Transcript of 4: A Beautiful Mind

This is exactly right.

Chicago. A white woman's murder. A black man behind bars for a crime he didn't commit.

90 years of killing somebody I have never seen.

The Crying Wolf podcast is the story of a corrupt detective, two men bound by injustice and the quest for redemption, no matter the price. Listen to the Crying Wolf podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

When you host a podcast called I said no Gifts, you hope your guests will understand the directive. Yet every week, my guests show up and spit in the face of etiquette by bringing a gift I didn't ask for. Take Paula Scola. You said no gifts and I respect that boundary. But once you open it, I can explain and hopefully it'll make sense. I'm Bridger Weiniger, and this is my curse to bear. New episodes of I said no Gifts from the Exactly Right network drop every Thursday. Listen to I said no gifts on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

December 29, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed.

There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

Just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged. Terrorism. Listen to the new season of law and criminal justice System on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

It is time for us to realize that we are too great a nation.

To limit ourselves to small dreams.

It's the 1980s. Ronald Reagan is president. Wall street is king. Bob Watchdell, then in his 40s, was on his way home after a long day on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange.

I saw a young guy with another guy. They were on the doorstep of one of these pretty houses and they were playing Go, the Chinese game.

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 20s compete.

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 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, 99.9% of the world were idiots.

Bob told him he was working in finance, trading options.

And he said, oh, you know, that's what I've always dreamed of doing. I said, well, maybe I can do something.

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 20 year old John Bender, a physics major who turned down a place at Harvard, got his first job on 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 $600 million of personal wealth. That chance encounter 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 exactly Right Me Media and I Heart podcasts produced by Blanchard House, this is Helen Heaven. I'm Becky Milligan. Chapter 4 A 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 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 $600 million? Well, let's rewind the beginning. When John was a schoolboy.

I remember one conversation I had with him about a multiple choice test 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 want to do well on these tests, what you have to do is figure out what the people the test want you to do. What's the answer that they think is right?

I'm at Paul and Margie Bender's home in Phoenix, Arizona. John's parents, Paul is a distinguished legal academic and Margie a teacher. Back then in the 1970s, they knew they had a bright kid on their hands. Not just bright, but with an insatiable curiosity to the point of being easily frustrated. And from the outside, Paul it might have appeared he was a little arrogant.

He was always very critical and combative.

In that Way I knew he was very intelligent.

One of his old friends and colleagues, Jonathan Catlin, wrote this on his blog about John. It's voiced up by one of our team.

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.

He would do well to get good.

Grades in 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 mostly complicated things and mathematical type things he was on. There was a math team at school which they competed around and they did very well, and he really seemed to enjoy that.

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.

So it was not a surprise that he majored in physics and that he was working in a lab with some physicists. That seemed to be comfortable for him to do.

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 2,500 years ago, and it's thought to be the most complex game ever devised by man. There's a checkered board 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 as a pretty good player.

We met at the breakfast room table in my house. 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 significantly better than I. I mean, it took my breath.

Away how fast he got good.

I mean, just amazing.

This is a peculiar game and it.

Appeals to peculiar people 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.

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, is that.

He was only concerned with ideas and go. To be an expert go player, you need to do ideas and details, you know? To a go player, he seemed arrogant because he was fixed in his view.

Of this is what's important.

He also had high expectations of his own abilities, 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 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.

The Crying Wolf podcast is the story of two men bound by injustice, of a city haunted by its secrets and the quest for redemption, no matter the price.

White victim, female, pretty, wealthy, black defendant.

Chicago, a white woman's murder. A black man behind bars for a crime he didn't commit.

I had 90 years for killing somebody.

I have never seen.

He says the police are his friends.

And then that's it.

They turn on him.

A corrupt detective, how he was interrogated, the techniques.

That's crazy.

A snitch and a life stolen.

They got the wrong guy.

But on the inside, Lee Harris finds an ally in his celly, Robert, who swears to tell the truth about what happened to Lee and free his friend.

And if you're with me, you're golden.

I'll take care of you.

I'm gonna be with you.

You stuck with me for life.

Listen to the Crying Wolf podcast starting on October 22nd on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Bridger Weiniger, embattled host of the podcast. I said no gifts from the exactly right network. I make myself perfectly clear to my guests. I forbid gifts of any kind. And yet every Thursday, they barge in with at purposelessly wrapped trinkets. Then we have no choice but to discuss them. Take Zach woods, who classlessly stormed into the podcast while disregarding my only request when you came trotting into my backyard. And I don't want to assume, but I'm going to. It's a gift for me. That's right. Thank you for describing my walk as a Trot. I think of myself as a dressage horse, first and foremost as a gracious host. I try not to humiliate my guests, but sometimes I can't help it. Like when Iowa deberry stopped by. What else are you doing with your time besides napping on the couch like a slob?

Okay.

My mother is the angel investor to this podcast.

I see.

This is what I endure. Wonderful guests, unspeakable rudeness. I said no Gifts. Drops every Thursday from the exactly Right network. Listen to I said no gifts on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

December 29, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage. Kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then at 6:33pm everything changed.

There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

Apparently the explosion actually impelled metal glass.

The injured were being loaded into ambulances.

Just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged. And it was here to stay. Terrorism, Law and criminal justice System is back in season two. We're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight that's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of law and criminal justice System on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There's something else. We heard a lot about John. He didn't like being told what to do. You know, he had what is sometimes called a problem with authority.

I was teaching in law school then and I was talking to him about something and he got really upset about the fact that people were telling me what to do. My clients or the court was telling me he was very uncomfortable with that.

That problem would exist in the science lab too.

If you go into a physics department at a university, you're in a department and you're told what to do by the chairman and the dean and all that kind of stuff. And he was always uncomfortable with that kind of arrangement.

So 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.

We were assuming he was going to go to graduate school in physics because that's what he was majoring in. And he'd worked with people in the physics department while he was an undergraduate.

But John told his dad that the physics lab wasn't for him.

He decided to embark on a career as basically as a gambler.

Yep, John had decided to forget physics and become a gambler. It's not what his parents had planned for their eldest.

I asked him what he was doing. 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 odds are in your favor, you. You. You start playing. 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.

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 21 or as close as possible. If you go over, you lose.

I remember being in Atlantic City with John, where he used to card count.

Steve, one of John's old friends, and.

They told him no, that he had been spotted, and they kicked us out. And he wasn't allowed to go back to Atlantic City. We laughed.

Was he good at it?

Amazing.

And it's that reputation that served him well in his next career on Wall street.

I think it was the gambling that attracted people to invest with him.

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 Watchdell. A door opened on a new world, Though it wasn't actually completely new.

It turns out that he'd done a lot of work in stock trading anyway, Even when he was underage.

John was only 17.

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, had made a good living, you know, just by himself, with no bankroll.

And now, in 1985, age 20 and financed by Bob's gambling friends, John embarked on his new career.

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 figure out patterns and trying to figure out prices. You have brokers coming in and out with orders.

This is where John Bender found himself on the path to making his fortune.

Before we knew it, John was down on the floor and he was immediately just brilliant at it. One of my friends who put the thing together, the organizer of the financial group, he said to me, well, Bob, you have to teach John the ropes. We're going to give you 8% 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.

At the time, there were regular seminars for the options traders. Someone would give a talk and then.

Afterwards there was a little quiz and they'd say, well, okay, you have this spread now. What'll 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 doing it for years and years. They're doing it their whole lives. He always knew the answer and it was right away really.

You didn't only spot his potential, but did you suspect that there was some sort of genius inside that young guy?

Yeah, I mean, I was lucky. I made a lucky guess.

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?

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.

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, you're in the money. So it suited ex gamblers 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 and John began to hang out together outside work. Despite their age difference, John in his 20s, Bob in his 40s. They became good buddies and went out on the town.

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, he was also great with the Ladies.

When you say great, great with the women or whatever, what does that mean?

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, he was good. I mean sexually.

He had a reputation.

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 matter of fact. Cause 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 a hassle.

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, both Bob and John spent the early mornings in the gym.

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. He never use the same muscle twice without knowing why he was doing it.

Steve was 20 when he first ran into John in the gym.

Of course, one day I walked into the gym at 7:30 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 do back and biceps 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?

From that moment on, they were firm friends.

And I would call John on a Saturday night and tell him, I have a party 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 on a nightclub floor. Dancing was funny 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.

Did you learn from John how to, how to sort of chat up girls.

Then, of course, a lot, John just would wink. He would look at them and he would wink at them, and then he would turn away and then slowly look again to see if that person's interested. And he would pick up on that. And as I got older, I learned to do that by being around John. He had very few friends, but his friends were very, very good friends. I don't think John wanted that many people around him. 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.

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.

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. He didn't swat it away or something like that or squish it.

That was 40 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.

Margie would keep asking, what are you gonna do with all this money?

What are you gonna do with all this money? It seemed to be in direct opposition to their fundamental values. In Arizona, Paul and Margie reflected on it.

If he went into science or education or 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. And that seemed to have a lot to do with money because you have never been interested in.

No, 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.

She has an affirmative dislike for worrying about money or caring about it. And he's in this business and that's all you do.

They found his desire to accumulate more and more money working 247 very hard to understand. And the way they talk about it, I can see how much it worried them.

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. 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, it's, 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 all engrossing when you. I don't think you can do that and not be completely involved in it.

The thing was that that desire to win, it was insatiable. It became all that mattered to John.

He just wanted to go for it and prove 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 next level and doing it better and playing with the big players, you know, playing with the big boys.

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.

You're in that game where you're playing for high stakes. There was no Mr. Nice Guy.

He sounded like pretty confident when he was making these bets, you know, putting on his positions. He knew he was clever.

More than clever signified being way above the norm. Way above the norm.

In 1996, 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 25 years experience in the finance world, and he unlocked a new world for John. He knew everyone that mattered. And in 1996, he invited John up to 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 23 years and had managed money for him for 10. According to court documents, George Soros invited John and Joel over to his home. Over dinner, 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 $140 million in the new fund. The hedge fund was doing incredibly well. Reportedly, John was on course to be a billionaire by the age of 40.

The Crying Wolf podcast is the story of two men bound by injustice, of a city haunted by its secrets and the quest for redemption, no matter the price.

White victim, female. Pretty, wealthy, black defendant.

Chicago. A white woman's murder. A black man behind bars for a crime he didn't commit.

I had 90 years for killing somebody.

I have never seen.

He says the police are his friends. And then that's it.

They turn on him.

A corrupt detective.

How he was interrogated, the techniques. That's crazy.

A snitch and a life stolen.

They got the wrong guy.

But on the inside, Lee Harris finds an ally in his celly, Robert, who swears to tell the truth about what happened to the and free his friend.

And if you're with me, your goal.

I'll take care of you.

I'm gonna be with you.

You stuck with me for life.

Listen to the Crying Wolf podcast starting on October 22nd on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Bridger Weiniger, embattled host of the podcast. I said no Gifts from the Exactly Right Network. I make myself perfectly clear to my guests. I forbid gifts of any kind. And yet every Thursday, they bar atrociously wrapped trinkets. Then we have no choice but to discuss them. Take Zach woods, who classlessly stormed into the podcast while disregarding my only request when you came trotting into my backyard. And I don't want to assume, but I'm going to. It's a gift for me. That's right. Thank you for describing my walk as a trot. I think of myself as a dressage horse, first and foremost, as a gracious host. I try not to humiliate my guests, but sometimes I can't help it. Like when Iowa deberry stopped by. What else are you doing with your time besides napping on the couch like a slob? Okay, My mother is the angel investor to this podcast.

I see.

This is what I endure. Wonderful guests, unspeakable rudeness. I said no Gifts Drops every Thursday from the Exactly Right Network. Listen to I said no gifts on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

December 29, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage. Kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then at 6:33pm everything changed.

There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

Apparently the explosion actually impelled metal glass.

The injured were being loaded into ambulances.

Just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged. And it was here to stay. Terrorism, Law and Criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight that's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Criminal justice System on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's 1999 and John was booked in for a dinner date.

So I come into New York to interview him.

Jack Schwager, remember him? He would visit John and Ann 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 meeting in a fancy sushi restaurant in New York.

He's a big guy and you're hulking, kind of almost think 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 it distinctly looked like this is not what he normally wears.

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.

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 than what people, people were looking at.

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.

You know, I kind of personally profited from, from his, his skill. Yeah. Like I tell people, he was probably the best investment I ever made. I think I, I think some ridiculous amount. I think I maybe made 250 on.

My investment that year or something like that.

Yep, 250%. Jack was struck by something else. John confided that he had a plan, a dream. He'd decided how he would use his fortune to move to Costa Rica and build a nature reserve.

Yeah, I interview lots of people who've been very successful in markets and what people do with their money ranges quite widely. I kind of admired him for basically using his money, for trying to Preserve rainforest. I thought that was a noble thing to do.

Bob remembers this, too.

There came a point when he didn't want to trade anymore and where he wanted to do something with his money.

His parents were relieved and assured that John had an end game and an exit strategy, which they approved of.

I wasn't interested in how much money he was making. I was interested in what he was going to do with it, because it was quite a lot, I think. And he said they were going to buy a place to live, and they looked around the world and 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 to build that house.

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, worth close to $65 billion, who would later be sentenced to 150 years in jail. John's views about Madoff came up when Jack and his son Zach visited John in Costa Rica in the early 2000s. Zach recalls how the conversation went. And he's going on and on about.

This particular trader, this particular investment guy. And as he goes on, he. He goes deeper.

He's like, I called this person, I called that person. Nobody's listening to me.

So he started to get, like, kind of irritated. The person that he was talking about was Bernie Madoff. And this guy was telling me clear.

As day that this man was like a monster fraudster.

He's tried to contact everybody that he knows and tell them that what he is doing is impossible, can't be done.

That he's poured over the financial statements himself.

As John moved into the world of the financial elite, he left his old friend Bob Watchtell 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 needed John's help.

I asked John whether I couldn't do some trading with him financing me. And he was a little bit lukewarm about it.

But John did agree to finance a new enterprise that Bob was working on. It would be one of John's less successful investment.

I had come up with the idea around that time of creating a food product. It would be a cheese chip. I'd understood that when you have a pizza and there's A part of it that's a little crunchy and burned. It's delicious.

What did you call it, by the way?

Volcanic hypercheese.

It turned out someone else already had the idea.

Once we found that out, that was it. My gig was up.

That's a shame.

Yeah.

Was John upset about it? Did he regret giving you or funding you?

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, Bob?

To his regret, lost touch with his buddy John and never got to see his place in Costa Rica. By 1999, at the age of 34, John had met and fallen for Anne, the beautiful but troubled fine art grad. They were living in Virginia. John was already 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. We're not 100% sure, but it was a health scare that marked something significant. He told Anne that he was ready to jack in trading. 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 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 75% to John and 25% to Joel. John said this was never put in writing. The dispute would rumble on for years. John would say in an 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 that was never proven. Joel Silverman's claim against John is read by an actor.

This is inaction for breach of contract, interference with contract, breach of fiduciary duty, conversion, and unjust enrichment arising out of an agreement between my client and defendant, John Bender. My client, through this action, seeks an accounting and recoupment of all those fees, which may exceed $30 million.

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 who felt duped by John. Others took him to court too, 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 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 2008 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.

This reserve is privately owned and lovingly managed by Ann Paton and John Bender. We were invited by the generous owners.

Of Boracayan 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.

The scientists even discovered a new species and it was named Gongora burakianensis after the area of origin and in honor of Ann Paton and John Benders passion for orchid conservation in Costa Rica. Remember, Boracayam was John and Anne's made up name for their home. John's parents had shown us pictures of the orchids too, vibrant pinks and orange, almost like something from out of space or the deepest ocean.

I'm saying to myself this is really unbelievable. He is understanding this stuff. He is changing it. He is understanding it in ways that other people have not understood it. I thought that was just amazing that you can have that kind of a feeling about land and nature around you, which he had developed with the house. That's a really positive thing.

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 archived newsletter we just heard from hidden on the Internet showed the joy and pride that John took in what 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 peace had found it. He was surrounded by the jungle animals, his flowers, his. And he was living in his enormous house, his wife beside him. By 2008, most of their legal battles had been settled. They invested their remaining cash, $90 million into a Costa Rican based 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, Juan Alvarez, would have power of attorney, meaning he now controlled John and Anne's fortune. Remember that name. He'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 positive steps, it wasn't enough. Feelings of despair arose. We learned this was nothing new for John Bob.

Again, 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.

We asked John's parents about what Anne would call his bipolar disorder.

I don't think we ever did a diagnosis of that, but that sounds very plausible to me. I mean, I'm in that way also. I get very depressed and he would get very depressed and I don't know about the, the high part of me. Maybe that's why he was so good at some things he could do that I don't, I don't. I've never had that feeling. But I understand the mood swings. I had them also. He had them probably more than I do.

In 2008, John spiraled down into a deep depression. Wacker, John's beloved bird, was killed. He was devastated. He told Anne the day after the house betrayed me. 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 my fucking mind right now.

First sick again and now this shit.

Today is a total fucking nightmare and tomorrow will get worse. Just when I was feeling I could learn to be happy, now I get this and I. I want to be dead.

That's next time on Hell in Heaven. Such a total loser for ever getting.

Involved with those scumbags.

You've been listening to Hell in Heaven from Exactly Right Media and I Heart 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 Nankmanel and Toby Matamont. The sound recordist and head of sound and music is Daniel Lloyd Evans. The lead sound designer is Vulcan Kizletug. The artwork is by Vanessa Lilac for Exactly Right Media. The executive producers are Karen Kilgarraff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer, with consulting producer Lily ladawig and associate producer Jay Elias. The creative director of Blanchard House is Rosie Pye. The executive producer and head of content at Blanchard House is Lawrence Grisel. Listen to Hell in Heaven on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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