The Great Salad Oil Swindle

by Norman C. Miller

The whole amazing story of Tino De Angelis, whose manipulations of millions of gallons of nonexistent salad oil threw two Wall Street brokerage houses into bankruptcy.

Genres: Business

256 pages, Mass Market Paperback

Published January 1, 1966

About the author

Norman Charles Miller was an American journalist who worked for The Wall Street Journal.

Reviews

[Bryan Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book about Tino De Angelis who bankrupted his firm and swindled others out of almost $200 million, especially American Express. After the fact, you can see how he was dishonest through and through, but the compliment to this was how willing others were to overlook the obvious problems with his past so they could make a buck and feed the swindle.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

Detailed and occasionally hyperventilatingly overdramatically written story of how a regular joe from New Jersey conducted a fraud against theoretically savvy financial professionals, created hundreds of millions of dollars in losses (in early 1960s money!) and caused the failure of two Wall Street brokerages. Criminally overlooked & forgotten episode of modern American financial history.

[Ryan Van Plew-Cid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Norman Miller does a superb job of sifting through a miasma of information to describe one of the largest swindles of the 20th Century. This is a high-point publication in the canon of true-crime literature relating to economic crimes. Highly recommend!

[Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like essentially all frauds, the mechanics are a bit less interesting than you’d hope, but the narrative moves along quickly and provides a lot of interesting details about the main players. Worth a read if you’re interested in economic frauds.

[matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting story about a strange commodities fraud from the early 1960's. Moral hazard has always seemed to exist in financial markets, and Tony De Angelis's scheme is another reminder of that fact.

[Actiondan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book deserves rediscovery, and should possibly be made into a David O. Russell movie starring Christian Bale as the mobbed-up huckster who is the real-life villain in this vastly entertaining story.
Tino DiAngelis was the guy in the global soybean oil industry, which he single-handedly controlled from his storage facility in Bayonne, NJ. The majority of all soybean oil (used to make salad dressing and mayonnaise) supposedly transferred through this site for export to points all over the globe. Perhaps suspicions should have been raised when DiAngelis pledged as collateral for loans an amount of soybean oil that was equal to double all the soybean oil in the United States, but various greedy actors found reasons to keep lending him money, buying his product (which often turned out to be mostly saltwater), and certifying for loan purposes that his product actually existed (even though it was mostly saltwater).
Eventually DiAngelis got in over his head, going long soybean oil on the futures market in a position that alone represented about 2/3 of all the trading interest in the commodity.
In the end, DiAngelis brought down a couple of commodities brokers foolish enough to let him trade on margin, made huge dents in a few banks foolish enough to lend him money, wrought havoc on both commodities exchanges and stock exchanges when his scheme finally unwound, and even knocked out about half of American Express' market cap (Amex had certified, mistakenly, that the impossible amounts of oil DiAngelis was pledging as collateral for bank loans actually existed; as it happened about 90% of it was pure fabrication).
Interesting postscript, this story was sort of how warren Buffett made his name, since he bought Amex on the dip and became a major shareholder and eventually the warren Buffett we all know and love.
Unfortunately, the Buffett story comes after the book is published, and also unfortunately nobody has thought to republish this book with an update.
If you can find it, this book is absolutely worth the effort.
It makes me happy to know that the author, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on this story for the Wall Street journal, is still alive ... As is DiAngelis.