Harvey Guillén

And the trail of that delusion ultimately leads back to Joe.

It's one thing to raise money.

It's another thing to make money, to turn a profit, right?

Well, Joe's primary plan for turning his club's money into more money is to revisit his greatest failure.

trading.

Remember when he went to Chicago, lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then the government revoked his trading privileges for 10 years?

Yeah, Joe sees an easy way around that.

All he has to do is change his name.

So Joe Gramsci becomes Joe Hunt, and he's ready to trade again.

But the problem is, he's way better at convincing people to invest money than investing it himself.

This one time, he gives a presentation to the stockholders of a major company as part of a potential merger deal, and by the end of it,

They make him president of the company, chairman of the board, and give him complete control over its $12 million of assets.

But Joe, and everyone else in his little fraternity, can't seem to put that money to work.

Joe's just proven he can run a Ponzi scheme.

Which is all the club is.

For those who don't know what that means, it's a type of investment fraud that pays early investors by using money collected from new investors rather than actual profits.

It requires a constant flow of cash from new clients and new investments to create the illusion of success because that illusion is what attracts investors.

But the thing about Ponzi schemes is the people running them don't necessarily think they're doing something wrong because they always see a way out.

They just need their next bet to pay off so they can stay afloat long enough to take someone else's

money.