Financial Planning

You have to admire someone's attempt at securing their financial future, even if it wasn't with their own money, when with a contraband cell phone within a prison cell you can accomplish the following:

Open a bank account with Charles Schwab in the name of a billionaire.

Convince the financial giant to transfer $11 million from the billionaire's account to a precious metals dealer in Idaho to buy 6,106 American Eagle gold coins. (My guess is these are the $10 denomination coins, as opposed to the Double Eagle $20 coins.)

Hire a private security company to take the coins from Boise, Idaho to Atlanta on a chartered plane.

After delivery was confirmed, the inmate Arthur Lee Cofield, contacted the owner of a six-bedroom house on 1.4 wooded acres in Atlanta and offered to buy the property.

The deal was sealed with a $720,000 cash down payment, with the balance later paid in cash as well.

(The property is pictured above, and personally, it does nothing for me. I wouldn't have bothered with that one. But then again, when you're doing this from a jail cell, you might not get all the real estate listings.)

Mr. Cofield did have some outside accomplices who helped provide documentation in the form of a utility bill and a photo of the driver's license for the billionaire's name he was using, Sidney Kimmel, to get the ball rolling in opening the initial account with Charles Schwab. From there, one thing happily led to another, until it didn't.

The good news for the Feds who have cracked the case is that Mr. Cofield is already in prison serving a 14-year prison stretch in a Georgia state prison for armed robbery, and is awaiting charges for attempted murder in an unrelated case, also in Georgia. There is no manhunt underway.

None of this happened overnight. It started in June 2020 when the call was made to establish the account with Charles Schwab, and continued until the just announced indictment in 2022.

The real Sidney Kimmel is a 94-year-old "fashion mogul" who bankrolled several movies that had high returns. No mention is made how Mr. Cofield picked Mr. Kimmel out to impersonate, but it worked for quite a while.

Jose Morales, the warden of the unit that housed Mr. Cofield commented that Mr. Cofield "was a shrewd, intelligent individual who could con you out of millions."

The moral to the story is that as good as a con man as the 31-year-old Mr. Cofield has proven to be, he wasn't able to con his way out of 14-year prison sentence, or pending charges for attempted murder. 

If you're going to commit white collar crime, it's best not to do it while you're already in prison.

But I'm sure he had fun doing it.

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