Hello from San Diego.

The Day of the Dead is a wonderful celebration that, despite the name, is a number of days in which the dead are honored. It is both a happy and sad occasion with dancing and music. It starts one day after Halloween on November 1. This is the Day of the Innocents, when legend says that deceased children can return to talk with their families for 24 hours. The next day the Day of the Dead celebration begins. Families remember other members who are gone by preparing meals and elaborate altars containing the favorite foods, photos, and other possessions of the departed. Marigolds are everywhere and children and adults paint their faces and dress up like ghouls. The Day of the Dead begins early in San Diego. In October, several cities around San Diego had festivals with food, decorations, music, costumes and all kinds of things for sale. On this side of the border, the altars are often arranged in the trunks of cars.

Here are some photos from the celebration in El Cajon.

The Biggest Fraud in History?

Suppose your grandfather and then your father made a fortune in a company they founded and built. You’ve been living well on the dividends from the stock you own for your whole life. The money is so vast you can hire someone to manage it for you, which allows you to follow your passion for horses. You live alone in a small hamlet in the Swiss Alps and don’t need to trouble yourself about money. What a fat target you are to scammers.

That was what happened to Nicolas Puech, one of the heirs of the Hermès fortune. Hermès is a French luxury clothes producer best known for its scarves and handbags. Puech had the largest individual holding of the company’s shares. He left management of his fortune to Éric Freymond, a money manager his family had introduced him to. Their relationship grew so close that Freymond claimed they were lovers.

Freymond was the son of a prestigious private banker in Geneva. What Puech didn’t know was that he was accused of stealing client funds and was forced to leave his father’s bank and start his own firm. He was then fined for insider trading and sued for breach of trust by actress, Ursula Andress.

The secret sales of the Hermès stock evidently began in 1999. Puech had signed a sweeping agreement to allow Freymond to manage and dispose of assets. Freymond surrounded Puech with a coterie of advisors and lawyers closely connected to himself. Freymond and one of his lawyers convinced Puech that his family was out to get him and advised him not to talk to relatives or the press, not to use cellphones, and not to tell anyone his whereabouts. One memo said, “Remember the most harmless questions are the most dangerous.” Evidently Freymond sold the Hermès stock to its arch competitor, LVMH. It was done through a number of difficult-to-trace companies. Puech said he never authorized sale of his shares. The owner of LVMH claims not to have known that the shares he bought originated from Puech. The value of the shares has almost tripled since the sale occurred.

So what are some of the things Freymond evidently did with the proceeds? He transferred money to investments of people close to him, bought stocks and art he speculated on, and gave money to himself. Puech got wind of the embezzlement when he asked Freymond to transfer a million Swiss Francs to his longtime housekeeper and the housekeeper’s wife. The housekeeper never received the money.

Puech may have been a rube, but he also knew how to dig up a paper trail. He commissioned an audit that revealed all the secret sales. He sued Freymond. As the audit and the authorities closed in, Puech discovered that Freymond had sold the house he lived in to a foundation. He is 82 and apparently has nothing left, a loss that is estimated at $15B. And Freymond? He apparently jumped in front of a train. Sounds like a good premise for a crime novel, doesn’t it?

No matter how much money you have, it won’t protect you from your own ignorance and the world’s cruelty.

My Events

I was delighted to be featured in a new app for book readers called BookBase. The virtual book-club & social reading app aims to take the traditional in-person book club experience into a smartphone app. This seems great for younger people who don’t use laptops as much as us old people do. The three founders of BookBase were students who came up with the idea while in college at Long Beach State. They are Elias Babaalian‑Morales, Jaelyn Gutierrez, and Nathen Deo. The objective is to facilitate reading together, discussion, recommendations, and moderated book-club style interactions. By downloading the app, readers can comment and interact with an author of a book featured each month by the creators of BookBase.

My first crime novel, Murderabilia, is being featured as BookBase Gold in November. The BookBase team met me in in Balboa Park and Nathen Deo conducted an interview about Murderabilia. His interview is featured on the site for subscribers. Each week the virtual readers will read 16 chapters from the book. They then can pose questions on the chat and I will answer them.

Here’s a picture of the team and me together.

Check out BookBase. All you need is an iOS or Android phone. It’s a very novel (pun intended) concept. The website is

https://bookbaseapp.com/

I had a fun audio interview with Adam Greenfield on his podcast, The Written Scene. It seems like we talked about everything. Here’s what Adam said we covered.

Here is what Adam said we covered:

“In this episode of The Written Scene, Carl opens up about revisiting hard scenes that are part truthful, having the willingness to fail as a poet on public stage, understanding the minds of criminals, making up ghost stories as a kid, learning fast how good people can be at their craft, not being ready to put in the effort into being a writer, finding poetry in fiction, reading books that require interpretations, writing the hero’s arc and giving morality to villains, craving empathy and connection with a character, being impacted as the writer as much as the reader is, preferring to write longer stories over short stories, why the first draft of his first scene is always written by hand, and much more.”

Tune it in on the following:

Online: https://thewrittenscene.transistor.fm/…/episode-97-carl…

Spotify:

YouTube (audio only):

A Free Primer on How to Tell a Story

Would you like a free training manual on how to tell a story? Picking the right story and telling it well are keys to making a sale or inspiring a donation. The primer in the link below divides elements of storytelling into 28 short sections. As a subscriber you can get it for free to download from this link:

https://carlvonderau.com/thank-you-for-subscribing/

Saving Myles

How about a good read for the Fall?

Grab Saving Myles

All the Best,
Carl