October 23, 2025 • 40 mins
Before Costa Rica, there was Wall Street. John Bender has a mind built for numbers - and makes a vast fortune betting against the crowd. Friends describe him as brilliant, a little arrogant - and haunted. John’s academic parents are relieved when he decides to escape the world of high finance and build a different kind of empire in the trees - but it will prove to be a decision with dark consequences.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It is time for us to realize that we're too
great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
It's the nineteen eighties. Ronald Reagan is President, Wall Street
is King. Bob Watchdell, then in his forties, was on
his way home after a long day on the Philadelphia
Stock Exchange.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
I saw a young guy with another guy and they
were on the doorstep of one of these pretty houses.
They were playing Go, the Chinese game.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Bob was a clever guy. He majored in chemistry, had
a PhD in philosophy, was a competitive backgammon player, and
an ex professional gambler. He stopped to watch the two
young men in their twenties compete.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
And this one guy, strapping young fellow was giving the
other kid he was playing a big handicap, a nine
stone handicap, which is sort of like giving somebody a
queen in chess or something like that. It's a huge,
huge handicap, and beating him easily. And that got my interest,
and I started talking to the kid, and that was
(01:15):
John Bender. He was kind of attractive. He was six
feet tall, burly, curly hair, and he had a nice,
you know, sardonic way about him. Where it was clear
that to him, ninety nine point nine percent of the
world were idiots.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Bob told him he was working in finance trading options.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Then he said, oh, you know, that's what I've always
dreamed of doing. I said, well, maybe I can do something.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
So Bob called his financiers, most of them professional gamblers,
and told them about this brilliant kid he'd found they
should take him on. That, in short, was how a
twenty year old John Bender, a physics major who turned
down a place at Harvard, got his first job on
(02:02):
the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. Bob had made another good bet.
His guy would prove to be one of the most
successful financiers on Wall Street. John would make millions, reportedly
six hundred million dollars of personal wealth. That chance encounter
(02:23):
would change the course of John's life. Those millions would
pay for the Bender's place in paradise, but they would
also be fought over, bitterly fought over by business associates,
and crucially, those millions would be presented as a motive
when one of the Benders was accused of murder. From
(02:54):
Exactly Right Media and iHeart Podcasts produced by Blanchard House,
this is Helen Heaven. I'm Becky Milligan, Chapter four, A
(03:24):
Beautiful Mind. Anne and John were traumatized by the ambush
outside Rosemary's house. We know that the couple were increasingly reclusive,
John was obsessed with orchids. They've hired a former police
(03:45):
chief to protect them. Meanwhile, Anne's health keeps getting worse
despite John's attempts to find a cure for her. And
still no one in the valley really knows anything about
these two except that money is no problem. So what
kind of man makes six hundred million dollars? Well, let's
(04:06):
rewind the beginning. When John was a schoolboy.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
I remember one conversation I had with him about a
multiple choice tests which he did not do well on,
and I talked to him about it, and he explained
to me how the question was wrong and the answer
that they were giving was wrong, and they didn't understand
what they were doing. And I said, John, if you
(04:34):
want to do well on his test, what you have
to do a cigurette? What the people did test want
you to do? What's the answer that they think is right.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
I'm at Paul and Margi Bender's home in Phoenix, Arizona.
John's parents paul Is a distinguished legal academic, and Margie
a teacher. Back then in the nineteen seventies, they knew
they had a bright kid on their hands, not just bright,
but with an insatiable curious to the point of being
easily frustrated. And from the outside it might have appeared
(05:06):
he was a little arrogant.
Speaker 4 (05:08):
He was always very critical and combative.
Speaker 5 (05:11):
In that way, I knew he was very intelligent.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
One of his old friends and colleagues, Jonathan Kaplan, wrote
this on his blog about John. It's voiced up by
one of our team.
Speaker 6 (05:22):
I never saw anyone do puzzles as well as him. Ever,
John would hear or read the puzzle, then give you
the answer. I never ever saw him hesitate, no matter
what the source material. He always had the right answer immediately.
I never saw anyone do puzzles as well as him.
Speaker 5 (05:39):
He would do well to get with raising the test,
but it was not the enthusiasm with which he would
go after the things that really struck him as worthwhile
or really interesting or complicated, and they were.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
Mostly complicated things in mathematical type of things he was on.
There was a math team at school. What they competed
around and they did very well, and the timulation enjoy that.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
It was natural then for John to go from maths
to physics, a subject his dad had studied too before
law school, but hadn't found that easy. For John, though,
it was a breeze he saw.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
It was not a surprise that he measured in physics
and that he was working in a lab with some
physicists that seemed to be comfortable for him to do.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
His parents saw a life in academia for their son.
The idea of that pleased them. He was going in
the right direction, and how did this super clever student relax? Well.
He liked playing games, but only ones that stretched his mind,
like go. Go was invented by the Chinese two five
(06:52):
hundred years ago, and it's thought to be the most
complex game ever devised by man. There's a checkerboard and
the competitors play with white and black stones. You have
to be really brainy to play well, so naturally it
appealed to John. There was even a go club a
few blocks away, run by Phil Strauss, who fancied himself
(07:15):
as a pretty good player.
Speaker 7 (07:18):
We met at the breakfast room table in my house.
Speaker 8 (07:22):
Somehow John showed up and wanted to learn how to
play Go, and I taught John how to play. I'm
a smart, analytical guy, and within a year he was.
Speaker 7 (07:37):
Significantly better than I. I mean, it took my breath
away how fast he got good.
Speaker 9 (07:45):
I mean just amazing.
Speaker 7 (07:47):
This is a peculiar game, and it appeals to peculiar people.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
If you were really committed. The highlight of the year
was the Go Congress, where the best players in the
world would gather to talk, shop, play tournaments, and hang
on the words of the game's masters. John being the guy,
he was moved seamlessly from student to teacher. It would
become a pattern in his life. So this new player
wasn't in the audience he was giving the lecture.
Speaker 7 (08:15):
It was very unusual for an amateur to give a talk,
but John was an unusual person and gave a talk
on how he approached Go. I remember his style as
a Go player, and what I remember that I think
is significant, probably in terms of the rest of his life,
(08:37):
is that he was only concerned with ideas and go,
and to be an expert Go player you need to
do ideas and details. You know, to a Go player,
he seen arrogant because he was fixed in his view
of this is what's important.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
He also had high expectations of his own nobilities, that
he could solve everything and by using his immense intellect,
he could always win. It explains why he believed he
could find and develop a cure for Anne's lymes disease,
which he never did, and when it didn't work out,
he was hard on himself, seeing it as a failure
(09:19):
that he had let himself and everyone else down. And
at these times he could spiral down into a dark
place which he would find difficult to pull himself out of.
(09:39):
There's something else we heard a lot about John. He
didn't like being told what to do.
Speaker 4 (09:44):
You know.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
He had what is sometimes called a problem with authority.
Speaker 4 (09:49):
I was teaching in all law school then, and I
was talking to about something, and he got really upset
about the fact that people were telling me what to do,
my clients, or the cord was telling me. He was
very uncomfortable with that.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
That problem would exist in the science lab too.
Speaker 4 (10:05):
If you go into a physics department at a university,
you're in an apartment and you've told what to do
by the chairman and the mean and all that kind
of stuff. And he was always uncomfortable with that kind
of arrangement, so.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
In the end, when it came to a career choice,
he went in an entirely different direction, turning his back
on academia and his parents' expectations, leaving them baffled.
Speaker 4 (10:31):
We were assuming he was going to go to graduate
school in physics because that's what he was measuring, and
he'd worked with people in the physics department while he
was an undergraduate.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
But John told his dad that the physics lab wasn't
for him.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
He decided to invark on a career as basically as
a gambler.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Yep, johna decided to forget physics and become a gambler.
It's not what his parents had planned for their eldest.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
Asked them what was doing and he said he was
playing blackjack and he said, I said, well, what do
you do? He said you can make money that way
and I said, yeah, I guess you can, but it's
not reliable. He said, oh, no, it's quite reliable. And
I said how do you do that? And he said,
you card count and you just watch what cards are
out and then that changes the odds, and when the
(11:19):
odds are in your favor, you start playing, and he said,
I'll show you, and so we got a couple of
decks of cards and we went through a bunch of
hands and he kept winning. He got to be very
good at it, obviously.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
So John would go to the nearby casinos and play
blackjack into the early hours and was making good money. Blackjack,
just in case you don't know, is a card game.
You need to get to twenty one or as close
as possible. If you go over, you lose.
Speaker 10 (11:48):
I remember being in Atlantic City with John where he
used to card count.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Steve, one of John's old friends.
Speaker 10 (11:58):
And they told him no that he had been body
and they kicked us out and he wasn't allowed to
go back to Atlantic City.
Speaker 9 (12:06):
We laughed.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Was he good at it?
Speaker 9 (12:08):
Amazing?
Speaker 2 (12:09):
And it's that reputation that served him well in his
next career on Wall Street.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
I think it was the gambling that attracted people to
invest with him.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Back to that street corner in Philadelphia, where this incredibly
smart guy who questioned authority and had an innate belief
that he could always win, bumped into stockbroker Bob Watchdow.
A door opened on a new world, though it wasn't
actually completely new.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
It turns out that he'd done a lot of work
in stock trading anyway, even when he was under age.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
John was only seventeen.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
There was an office of some brokers right at the
foot of the stock exchange, and he would sit in
that office watching the ticker and make trades. You know,
had made a good living, you know, just by himself,
with no bankroll.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
And now in nineteen eighty five, age twenty and finance
by Bob's gambling friends, John embarked on his new career.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
You're in what they call a pit, and it's like,
that's not a bad description of what it is, but
you had to stand the whole time, for seven or
eight hours in a crowd of idiots, screaming, marking out
their turf, cursing at you. Meanwhile, you're looking up at
a board that has a bunch of numbers, trying to
(13:42):
figure out patterns and trying to figure out prices. You
have brokers coming in and out with orders.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
This is where John Bender found himself on the path
to making his fortune.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
Before we knew it, John was down on the floor
and he was immediately just brilliant at it. One of
my friends who'd put the thing together the organizer of
the financial group. He said to me, well, Bob, you
have to teach John the ropes. So we're going to
(14:14):
give you eight percent of his winnings or whatever, but
you have to be there and you have to, you know,
explain things to him. And I said, there's no way
I can explain anything to him. He could only explain
things to me, and it would be futile for me
to even try.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
At the time, there were regular seminars for the options traders.
Someone would give a.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
Talk and then afterwards there was a little quiz and
they'd say, well, okay, you have this spread. Now what
will happen in six months if volatility does this and
the price goes up and you know, And before anybody
else could answer, John had to answer every time. And
these were all pros. These were all people who'd been
(14:56):
doing it for years and years, they're doing it their
whole lives. Always knew the answer and it was right away.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
Really, you didn't only spot his potential, but did you
suspect that there was some sort of genius inside that
young guy?
Speaker 4 (15:08):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (15:09):
I mean I was lucky. I made a lucky guest.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
So John put his brilliant mind to work, and this
time he started making serious money. But that wasn't the
only reason he got noticed. So what was he actually doing?
What is options trading?
Speaker 3 (15:27):
Basically it's you against the public. You're a middleman between
buyers and sellers of these options, and options are very
complex and difficult to value.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
It's complicated and risky. In short, an option is a
contract which gives the investor a right to buy something
at a certain date in the future at a pre
negotiated price. Basically, the investors make a bet on how
a stock will perform. If it does better than expected,
(15:57):
you're in the money. So it's suited x scam. And
for John he could use his brain to mathematically work
out how to reduce the risk, and he started to
develop all sorts of strategies and systems which would give
him an advantage over all the other traders, which I
guess by now you'd have expected him to do. Bob
(16:20):
and John began to hang out together outside work, despite
their age difference, John in his twenties Bob in his forties.
They became good buddies and went out on the town.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
He wasn't a strange genius. He was not a you know,
Mozart or somebody like. I mean, he was fun to
talk to. And he was also great with the ladies.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
When you say great, great with the women or whatever,
what does that mean.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
Yeah, I mean he was. He just had a lot
of girls like them and maybe they, you know, had
heard from their girlfriends that he was good, I mean sexually.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
He had a reputation.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Yeah, yeah, from what I know. Yeah, he was young
and handsome, and you know, he would tell me some
stories about them. He just thought of it as a
matter of fact, as that's the way life is. And
this is you know, I mean, this one's chasing me.
This one insisted that I it was sort of like
a bit of a you know, it's a bit of
(17:25):
a hassle.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
So girls were basically beating down his door. Yeah, this
could all be locker room chat, of course. And all
this being a ladies man was before he met Anne.
When they weren't in the pit or out on the town,
John did a little modeling, and Bob says he sometimes
sat as an artist model and even appeared in porn films.
Although we didn't speak to anyone who saw the evidence,
(17:48):
both Bob and John spent the early mornings in the gym.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
We actually did a lot of physical things like tennis
and working out. We did a lot of working out together.
He was quite strong, but terribly efficient when he was
working out. Could he never use the same muscle twice
without knowing why he was doing it.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Steve was twenty when he first ran into John in
the gym.
Speaker 10 (18:14):
Of course, one day I walked into the gym at
seven thirty in the morning to work out. John was
in there working out. I had never met him, and
I said, what body parts are you working today? He said,
I'm doing legs. I said, well, I have to back
(18:34):
and biceps is today? Let's go do back and biceps.
John said, oh okay. And it was kind of crazy
because John looked at me, like, who's this black guy
that's taken over?
Speaker 2 (18:51):
From that moment Tom. They were firm friends.
Speaker 10 (18:55):
And I would call John on a Saturday night and
tell him I have a poor aready that we can
go to, and he said, well, I don't know if
I can go. I said, come on, John, you're with me.
I'm black, you're a Jewish kid. I'll make sure you're okay.
And we would go hang out for the night to
see John. When a nightclub floor and dancing was funny
(19:18):
because John didn't know how to dance at all, and
we would be there for five hours. He was very
good at meeting girls, and I was the type that
wasn't good at that at all.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Did you learn from John how to how to sort
of chat up girls?
Speaker 9 (19:33):
Then, of course a lot.
Speaker 10 (19:36):
John just would wink. He would looked at them, and
he would wink at them, and then he would turn
away and if sudly, look again to see if that
person's interested, and he would kick up one ed. And
as I got older, I learned to do that by
being around job. He had very few friends, but his
friends were very, very good friends. I don't think John
(19:58):
wanted that many people around. I remember one night John
telling me that money is only green paper, and he's
going to make as much of it as you want.
He told me that, he said, you'll come work for
me one day. It never happened.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Working out was one thing John continued to do in
Costa Rica, where he had a vast gym. But with
all that bravado, Bob never heard his friend raise his
voice or have a fight. He recalls John being quiet, kind,
He had a thoughtful side, so.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
I remember him being incredibly gentle with some kind of
little insect where it was in his way or something
like that, and he just like, he's this big, strong
guy and he just moved it so gently. Like that
struck me. I never forgot that, you know, he didn't
(20:52):
swat it away or something like that or squish it.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
That was forty years ago, but Bob will never forget it,
because well, it wasn't what he expected John to do.
John was having a good time and he was making
a lot of money, but that was troubling for his parents.
One question kept coming up, Margue.
Speaker 4 (21:15):
We keep asking you what he can do with all
this money?
Speaker 2 (21:17):
What are you going to do with all this money?
It seemed to be in direct opposition to their fundamental
values in Arizona. Paul and Marghy reflected on it.
Speaker 4 (21:27):
If he were into science or education something like that,
you would have been a lot more comfortable with that
than his going into a field that you know absolutely
nothing about him that seemed to have a lot to
do with money, because you have never been interested in no.
Speaker 5 (21:41):
I mean that's one of the things about me that
I guess nobody understands. But having a lot of money
was never something I wanted. If I had had it,
I would have spent it on somebody else.
Speaker 4 (21:49):
She is an affirmative dislike for worrying about money or
caring about it. And he's in this business and that's
all you do.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
They found his desire to accumulate more and more money
working twenty four seven very hard to understand, and the
way they talk about it, I can see how much
it worried them.
Speaker 4 (22:08):
All those people are like that. I mean they never
leave their job because their job is investing and they're
looking for things to buy and sell and it can
happen at any time, and so they always have something
with them that they can do business on. And yeah,
it was a very engrossing kind of thing to do,
(22:32):
and he really liked it. I mean it was a game,
it was a puzzle, it was something to win at exciting. Yeah, no,
I think so. And it keeps changing. I mean it's
a constant game to try to win that. I think
that's the way he looked at it, to try to
figure out what to do to win the game, and
he kept trying to do that. So, yeah, it was
(22:53):
all engrossing. When you do I don't think you can
do that and not be completely involved in it.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
The thing was that that desire to win it was insatiable.
It became all that mattered to John Well.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
He just wanted to go for it and proved that
he was right that he was never satisfied no matter
how much money he'd made, no matter how well he'd
done it, because even if he'd made a winning trade,
he could have bet more, and he should have seen
what was going to happen when I knew him. That's
all that seemed to interest him was getting to the
(23:30):
next level and doing it better and playing with the
big players.
Speaker 4 (23:34):
You know, playing with the big boys.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Playing with the big boys meant playing hardball. We've been
told that not everyone liked how he went about it,
but that didn't stop him.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
You're in that game where you're playing for high stakes.
There was no mister nice guy.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
He sounded out pretty confident when he was making these bets,
you know, putting on his positions. He knew he was clever.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
More than clever signified being way above the norm, way
above the norm.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
In nineteen ninety six, he moved into the financial big
league and set up a hedge fund Amber Arbitrage with
a man named Joel Silverman. Joel Silverman had more than
twenty five years experience in the finance world, and he
unlocked a new world for John. He knew everyone that mattered,
and in nineteen ninety six he invited John up to
(24:28):
New York and threw him a party to introduce him
to potential investors. One crucial introduction was with George Soros,
one of the most famous financiers in the world. Joel
had known him for twenty three years and had managed
money for him for ten. According to court documents, George
Soros invited John and Joel over to his home. Over dinner,
(24:52):
Joel told George about John's brilliance in the financial markets,
the enormous returns he'd made, and the speed at which
he'd made his millions. It must have gone down well.
George Soros would later invest one hundred and forty million
dollars in the new fund. The Hedge Fund was doing
incredibly well. Reportedly, John was on course to be a
(25:14):
billionaire by the age of forty. It's nineteen ninety nine
and John was booked in for a dinner.
Speaker 11 (25:31):
Date, so coming to New York did gevi There.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Jack Schwager remember him. He would visit John and Anne
in Costa Rica with his son Zach a couple of
years later. This was where they first met. As well
as being a financier himself, Jack was also the author
of the book Market Wizards, a series of interviews with
very successful traders. John had caught his eye. They were
(25:55):
meeting in a fancy sushi restaurant in New York.
Speaker 11 (25:59):
It's a guy and the hulking kind of almost think
a football linebacker type build, and he had a suit
on and a tie, and the shirt and suit seemed
to be straining, you know, from the bulk of his
frame and ditinct thing looked like this is not what
he normally wears.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
But John soon relaxed and Jack, over their meals, started
asking questions about how John had made his millions. He
found John and his methods fascinating. He turned the rule
book on its head.
Speaker 11 (26:31):
His very method of trading was kind of a Maverick
way of trading, not the way most people trade options,
and he was always looking for things that were kind
of a bit different with people were looking at.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Jack was so impressed he later invested with John and
his fund and this gives you an idea of the
sums of money we're talking about.
Speaker 11 (26:53):
You know, I kind of personally profited from from his skill. Yeah,
Like I tell people, he was probably the best investment
there ever.
Speaker 12 (27:02):
Med I think, I think I'm some ridiculous amount.
Speaker 11 (27:04):
I think I maybe made two hundred and fifty percent
on my investment that year or.
Speaker 4 (27:08):
Something like that.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Yeah, two hundred and fifty percent. Jack was struck by
something else. John confided that he had a plan, a dream.
He decided how he would use his fortune to move
(27:29):
to Costa Rica and build a nature reserve.
Speaker 4 (27:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 12 (27:33):
I interview lots of people who have been very successful
in market, said, what people do with that money ranges
quite wildly.
Speaker 3 (27:40):
I kind of admired him.
Speaker 12 (27:42):
For basically using his money for trying to preserve rainforest.
I thought that was a noble thing to do.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Bob remembers this too.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
There came a point when he didn't want to trade
anymore and where he wanted to do something with his.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
His parents were relieved and assured that John had an
endgame and an exit strategy, which they approved of.
Speaker 4 (28:07):
I wasn't interested in how much money he was making.
I was interested in money's going to do with it
because it was quite a lie, I think. And he
said they were going to buy a place to live,
and then looked around the world. They finally found this
place in Costa Rica that they bought, and then he
used a lot of the money to buy that land
and the build learn the house.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
And the move couldn't come soon enough. John was beginning
to be disillusioned with the finance world, spotting before anyone
else that one financier Bernie Madoff was up to no good.
Bernie Madoff, the guy who ran the largest Ponzi scheme
in history, worked close to sixty five billion dollars, who
(28:45):
would later be sentenced to one hundred and fifty years
in jail. John's views about Madoff came up when Jack
and his son Zach visited John in Costa Rica in
the early two thousands. Zach recalls how the conversation went.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
And He's going on and on about this particular trader,
this particular investment guy. And as he goes on, he
goes deeper. He's like, I called this person. I called
that person. Nobody's listening to me. So we started to
get like kind of irritated. The person that he was
talking about was Bernie made off. And this guy was
telling me clear as day that this man was like
a monster froster. And he's tried to contact everybody that
(29:22):
he knows and tell him that what he is doing
is impossible, can't be done. That He's poured over the
financial statements himself.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
As John moved into the world of the financial elite,
he left his old friend Bob watched her behind. Bob
had got John into finance in the first place, of course,
starting on that street corner in Philadelphia. But Bob had
now run into money trouble. The tables had turned. Bob
had watched his protege rise to the top. Now he
(29:50):
needed John's help.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
I asked John whether I couldn't do some trading with
him financing me, and he was a little bit luke warm.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
About it, but did agree to finance a new enterprise
that Bob was working on. It would be one of
John's less successful investments.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
I had come up with the idea around that time
of creating a food product.
Speaker 4 (30:14):
It would be a cheese chip.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
I'd understood that when you have a pizza and there's
a part of it that's a little crunchy and burned
and delicious.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
What did you call it?
Speaker 3 (30:25):
By the way, volcanic hyper cheese.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
It turned out someone else already had the idea.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
Once we found that out, that was it.
Speaker 4 (30:34):
My gig was up.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
That's a shame.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Was John upset about it? Did he regret giving you
or funding you?
Speaker 3 (30:41):
No, he didn't regret it. But I remember, like I
showed him my little business card and he said, oh, well,
that was really your wet dream, wasn't it.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
Bob to his regret, lost touch with his buddy John
and never got to see his place. In Costa Rica
ninety nine, at the age of thirty four, John had
met and fallen for Anne, the beautiful but troubled, fine
art brad They were living in Virginia. John was already
(31:11):
planning their new life, buying up land in the Costa
Rican jungle. But a year later things would change dramatically
for the couple. John was treated for either a mild
aneurysm or a stroke. Were not one hundred percent sure,
but it was a health scare that marked something significant.
He told Anne that he was ready to jack in trading.
(31:32):
It was time to fulfill his dream and move his
money out of America. According to the Wall Street Journal.
Following a few months recovering, John resigned from his hedge
fund and it was wound down. Their life in Costa
Rica began, But what should have been a simpler life
was anything but. Closing the business wasn't quite as simple
(31:57):
as John had hoped. It marked the start of legal
battles with former associates, including Joel Silverman, who claimed he
was owed money. Huge sums were involved, millions. John stopped
taking Joel's calls. Silverman would later contend that the profit
split had been agreed at seventy five percent to John
(32:18):
and twenty five percent to Joel. John said this was
never put in writing. The dispute would rumble on for years.
John would say in en affidavit that he believed when
the Costa Rican police arrested him on that quiet street
outside Rosemary's seed business, it was all down to Silverman
pursuing him about money he was allegedly owed, a claim
(32:40):
that was never proven. Joel Silverman's claim against John is
read by an actor.
Speaker 13 (32:45):
This is an action for breach of contract, interference with contract,
breach of fiduciary duty, conversion and unjustin Richmond, arising out
of an agreement between my client and defendant John Bender.
My client, through this action seeks an accounting and recruitment
of all the most fees, which may exceed thirty million dollars.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
While Joel Silverman has not addressed the kidnapping allegation directly
in court documents, he said it had not proved possible
to find John and serve him as he didn't know
in which country John was residing. We did try and
reach the Silverman family, but didn't receive a reply. We
understand he may not have been the only former associate
(33:25):
who felt duped by John. Others took him to court
two with similar complaints. This might explain why Michael the
Mercenary was sent to retrieve John and bring him back
to the US. The depths of the bitterness can't be understated.
It involved hundreds of millions of dollars, a genius and
a gentleman's agreement. Now in Costa Rica, John wanted to
(33:51):
find some peace of mind. He hoped to escape from
the world which was constantly snapping at his heels and
threatening to destroy his dream. He wanted to use his
brilliant brain for something entirely different. Flowers in an archived website.
Producer Poppy found the Selby Botanical Gardens Dispatch, published summer
(34:14):
two thousand and eight, featuring a picture of John Jeans
a rucksack and a sun hat in the middle of
lush rainforest. He looks every bit the adventurer and happy.
Here's Poppy with some more of that dispatch.
Speaker 14 (34:29):
This reserve is privately owned and lovingly managed by Anne
Patten and John Bender. We were invited by the generous
owners of Borakayanne to do an inventory survey of the
plants in the reserve, including orchids. This promised to be
a very exciting project since this area is well known
for its biodiversity, but is also poorly explored scientifically.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
The scientists even discovered a new species, and it was
named Gongora Boracaya nensis after the area of origin and
in honor of Anne Patten and John Bender's passion for
orchid conservation in Costa Rica. Remember Bora Kayam was John
and Anne's made up name for their home. John's parents
(35:10):
had shown us pictures of the orchids, too, vibrant pinks
and orange, almost like something from out of space or
the deepest ocean.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
I'm saying to myself, this is really unbelievable. He is
understanding the stuff, he is changing. He is understanding in
ways that other people have not understood it. I thought
that was just amazing that you can have that kind
of feeling about land and nature around you, which he
had developed with the house. That's a really puzzlive sting.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
What they had planted had truly blossomed. Remember, as Valdo said,
John was planning on using an entire floor of the
house as an orchid laboratory, but never saw it through
that archive newsletter we just heard from hidden on the Internet,
showed the joy and pride that John took in what
(36:03):
he'd created. In a way. I wish we could stop
the story here. It would have a happy ending. This
restless genius who was searching for a dream and an
inner piece had found it. He was surrounded by the
jungle animals, his flowers, and he was living in his
enormous house, his wife beside him. By two thousand and eight,
(36:27):
most of their legal battles had been settled. They invested
their remaining cash ninety million dollars into a Costa Rican
Base Trust, which was intended to protect their money and
the future of the wildlife reserve. Legally, Anne and John
now worked for the trust. The lawyer who managed it all,
(36:48):
Juan Alvarez, would have power of attorney, meaning he now
controlled John and Anne's fortune. Remember that name, who'll become
important later in our story. Crucially, the trust protected them
from future claims on their money from creditors who believed
that the Benders owed them cash. But for all the
(37:09):
positive steps, it wasn't enough. Feelings of despair arose. We
learned this was nothing new for John. Bob again if.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
He mentioned that he was on the edge in a
lot of ways emotionally a few times in his life,
but you know, it was sort of like he was
too bright to exist in the world with these other
ordinary people.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
We asked John's parents about what Anne would call his
bipolar disorder.
Speaker 4 (37:42):
I don't think we ever did a diagnosis of that,
but that's servant very clausible to me. I meant, also,
I get very depressed, and he was depressed, and I
don't know about the hypom me. Maybe that's why he
was so good at some things that he could do.
So I've never heard that feeling, but I understand that
(38:04):
the mood swings. I hadn't. Also he has, I'm probably
more than I.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
In two thousand and eight, John spiraled down into a
deep depression. Whaka John's beloved bird was killed. He was devastated,
he told Anne.
Speaker 9 (38:22):
The day after the house betraying me.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
In the next chapter, everything comes crashing down. John starts
to unravel as an email from him, which Anne later
shared with CBS, appears to show voiced here by an actor, losing.
Speaker 4 (38:43):
My fucking mind right now.
Speaker 13 (38:45):
First sick again, and now this shit.
Speaker 9 (38:47):
Today's a total fucking nightmare, and tomorrow will get worse.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
Just when I was feeling I could learn to be happy,
now I get this and I want to be dead.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
That's next time on Hell in Heaven.
Speaker 9 (39:00):
Such a total fucking loser for ever getting involved with
the scumbags.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
You've been listening to Helen Heaven from Exactly Right Media
and IHART podcasts produced by Blanchard House, hosted, written and
produced by me Becky Milligan. The producer and co writer
is Poppy Damon. Music is by Daniel Lloyd Evans, Louis Nankmanell,
and Toby Mattamol. The sound recordist and head of sound
(39:42):
and music is Daniel Lloyd Evans. The lead sound designer
is Vulcan Kiseltoog. The artwork is by Vanessa Lilac for
Exactly Right Media. The executive producers are Karen Kilgarreth, Georgia Hardstark,
and Danielle Kramer, with consulting producers Lilly Ladderwig and associate
producer Jay Elias. The creative director of Blanchard House is
(40:08):
Rosie Pye. The executive producer and head of Content at
Blanchard House is Lawrence Griselle. Listen to Helen Heaven on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your
podcasts
It is time for us to realize that we're too
great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
It's the nineteen eighties. Ronald Reagan is President, Wall Street
is King. Bob Watchdell, then in his forties, was on
his way home after a long day on the Philadelphia
Stock Exchange.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
I saw a young guy with another guy and they
were on the doorstep of one of these pretty houses.
They were playing Go, the Chinese game.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Bob was a clever guy. He majored in chemistry, had
a PhD in philosophy, was a competitive backgammon player, and
an ex professional gambler. He stopped to watch the two
young men in their twenties compete.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
And this one guy, strapping young fellow was giving the
other kid he was playing a big handicap, a nine
stone handicap, which is sort of like giving somebody a
queen in chess or something like that. It's a huge,
huge handicap, and beating him easily. And that got my interest,
and I started talking to the kid, and that was
(01:15):
John Bender. He was kind of attractive. He was six
feet tall, burly, curly hair, and he had a nice,
you know, sardonic way about him. Where it was clear
that to him, ninety nine point nine percent of the
world were idiots.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Bob told him he was working in finance trading options.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Then he said, oh, you know, that's what I've always
dreamed of doing. I said, well, maybe I can do something.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
So Bob called his financiers, most of them professional gamblers,
and told them about this brilliant kid he'd found they
should take him on. That, in short, was how a
twenty year old John Bender, a physics major who turned
down a place at Harvard, got his first job on
(02:02):
the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. Bob had made another good bet.
His guy would prove to be one of the most
successful financiers on Wall Street. John would make millions, reportedly
six hundred million dollars of personal wealth. That chance encounter
(02:23):
would change the course of John's life. Those millions would
pay for the Bender's place in paradise, but they would
also be fought over, bitterly fought over by business associates,
and crucially, those millions would be presented as a motive
when one of the Benders was accused of murder. From
(02:54):
Exactly Right Media and iHeart Podcasts produced by Blanchard House,
this is Helen Heaven. I'm Becky Milligan, Chapter four, A
(03:24):
Beautiful Mind. Anne and John were traumatized by the ambush
outside Rosemary's house. We know that the couple were increasingly reclusive,
John was obsessed with orchids. They've hired a former police
(03:45):
chief to protect them. Meanwhile, Anne's health keeps getting worse
despite John's attempts to find a cure for her. And
still no one in the valley really knows anything about
these two except that money is no problem. So what
kind of man makes six hundred million dollars? Well, let's
(04:06):
rewind the beginning. When John was a schoolboy.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
I remember one conversation I had with him about a
multiple choice tests which he did not do well on,
and I talked to him about it, and he explained
to me how the question was wrong and the answer
that they were giving was wrong, and they didn't understand
what they were doing. And I said, John, if you
(04:34):
want to do well on his test, what you have
to do a cigurette? What the people did test want
you to do? What's the answer that they think is right.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
I'm at Paul and Margi Bender's home in Phoenix, Arizona.
John's parents paul Is a distinguished legal academic, and Margie
a teacher. Back then in the nineteen seventies, they knew
they had a bright kid on their hands, not just bright,
but with an insatiable curious to the point of being
easily frustrated. And from the outside it might have appeared
(05:06):
he was a little arrogant.
Speaker 4 (05:08):
He was always very critical and combative.
Speaker 5 (05:11):
In that way, I knew he was very intelligent.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
One of his old friends and colleagues, Jonathan Kaplan, wrote
this on his blog about John. It's voiced up by
one of our team.
Speaker 6 (05:22):
I never saw anyone do puzzles as well as him. Ever,
John would hear or read the puzzle, then give you
the answer. I never ever saw him hesitate, no matter
what the source material. He always had the right answer immediately.
I never saw anyone do puzzles as well as him.
Speaker 5 (05:39):
He would do well to get with raising the test,
but it was not the enthusiasm with which he would
go after the things that really struck him as worthwhile
or really interesting or complicated, and they were.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
Mostly complicated things in mathematical type of things he was on.
There was a math team at school. What they competed
around and they did very well, and the timulation enjoy that.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
It was natural then for John to go from maths
to physics, a subject his dad had studied too before
law school, but hadn't found that easy. For John, though,
it was a breeze he saw.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
It was not a surprise that he measured in physics
and that he was working in a lab with some
physicists that seemed to be comfortable for him to do.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
His parents saw a life in academia for their son.
The idea of that pleased them. He was going in
the right direction, and how did this super clever student relax? Well.
He liked playing games, but only ones that stretched his mind,
like go. Go was invented by the Chinese two five
(06:52):
hundred years ago, and it's thought to be the most
complex game ever devised by man. There's a checkerboard and
the competitors play with white and black stones. You have
to be really brainy to play well, so naturally it
appealed to John. There was even a go club a
few blocks away, run by Phil Strauss, who fancied himself
(07:15):
as a pretty good player.
Speaker 7 (07:18):
We met at the breakfast room table in my house.
Speaker 8 (07:22):
Somehow John showed up and wanted to learn how to
play Go, and I taught John how to play. I'm
a smart, analytical guy, and within a year he was.
Speaker 7 (07:37):
Significantly better than I. I mean, it took my breath
away how fast he got good.
Speaker 9 (07:45):
I mean just amazing.
Speaker 7 (07:47):
This is a peculiar game, and it appeals to peculiar people.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
If you were really committed. The highlight of the year
was the Go Congress, where the best players in the
world would gather to talk, shop, play tournaments, and hang
on the words of the game's masters. John being the guy,
he was moved seamlessly from student to teacher. It would
become a pattern in his life. So this new player
wasn't in the audience he was giving the lecture.
Speaker 7 (08:15):
It was very unusual for an amateur to give a talk,
but John was an unusual person and gave a talk
on how he approached Go. I remember his style as
a Go player, and what I remember that I think
is significant, probably in terms of the rest of his life,
(08:37):
is that he was only concerned with ideas and go,
and to be an expert Go player you need to
do ideas and details. You know, to a Go player,
he seen arrogant because he was fixed in his view
of this is what's important.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
He also had high expectations of his own nobilities, that
he could solve everything and by using his immense intellect,
he could always win. It explains why he believed he
could find and develop a cure for Anne's lymes disease,
which he never did, and when it didn't work out,
he was hard on himself, seeing it as a failure
(09:19):
that he had let himself and everyone else down. And
at these times he could spiral down into a dark
place which he would find difficult to pull himself out of.
(09:39):
There's something else we heard a lot about John. He
didn't like being told what to do.
Speaker 4 (09:44):
You know.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
He had what is sometimes called a problem with authority.
Speaker 4 (09:49):
I was teaching in all law school then, and I
was talking to about something, and he got really upset
about the fact that people were telling me what to do,
my clients, or the cord was telling me. He was
very uncomfortable with that.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
That problem would exist in the science lab too.
Speaker 4 (10:05):
If you go into a physics department at a university,
you're in an apartment and you've told what to do
by the chairman and the mean and all that kind
of stuff. And he was always uncomfortable with that kind
of arrangement, so.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
In the end, when it came to a career choice,
he went in an entirely different direction, turning his back
on academia and his parents' expectations, leaving them baffled.
Speaker 4 (10:31):
We were assuming he was going to go to graduate
school in physics because that's what he was measuring, and
he'd worked with people in the physics department while he
was an undergraduate.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
But John told his dad that the physics lab wasn't
for him.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
He decided to invark on a career as basically as
a gambler.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Yep, johna decided to forget physics and become a gambler.
It's not what his parents had planned for their eldest.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
Asked them what was doing and he said he was
playing blackjack and he said, I said, well, what do
you do? He said you can make money that way
and I said, yeah, I guess you can, but it's
not reliable. He said, oh, no, it's quite reliable. And
I said how do you do that? And he said,
you card count and you just watch what cards are
out and then that changes the odds, and when the
(11:19):
odds are in your favor, you start playing, and he said,
I'll show you, and so we got a couple of
decks of cards and we went through a bunch of
hands and he kept winning. He got to be very
good at it, obviously.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
So John would go to the nearby casinos and play
blackjack into the early hours and was making good money. Blackjack,
just in case you don't know, is a card game.
You need to get to twenty one or as close
as possible. If you go over, you lose.
Speaker 10 (11:48):
I remember being in Atlantic City with John where he
used to card count.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Steve, one of John's old friends.
Speaker 10 (11:58):
And they told him no that he had been body
and they kicked us out and he wasn't allowed to
go back to Atlantic City.
Speaker 9 (12:06):
We laughed.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Was he good at it?
Speaker 9 (12:08):
Amazing?
Speaker 2 (12:09):
And it's that reputation that served him well in his
next career on Wall Street.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
I think it was the gambling that attracted people to
invest with him.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Back to that street corner in Philadelphia, where this incredibly
smart guy who questioned authority and had an innate belief
that he could always win, bumped into stockbroker Bob Watchdow.
A door opened on a new world, though it wasn't
actually completely new.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
It turns out that he'd done a lot of work
in stock trading anyway, even when he was under age.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
John was only seventeen.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
There was an office of some brokers right at the
foot of the stock exchange, and he would sit in
that office watching the ticker and make trades. You know,
had made a good living, you know, just by himself,
with no bankroll.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
And now in nineteen eighty five, age twenty and finance
by Bob's gambling friends, John embarked on his new career.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
You're in what they call a pit, and it's like,
that's not a bad description of what it is, but
you had to stand the whole time, for seven or
eight hours in a crowd of idiots, screaming, marking out
their turf, cursing at you. Meanwhile, you're looking up at
a board that has a bunch of numbers, trying to
(13:42):
figure out patterns and trying to figure out prices. You
have brokers coming in and out with orders.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
This is where John Bender found himself on the path
to making his fortune.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
Before we knew it, John was down on the floor
and he was immediately just brilliant at it. One of
my friends who'd put the thing together the organizer of
the financial group. He said to me, well, Bob, you
have to teach John the ropes. So we're going to
(14:14):
give you eight percent of his winnings or whatever, but
you have to be there and you have to, you know,
explain things to him. And I said, there's no way
I can explain anything to him. He could only explain
things to me, and it would be futile for me
to even try.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
At the time, there were regular seminars for the options traders.
Someone would give a.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
Talk and then afterwards there was a little quiz and
they'd say, well, okay, you have this spread. Now what
will happen in six months if volatility does this and
the price goes up and you know, And before anybody
else could answer, John had to answer every time. And
these were all pros. These were all people who'd been
(14:56):
doing it for years and years, they're doing it their
whole lives. Always knew the answer and it was right away.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
Really, you didn't only spot his potential, but did you
suspect that there was some sort of genius inside that
young guy?
Speaker 4 (15:08):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (15:09):
I mean I was lucky. I made a lucky guest.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
So John put his brilliant mind to work, and this
time he started making serious money. But that wasn't the
only reason he got noticed. So what was he actually doing?
What is options trading?
Speaker 3 (15:27):
Basically it's you against the public. You're a middleman between
buyers and sellers of these options, and options are very
complex and difficult to value.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
It's complicated and risky. In short, an option is a
contract which gives the investor a right to buy something
at a certain date in the future at a pre
negotiated price. Basically, the investors make a bet on how
a stock will perform. If it does better than expected,
(15:57):
you're in the money. So it's suited x scam. And
for John he could use his brain to mathematically work
out how to reduce the risk, and he started to
develop all sorts of strategies and systems which would give
him an advantage over all the other traders, which I
guess by now you'd have expected him to do. Bob
(16:20):
and John began to hang out together outside work, despite
their age difference, John in his twenties Bob in his forties.
They became good buddies and went out on the town.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
He wasn't a strange genius. He was not a you know,
Mozart or somebody like. I mean, he was fun to
talk to. And he was also great with the ladies.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
When you say great, great with the women or whatever,
what does that mean.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
Yeah, I mean he was. He just had a lot
of girls like them and maybe they, you know, had
heard from their girlfriends that he was good, I mean sexually.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
He had a reputation.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Yeah, yeah, from what I know. Yeah, he was young
and handsome, and you know, he would tell me some
stories about them. He just thought of it as a
matter of fact, as that's the way life is. And
this is you know, I mean, this one's chasing me.
This one insisted that I it was sort of like
a bit of a you know, it's a bit of
(17:25):
a hassle.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
So girls were basically beating down his door. Yeah, this
could all be locker room chat, of course. And all
this being a ladies man was before he met Anne.
When they weren't in the pit or out on the town,
John did a little modeling, and Bob says he sometimes
sat as an artist model and even appeared in porn films.
Although we didn't speak to anyone who saw the evidence,
(17:48):
both Bob and John spent the early mornings in the gym.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
We actually did a lot of physical things like tennis
and working out. We did a lot of working out together.
He was quite strong, but terribly efficient when he was
working out. Could he never use the same muscle twice
without knowing why he was doing it.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Steve was twenty when he first ran into John in
the gym.
Speaker 10 (18:14):
Of course, one day I walked into the gym at
seven thirty in the morning to work out. John was
in there working out. I had never met him, and
I said, what body parts are you working today? He said,
I'm doing legs. I said, well, I have to back
(18:34):
and biceps is today? Let's go do back and biceps.
John said, oh okay. And it was kind of crazy
because John looked at me, like, who's this black guy
that's taken over?
Speaker 2 (18:51):
From that moment Tom. They were firm friends.
Speaker 10 (18:55):
And I would call John on a Saturday night and
tell him I have a poor aready that we can
go to, and he said, well, I don't know if
I can go. I said, come on, John, you're with me.
I'm black, you're a Jewish kid. I'll make sure you're okay.
And we would go hang out for the night to
see John. When a nightclub floor and dancing was funny
(19:18):
because John didn't know how to dance at all, and
we would be there for five hours. He was very
good at meeting girls, and I was the type that
wasn't good at that at all.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Did you learn from John how to how to sort
of chat up girls?
Speaker 9 (19:33):
Then, of course a lot.
Speaker 10 (19:36):
John just would wink. He would looked at them, and
he would wink at them, and then he would turn
away and if sudly, look again to see if that
person's interested, and he would kick up one ed. And
as I got older, I learned to do that by
being around job. He had very few friends, but his
friends were very, very good friends. I don't think John
(19:58):
wanted that many people around. I remember one night John
telling me that money is only green paper, and he's
going to make as much of it as you want.
He told me that, he said, you'll come work for
me one day. It never happened.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Working out was one thing John continued to do in
Costa Rica, where he had a vast gym. But with
all that bravado, Bob never heard his friend raise his
voice or have a fight. He recalls John being quiet, kind,
He had a thoughtful side, so.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
I remember him being incredibly gentle with some kind of
little insect where it was in his way or something
like that, and he just like, he's this big, strong
guy and he just moved it so gently. Like that
struck me. I never forgot that, you know, he didn't
(20:52):
swat it away or something like that or squish it.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
That was forty years ago, but Bob will never forget it,
because well, it wasn't what he expected John to do.
John was having a good time and he was making
a lot of money, but that was troubling for his parents.
One question kept coming up, Margue.
Speaker 4 (21:15):
We keep asking you what he can do with all
this money?
Speaker 2 (21:17):
What are you going to do with all this money?
It seemed to be in direct opposition to their fundamental
values in Arizona. Paul and Marghy reflected on it.
Speaker 4 (21:27):
If he were into science or education something like that,
you would have been a lot more comfortable with that
than his going into a field that you know absolutely
nothing about him that seemed to have a lot to
do with money, because you have never been interested in no.
Speaker 5 (21:41):
I mean that's one of the things about me that
I guess nobody understands. But having a lot of money
was never something I wanted. If I had had it,
I would have spent it on somebody else.
Speaker 4 (21:49):
She is an affirmative dislike for worrying about money or
caring about it. And he's in this business and that's
all you do.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
They found his desire to accumulate more and more money
working twenty four seven very hard to understand, and the
way they talk about it, I can see how much
it worried them.
Speaker 4 (22:08):
All those people are like that. I mean they never
leave their job because their job is investing and they're
looking for things to buy and sell and it can
happen at any time, and so they always have something
with them that they can do business on. And yeah,
it was a very engrossing kind of thing to do,
(22:32):
and he really liked it. I mean it was a game,
it was a puzzle, it was something to win at exciting. Yeah, no,
I think so. And it keeps changing. I mean it's
a constant game to try to win that. I think
that's the way he looked at it, to try to
figure out what to do to win the game, and
he kept trying to do that. So, yeah, it was
(22:53):
all engrossing. When you do I don't think you can
do that and not be completely involved in it.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
The thing was that that desire to win it was insatiable.
It became all that mattered to John Well.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
He just wanted to go for it and proved that
he was right that he was never satisfied no matter
how much money he'd made, no matter how well he'd
done it, because even if he'd made a winning trade,
he could have bet more, and he should have seen
what was going to happen when I knew him. That's
all that seemed to interest him was getting to the
(23:30):
next level and doing it better and playing with the
big players.
Speaker 4 (23:34):
You know, playing with the big boys.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Playing with the big boys meant playing hardball. We've been
told that not everyone liked how he went about it,
but that didn't stop him.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
You're in that game where you're playing for high stakes.
There was no mister nice guy.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
He sounded out pretty confident when he was making these bets,
you know, putting on his positions. He knew he was clever.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
More than clever signified being way above the norm, way
above the norm.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
In nineteen ninety six, he moved into the financial big
league and set up a hedge fund Amber Arbitrage with
a man named Joel Silverman. Joel Silverman had more than
twenty five years experience in the finance world, and he
unlocked a new world for John. He knew everyone that mattered,
and in nineteen ninety six he invited John up to
(24:28):
New York and threw him a party to introduce him
to potential investors. One crucial introduction was with George Soros,
one of the most famous financiers in the world. Joel
had known him for twenty three years and had managed
money for him for ten. According to court documents, George
Soros invited John and Joel over to his home. Over dinner,
(24:52):
Joel told George about John's brilliance in the financial markets,
the enormous returns he'd made, and the speed at which
he'd made his millions. It must have gone down well.
George Soros would later invest one hundred and forty million
dollars in the new fund. The Hedge Fund was doing
incredibly well. Reportedly, John was on course to be a
(25:14):
billionaire by the age of forty. It's nineteen ninety nine
and John was booked in for a dinner.
Speaker 11 (25:31):
Date, so coming to New York did gevi There.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Jack Schwager remember him. He would visit John and Anne
in Costa Rica with his son Zach a couple of
years later. This was where they first met. As well
as being a financier himself, Jack was also the author
of the book Market Wizards, a series of interviews with
very successful traders. John had caught his eye. They were
(25:55):
meeting in a fancy sushi restaurant in New York.
Speaker 11 (25:59):
It's a guy and the hulking kind of almost think
a football linebacker type build, and he had a suit
on and a tie, and the shirt and suit seemed
to be straining, you know, from the bulk of his
frame and ditinct thing looked like this is not what
he normally wears.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
But John soon relaxed and Jack, over their meals, started
asking questions about how John had made his millions. He
found John and his methods fascinating. He turned the rule
book on its head.
Speaker 11 (26:31):
His very method of trading was kind of a Maverick
way of trading, not the way most people trade options,
and he was always looking for things that were kind
of a bit different with people were looking at.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Jack was so impressed he later invested with John and
his fund and this gives you an idea of the
sums of money we're talking about.
Speaker 11 (26:53):
You know, I kind of personally profited from from his skill. Yeah,
Like I tell people, he was probably the best investment
there ever.
Speaker 12 (27:02):
Med I think, I think I'm some ridiculous amount.
Speaker 11 (27:04):
I think I maybe made two hundred and fifty percent
on my investment that year or.
Speaker 4 (27:08):
Something like that.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Yeah, two hundred and fifty percent. Jack was struck by
something else. John confided that he had a plan, a dream.
He decided how he would use his fortune to move
(27:29):
to Costa Rica and build a nature reserve.
Speaker 4 (27:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 12 (27:33):
I interview lots of people who have been very successful
in market, said, what people do with that money ranges
quite wildly.
Speaker 3 (27:40):
I kind of admired him.
Speaker 12 (27:42):
For basically using his money for trying to preserve rainforest.
I thought that was a noble thing to do.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Bob remembers this too.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
There came a point when he didn't want to trade
anymore and where he wanted to do something with his.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
His parents were relieved and assured that John had an
endgame and an exit strategy, which they approved of.
Speaker 4 (28:07):
I wasn't interested in how much money he was making.
I was interested in money's going to do with it
because it was quite a lie, I think. And he
said they were going to buy a place to live,
and then looked around the world. They finally found this
place in Costa Rica that they bought, and then he
used a lot of the money to buy that land
and the build learn the house.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
And the move couldn't come soon enough. John was beginning
to be disillusioned with the finance world, spotting before anyone
else that one financier Bernie Madoff was up to no good.
Bernie Madoff, the guy who ran the largest Ponzi scheme
in history, worked close to sixty five billion dollars, who
(28:45):
would later be sentenced to one hundred and fifty years
in jail. John's views about Madoff came up when Jack
and his son Zach visited John in Costa Rica in
the early two thousands. Zach recalls how the conversation went.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
And He's going on and on about this particular trader,
this particular investment guy. And as he goes on, he
goes deeper. He's like, I called this person. I called
that person. Nobody's listening to me. So we started to
get like kind of irritated. The person that he was
talking about was Bernie made off. And this guy was
telling me clear as day that this man was like
a monster froster. And he's tried to contact everybody that
(29:22):
he knows and tell him that what he is doing
is impossible, can't be done. That He's poured over the
financial statements himself.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
As John moved into the world of the financial elite,
he left his old friend Bob watched her behind. Bob
had got John into finance in the first place, of course,
starting on that street corner in Philadelphia. But Bob had
now run into money trouble. The tables had turned. Bob
had watched his protege rise to the top. Now he
(29:50):
needed John's help.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
I asked John whether I couldn't do some trading with
him financing me, and he was a little bit luke warm.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
About it, but did agree to finance a new enterprise
that Bob was working on. It would be one of
John's less successful investments.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
I had come up with the idea around that time
of creating a food product.
Speaker 4 (30:14):
It would be a cheese chip.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
I'd understood that when you have a pizza and there's
a part of it that's a little crunchy and burned
and delicious.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
What did you call it?
Speaker 3 (30:25):
By the way, volcanic hyper cheese.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
It turned out someone else already had the idea.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
Once we found that out, that was it.
Speaker 4 (30:34):
My gig was up.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
That's a shame.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Was John upset about it? Did he regret giving you
or funding you?
Speaker 3 (30:41):
No, he didn't regret it. But I remember, like I
showed him my little business card and he said, oh, well,
that was really your wet dream, wasn't it.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
Bob to his regret, lost touch with his buddy John
and never got to see his place. In Costa Rica
ninety nine, at the age of thirty four, John had
met and fallen for Anne, the beautiful but troubled, fine
art brad They were living in Virginia. John was already
(31:11):
planning their new life, buying up land in the Costa
Rican jungle. But a year later things would change dramatically
for the couple. John was treated for either a mild
aneurysm or a stroke. Were not one hundred percent sure,
but it was a health scare that marked something significant.
He told Anne that he was ready to jack in trading.
(31:32):
It was time to fulfill his dream and move his
money out of America. According to the Wall Street Journal.
Following a few months recovering, John resigned from his hedge
fund and it was wound down. Their life in Costa
Rica began, But what should have been a simpler life
was anything but. Closing the business wasn't quite as simple
(31:57):
as John had hoped. It marked the start of legal
battles with former associates, including Joel Silverman, who claimed he
was owed money. Huge sums were involved, millions. John stopped
taking Joel's calls. Silverman would later contend that the profit
split had been agreed at seventy five percent to John
(32:18):
and twenty five percent to Joel. John said this was
never put in writing. The dispute would rumble on for years.
John would say in en affidavit that he believed when
the Costa Rican police arrested him on that quiet street
outside Rosemary's seed business, it was all down to Silverman
pursuing him about money he was allegedly owed, a claim
(32:40):
that was never proven. Joel Silverman's claim against John is
read by an actor.
Speaker 13 (32:45):
This is an action for breach of contract, interference with contract,
breach of fiduciary duty, conversion and unjustin Richmond, arising out
of an agreement between my client and defendant John Bender.
My client, through this action seeks an accounting and recruitment
of all the most fees, which may exceed thirty million dollars.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
While Joel Silverman has not addressed the kidnapping allegation directly
in court documents, he said it had not proved possible
to find John and serve him as he didn't know
in which country John was residing. We did try and
reach the Silverman family, but didn't receive a reply. We
understand he may not have been the only former associate
(33:25):
who felt duped by John. Others took him to court
two with similar complaints. This might explain why Michael the
Mercenary was sent to retrieve John and bring him back
to the US. The depths of the bitterness can't be understated.
It involved hundreds of millions of dollars, a genius and
a gentleman's agreement. Now in Costa Rica, John wanted to
(33:51):
find some peace of mind. He hoped to escape from
the world which was constantly snapping at his heels and
threatening to destroy his dream. He wanted to use his
brilliant brain for something entirely different. Flowers in an archived website.
Producer Poppy found the Selby Botanical Gardens Dispatch, published summer
(34:14):
two thousand and eight, featuring a picture of John Jeans
a rucksack and a sun hat in the middle of
lush rainforest. He looks every bit the adventurer and happy.
Here's Poppy with some more of that dispatch.
Speaker 14 (34:29):
This reserve is privately owned and lovingly managed by Anne
Patten and John Bender. We were invited by the generous
owners of Borakayanne to do an inventory survey of the
plants in the reserve, including orchids. This promised to be
a very exciting project since this area is well known
for its biodiversity, but is also poorly explored scientifically.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
The scientists even discovered a new species, and it was
named Gongora Boracaya nensis after the area of origin and
in honor of Anne Patten and John Bender's passion for
orchid conservation in Costa Rica. Remember Bora Kayam was John
and Anne's made up name for their home. John's parents
(35:10):
had shown us pictures of the orchids, too, vibrant pinks
and orange, almost like something from out of space or
the deepest ocean.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
I'm saying to myself, this is really unbelievable. He is
understanding the stuff, he is changing. He is understanding in
ways that other people have not understood it. I thought
that was just amazing that you can have that kind
of feeling about land and nature around you, which he
had developed with the house. That's a really puzzlive sting.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
What they had planted had truly blossomed. Remember, as Valdo said,
John was planning on using an entire floor of the
house as an orchid laboratory, but never saw it through
that archive newsletter we just heard from hidden on the Internet,
showed the joy and pride that John took in what
(36:03):
he'd created. In a way. I wish we could stop
the story here. It would have a happy ending. This
restless genius who was searching for a dream and an
inner piece had found it. He was surrounded by the
jungle animals, his flowers, and he was living in his
enormous house, his wife beside him. By two thousand and eight,
(36:27):
most of their legal battles had been settled. They invested
their remaining cash ninety million dollars into a Costa Rican
Base Trust, which was intended to protect their money and
the future of the wildlife reserve. Legally, Anne and John
now worked for the trust. The lawyer who managed it all,
(36:48):
Juan Alvarez, would have power of attorney, meaning he now
controlled John and Anne's fortune. Remember that name, who'll become
important later in our story. Crucially, the trust protected them
from future claims on their money from creditors who believed
that the Benders owed them cash. But for all the
(37:09):
positive steps, it wasn't enough. Feelings of despair arose. We
learned this was nothing new for John. Bob again if.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
He mentioned that he was on the edge in a
lot of ways emotionally a few times in his life,
but you know, it was sort of like he was
too bright to exist in the world with these other
ordinary people.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
We asked John's parents about what Anne would call his
bipolar disorder.
Speaker 4 (37:42):
I don't think we ever did a diagnosis of that,
but that's servant very clausible to me. I meant, also,
I get very depressed, and he was depressed, and I
don't know about the hypom me. Maybe that's why he
was so good at some things that he could do.
So I've never heard that feeling, but I understand that
(38:04):
the mood swings. I hadn't. Also he has, I'm probably
more than I.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
In two thousand and eight, John spiraled down into a
deep depression. Whaka John's beloved bird was killed. He was devastated,
he told Anne.
Speaker 9 (38:22):
The day after the house betraying me.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
In the next chapter, everything comes crashing down. John starts
to unravel as an email from him, which Anne later
shared with CBS, appears to show voiced here by an actor, losing.
Speaker 4 (38:43):
My fucking mind right now.
Speaker 13 (38:45):
First sick again, and now this shit.
Speaker 9 (38:47):
Today's a total fucking nightmare, and tomorrow will get worse.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
Just when I was feeling I could learn to be happy,
now I get this and I want to be dead.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
That's next time on Hell in Heaven.
Speaker 9 (39:00):
Such a total fucking loser for ever getting involved with
the scumbags.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
You've been listening to Helen Heaven from Exactly Right Media
and IHART podcasts produced by Blanchard House, hosted, written and
produced by me Becky Milligan. The producer and co writer
is Poppy Damon. Music is by Daniel Lloyd Evans, Louis Nankmanell,
and Toby Mattamol. The sound recordist and head of sound
(39:42):
and music is Daniel Lloyd Evans. The lead sound designer
is Vulcan Kiseltoog. The artwork is by Vanessa Lilac for
Exactly Right Media. The executive producers are Karen Kilgarreth, Georgia Hardstark,
and Danielle Kramer, with consulting producers Lilly Ladderwig and associate
producer Jay Elias. The creative director of Blanchard House is
(40:08):
Rosie Pye. The executive producer and head of Content at
Blanchard House is Lawrence Griselle. Listen to Helen Heaven on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your
podcasts
Hosts And Creators
Emma Jane Kirby
Becky Milligan
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