You Sound Like These Chumps.Good read for anyone who knowingly running a boiler room scam.
"There is no shortage...of lucrative opportunities that exist for a fast-talking psychopath with a head for numbers and the social skills to move easily in financial circles....If I were unable to study psychopaths in prison, my next choice would very likely be a place like the Vancouver Stock Exchange."
Hickman's suicide followed hard on the heels of the Jan. 14 murder of disgraced former stock promoter David Ward, who, along with partner Ed Carter, engineered one of the Vancouver Stock Exchange's most notorious scams. Since his 1989 release from jail, Ward had been adrift. His death, in his white Nissan Pathfinder on a residential street in East Van, had all the hallmarks of a mob hit from the movies: single bullet to the brain, no witnesses or clues, engine left running, money and jewelry left on the body. "It's clear that finding the killer isn't going to be easy," said police media liaison officer Constable Anne Drennan, a week after Ward's murder. "Our primary, most obvious angle is the stock-promotion scandal." But the stock
promotion was old news. In his recent life, Ward had been a shady figure on the Alberta Stock Exchange, operating businesses out of Mexico and Miami that were rumoured to be operating at the edges of the international drug trade.
"The odds are that the cops may never know who murdered Ward or on whose orders. In recent years, the VSE has seen two high-profile suicides, two murders similar to Ward's and one very mysterious disappearance. Two reporters who document the VSE scene have had death threats. In recent years, police and government officials have discovered that the VSE, long a home to freebooters, pirates and financial finaglers, has become the laundry for cash from a variety of illicit sources, including arms dealers, drug czars and even organized crime. As Sergeant Peter Montague, head of media relations for the RCMP in British Columbia, puts it, "Any time you have a large flow of capital [as in a stock exchange], it attracts people who want to launder cash." The consequences of this can be grim. You always had to worry about losing your shirt on Howe Street. Now, you have to worry about losing your life"