew who was missing. We have profiles of con artists from the 1860s and the 1960s. We have crooks from Brooklyn and Sweden. We have pastors and CEOs. But we don’t have a single woman in the Hall of Infamy. Sure, women figure prominently in these stories. Some of them are pretty interesting, like the long-lashed Tammy Faye, who was married to Jim Bakker. One woman – Betty Payne – ended up behind bars for helping her husband run his con. But, like the female characters in a blockbuster action film, these women are peripheral. They didn’t engineer the cons; they played supporting roles.
So where are the women con artists? Is it lack of opportunity – a kind of criminal’s glass ceiling? Or maybe they’re better at not getting caught?! We’ve speculated and joked about the reasons; now we’re determined to feminize the Hall of Infamy. We’ve already received several nominations. The first arrived on the heels of the site’s launch in July, after Leah Garchik wrote about it in her San Francisco Chronicle column. She noted the popularity of the name “Bernie” amongst our con artists (Cornfeld, Ebbers and Madoff), as well as the absence of women. One of Garchik’s readers sent in a suggestion – a Long Island woman who allegedly ran a real estate-based Ponzi Scheme. I filed the woman’s name away in order to keep an eye on her: she was a “person of interest” – she wasn’t facing formal charges and she certainly hadn’t been found guilty in a court of law, which is a criteria for a contemporary inductee to the Hall of Infamy.
I was thinking about women con artists recently and did a quick search of the alleged con artist (Laurie Schneider) and the nickname she was given by Garchik’s reader: “Ponzi Princess.” To my surprise, I found an article that appeared just two weeks ago in the New York Post. The story included this quote from an investor, who claims to have lost $200,000 to Schneider: “Madoff is the king. She is like a little Ponzi princess. And no one has done anything about it.”
It appears that someone has done something about it; Schneider’s lawyer confirmed that the Brooklyn US Attorney’s Office has begun an investigation into the alleged scam, which is said to involve phony investments and the flipping of non-existent real estate. The alleged fraud may have taken in as many as 50 victims, who lost as much as $30 million, according to the US Bankruptcy Court trustee assigned to the case.
Perhaps it’s the (relatively) small scale of the crime that make this alleged con artist a “princess” next to Madoff’s “king.” Or perhaps because women are so rarely accused of con artistry, they make for a novel story and seem to need a cute nickname. Whatever the case, I happen to agree with the reader of Garchik’s column, who wrote of her reasons for wanting to see the Ponzi princess on this site: “I certainly do not want the world to think that only men could be sick schemers.”
Can you suggest any women (past or present, under investigation or convicted) to our equal opportunity website devoted to sick schemers?
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