00:00:00
They seemed so perfect, this golden couple, he who soared so fast and high, she who dazzled
00:00:14
down below. And their life? Why, it was a dream come true. Their plentiful money appeared as if from thin air.
00:00:23
And here in their mansion, French Chateau style, they cared for their children, collected
00:00:28
fine things. and lived well-earned success out loud. In fact, it could be said that on land, and in the water, and in the air,
00:00:37
Marcus and Michelle Schringer made waves, perhaps of envy, among those less lucky in life.
00:00:45
And then? Ah, yes. And then. The stage on which this bizarre play, Sword, then Crash,
00:00:55
is itself a part of the story, a sort of nautical cul-de-sac, surrounded by the kind of places a person can truly live large.
00:01:02
The locals even have a nickname for it, a cheesy reflection of a less sober time, Cocktail Cove.
00:01:09
A little less frothy these days, perhaps, but once upon a time, particularly in a certain imitation chateau,
00:01:17
it was shaken and stirred. On a weekend in the warm summer sun, Cocktail Cove on the Geist Reservoir outside Indianapolis is the place to be.
00:01:34
The lake is man-made, as is the life. The water sports, the boating, the sense of achievement,
00:01:41
lubricated in suntan oil, new money, and an all-day happy hour. Former Indianapolis television personality Pat Carlini lives here.
00:01:51
About every other house has a pool and a hot tub. They've got a lot of parties. They have a lot of fun.
00:01:55
I think the people are very work hard all week long. It comes Friday. It's the weekend.
00:02:01
They want to play. They play hard. Almost gives you an idea for a TV show or something.
00:02:05
That's been talked about a lot. The whole Desperate Housewives feel. They've dubbed the streets Wisteria Lane.
00:02:12
I can totally see a reality show. you know, the Geist gals. But there was one of those Geist gals Pat and the neighbors didn't see very often.
00:02:23
Yet everyone seemed to know who she was. Michelle Shrinker, the attractive young wife of the well-to-do hotshot
00:02:30
who built one of the biggest houses on Geist. It's a nice, affluent neighborhood.
00:02:37
But it's, I mean... Bit of a patent place? Yeah. Secret backbiting going on, that kind of thing?
00:02:43
Yeah. That can be said about it. Absolutely. I'm usually the one they're talking about.
00:02:49
What do they usually say about you? Well, I don't know if it's so much about me, but more about my husband.
00:02:56
I know the backstabbing that went on, and it's just not something I wanted to participate in.
00:03:02
I didn't want to be a part of it. From the beginning. From the beginning. The beginning.
00:03:09
She met him one summer in the early 90s while both were on summer break from Purdue University.
00:03:17
I was in town for a weekend and just kind of caught my eye. We had a lot of fun.
00:03:22
Our first date, we went flying nonetheless. Kind of a unique first date, but a little scary at first.
00:03:31
It soon became comfortable. They married in 1995. I mean, I adored him. I mean, I really loved him.
00:03:38
He was a young man in a hurry. In his 20s, Marcus launched a career as an investment advisor.
00:03:45
The business seemed to grow steadily. It had several names over time, including Heritage Wealth Management.
00:03:53
I would just describe him as a financial advisor who, you know, did portfolio management for affluent individuals.
00:04:04
You know, he managed the business and I managed the home. And that may be. But go back a few years and take a look at the Heritage Wealth Management website, circa 2005.
00:04:16
There's Marcus. Hi, I'm Marcus Shrinker, President and Senior Advisor of Heritage Wealth Management.
00:04:22
With what now seems an oddly foreboding sales pitch. Your investments are your parachute.
00:04:28
Then there's Michelle. I'm Michelle Shrinker, Chief Financial Officer of Heritage Wealth Management.
00:04:34
That was done, gosh, a few years ago, and each employee at the time did a little spot.
00:04:43
The dialogue was written by Marcus. Marcus wanted to create an image. It was done for marketing purposes.
00:04:53
A big company. To make it seem bigger maybe than it was at the time. Michelle says she was really a stay-at-home mom, focused on her children,
00:05:01
and, by all accounts, did a wonderful job. They had it all. Beautiful children. Friends, like Cindy Gooding, say the Shrinkers were a perfect family.
00:05:12
In fact, when Cindy took the kids to lunch one day, she said, a stranger stopped her.
00:05:17
He said, I have to tell you, your children are the most well-behaved children I have ever seen.
00:05:23
I started tearing up. I was so proud of them. That's the kind of family they were.
00:05:28
To some, that is. But around Geist in recent years, strange stories began circulating about Marcus.
00:05:36
I would describe his personality as, you know, it's been described as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
00:05:41
I could see that. Tom Britt, who runs the popular Geist magazine, knew the Shrinkers and liked Marcus.
00:05:49
You heard from his neighbors and people lived across the street about what was going on,
00:05:53
and it was just hard to believe it didn sync up with the guy that I knew You know there a lot of stories and they urban legends but you know if you hear so many of them you have to believe at least one of them is true
00:06:05
And if any one of them are true, you just think this guy's crazy. And as the stories get stranger and stranger,
00:06:15
questions begin to percolate in the waters of Cocktail Cove. In an upscale neighborhood known as Cocktail Cove near Indianapolis,
00:06:38
a young investment advisor with big ambitions was making an even bigger name for himself.
00:06:45
But it wasn't quite the reputation Marcus Shrinker might have wished. Pat Carlini lived nearby.
00:06:51
It seems like he just had run-ins with one neighbor after another. Over what? It could be the fact that somebody is building a house next to him,
00:07:01
and the stone on that house would look too much like the stone on his house. That might sound like typical neighborhood pettiness,
00:07:08
but to others, Marcus Schrenker had reputedly turned into the neighbor from hell.
00:07:13
A pretty bad tenant, too. He rented office space at a building near his home. Tom Britt runs the local magazine.
00:07:20
A couple years ago, he had an argument within his landlord. The next day, a guy wakes up and he goes out to his dock, and his boat isn't there,
00:07:30
and he gets a call from the fire department saying that there was a boat registered to him
00:07:35
that had gone over the dam and had crashed, and nobody could ever pin it on Marcus.
00:07:41
All the while, Marcus was living the good life with his wife Michelle and the three children
00:07:46
in their big house on the water. What did he tell you about that? That he didn't do those things.
00:07:54
That is ridiculous that he did those things. Michelle was at Marcus' side on the local news after he sued the county sheriff's department
00:08:02
for wrongful arrest after a dispute about one of his motorcycles. He grabbed me and handcuffed me, threw me to the ground right here,
00:08:12
and basically just wrestled me as hard as he could. The Sheriff's Department denied any wrongdoing and the lawsuit was settled.
00:08:19
But on Cocktail Cove, there was something unsettling about Marcus's ability to grab the spotlight.
00:08:26
I know they always wondered about our income and that sort of thing. I know there was a lot of talk about Marcus.
00:08:33
Where do they get their money? Yeah. But I just never paid much attention to it.
00:08:38
But others did. He made a big splash with the plane flying over the reservoir and buzzing people.
00:08:45
I heard those stories. You just summed that up pretty well. Chris Proffitt covered the area around Geist for more than two decades
00:08:51
as a reporter for NBC affiliate WTHR in Indianapolis. This was a guy that favored Armani's suits.
00:08:59
He had an attractive wife. He had cars. He had planes. He seemed to have a really good life.
00:09:05
I think it's become clear that Marcus wanted to give the appearance of success. And did he ever.
00:09:12
He had all the expensive boy toys a guy could want. To Marcus, though, planes were the ultimate status symbols, and he loved to show his off.
00:09:23
With his camera in the cockpit, he was a regular at air shows where he could display his pilot skills, his daredevil streak.
00:09:30
For Marcus, airplanes were at the center of everything. Even a full-page ad the shrinkers did for a luxury car dealership
00:09:38
which featured Marcus, Michelle, the Lexus, the airplane. It was flattering that they asked us to do it.
00:09:47
I mean, it was nice, so we did it. I mean, we had boughten Lexus there before, and we knew the manager over there who had lived in our neighborhood,
00:09:57
so, you know, it was no big deal. No big deal. Everything about Marcus Shrenker and his apparent success was no big deal.
00:10:06
The man just seemed to rake it in. Despite a few neighborhood suspicions, very few questions were asked.
00:10:13
Nothing seemed out of place for this all-American success story of a family. There was one odd thing, though, back in 2005.
00:10:22
Marcus Shrenker suddenly turned to his wife, Michelle, and said, We're leaving town, moving down south to Atlanta.
00:10:31
How was the move? Um, it was hard. At least it was hard on me and hard on the kids to adjust,
00:10:37
but we did it, so it wasn't a happy time. The Shrinkers lived in another beautiful home in a gated subdivision.
00:10:46
Turns out Atlanta is home to thousands of pilots, and Mark has made a specific pitch to them on his website.
00:10:53
While your focus is on the lives of others, whose focus is on yours? Your investments or your parachute?
00:11:00
Marcus already had entree in Atlanta. He already knew a pilot, Charles Kinney, and they became close.
00:11:07
I got to hold his baby, play with his kids. We knew his family. Some of Charles' family members invested with Marcus, as did pilot David Smith.
00:11:17
We had a lot of fun. We went skeet shooting. We went down to see the space shuttle launch.
00:11:23
So we became pretty close friends rapidly. But after 18 months or so in Atlanta, Mark has had another surprise for Michelle.
00:11:32
He woke up one morning and just said, I've decided we're going to buy a lot in our old neighborhood and we're going to build a house and move back.
00:11:43
Before long, the Shrinkers were back on Cocktail Cove. Where did the money for their good life come from?
00:11:49
How did his business work? He made the trades. He managed people's funds. But I don know I didn specialize in what he did That was his business My focus was not the business My focus was our family But Marcus was focusing on a new incarnation of the business
00:12:07
Heritage Wealth Management soon got a new name, and Marcus called the man who runs the widely read magazine covering the Geist area.
00:12:15
He contacted me and said, hey, I'm going to go through this rebranding, and I'm going to get your input on it, and I'm going to get your help.
00:12:21
And I thought, you know, I might get an advertiser out of it. And he did. A four-page ad.
00:12:29
Shrinker's new company was called Icon Group. It had a nice ring to it. It had offices in Indianapolis and Sao Paulo and Tokyo and London.
00:12:40
A far-flung empire. The way he portrayed it to me was he said that they were already established business
00:12:46
and they were buying his business. And he was just going to be managing and selling securities for them.
00:12:52
Life looked very good indeed for the shrinkers and remarkably continued to look good
00:12:59
even as markets the world over were collapsing. And then, quiet signs of trouble.
00:13:06
Referring to Icon Group, Marcus sent an email to a friend saying, we have a compliance issue.
00:13:13
Another said, I've had to take some time off for stress. And during the holidays,
00:13:19
a close family friend got a phone call. I think it was Christmas Eve when another investor had contacted my husband and said,
00:13:29
hey, something's just not right. And they did a little digging. Christmas, joy was in the air around Cocktail Cove.
00:13:40
But at the big house on the water? Well, joy would not be the word. Earlier, Michelle Shrinker had stumbled on a painful discovery.
00:13:49
How did you find out? How did he finally tell you? He never really told me. I caught him.
00:14:06
And I saw him and her moving into the condo together. What did you do? I confronted him.
00:14:17
An affair. There was no denying it. A woman from the local airport in which Shrinker had invested and where he spent a lot of time.
00:14:25
In November, Michelle says, she had filled out paperwork for a divorce but didn't go through with it.
00:14:30
The kids, she says, had been looking forward to a family Christmas, a vacation. Where were you going to go on this family vacation?
00:14:38
Florida, to see his family. So why didn't you go? His parents got sick and I said, well, let's just get a hotel somewhere and still go.
00:14:49
And he said, well, we really can't afford it. Can't afford it? The high-flying Marcus Shrinker couldn't afford a brief vacation in Florida.
00:14:58
And I said, okay, fine, you know. And then a couple days later, ironically, he could afford to go to Key West.
00:15:07
Could afford to go to Key West with his girlfriend. Airport surveillance video from December 29, 2008,
00:15:14
showed Marcus and his girlfriend before leaving for Key West. that decided Michelle was the end.
00:15:22
And so while he was away, on December 30th, 2008, she filed for divorce. The next day, New Year's Eve,
00:15:31
she was upstairs. And my six-year-old came, came up, and said, Mommy, there's a policeman that wants to talk to you.
00:15:48
It was the last week in December 2008. Financial advisor Marcus Shrinker was in Key West, Florida with his girlfriend.
00:16:03
Back in the Indianapolis area, in the neighborhood known as Cocktail Cove, Shrinker's wife, Michelle, was brooding about the future.
00:16:12
Next day, New Year's Eve, at the big house on the cove, wound slowly through a gloomy afternoon, Marcus gone, Michelle on her own with the children.
00:16:21
And then the youngest called out. A policeman was at the door. And I said, he wants to talk to me. What are you talking about?
00:16:29
Where's the policeman? And he said, downstairs. He asked for daddy. But he wants to talk to you.
00:16:34
And they started yelling, Mr. Shrinker, get down here right now, right now. In fact, several investigators had arrived, and they had a search warrant.
00:16:43
They went through the huge house room by room. Do you think he knew when he left to go on the little vacation with his girlfriend
00:16:52
that he was about to get raided? I don't know for sure, but I felt like it. In fact, whether Marcus Schrenker knew it or not,
00:17:03
regulators had been following a trail through his financial papers for the previous eight days.
00:17:08
Then Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rikita. It started December 23rd for us, and it's been going at breakneck speed.
00:17:17
In one week's time, we were able to get enough evidence to convince a judge to issue a warrant to go seize that property.
00:17:25
According to investigators, Marcus had been selling investments without a license.
00:17:31
And they were finding, they say, other significant evidence of wrongdoing. How much money is involved?
00:17:37
We're talking about millions, but we're not talking about tens of millions. Criminal charges had not yet been filed, but Marcus knew the law was closing in.
00:17:46
His personal problems were, too. And then suddenly, it was as if time began to spin faster and faster.
00:17:55
Marcus returned to Indiana the first week of January He stayed with his girlfriend Michelle called him about the divorce What was his reaction Um I think he was surprised and said he didn want it
00:18:09
He didn't want a divorce. Please don't do this. Which I found very ironic. Then, January 4th, Marcus' stepfather died.
00:18:19
He attended the funeral. But around Geist Reservoir and Cocktail Cove, The talk was about business.
00:18:26
I got a voicemail on my cell phone, and it was Mark, and he said, Tom, I'm calling because something's happened to the company.
00:18:35
On January 9th, Marcus was hit with a half-million-dollar judgment in a federal lawsuit brought by an insurance company.
00:18:43
He'd been holding on to commissions he should have returned to the insurer. And over recent weeks, Michelle couldn't help but notice
00:18:49
that Marcus was growing increasingly agitated. And I would ask him what he was stressed about, and he would just say,
00:18:56
there's always somebody yelling at me. But he would never elaborate. Then, January 10th, Marcus drove to Alabama using a trailer to drop off a red motorcycle,
00:19:09
and then quickly back to Indianapolis. And then, on the evening of Sunday, January 11th, he filed a flight plan for Destin, Florida.
00:19:17
Yeah, he told me he was going to visit his dad. and I didn't think much of it. That evening, airport security cameras
00:19:25
caught Marcus' pickup truck doing donuts on the snow-covered tarmac. They brought his plane out.
00:19:37
And in his high-powered $1.9 million Piper Meridian, Florida was less than three hours away.
00:19:44
It was 6.45 Eastern time when he took off. Destination infamy Michelle was at home with the kids
00:19:59
It was around 9 o'clock I got a call from a controller from Alabama And said they needed his cell phone number
00:20:10
And I said, why? And they said, we lost contact with him And I said, is everything okay?
00:20:17
and they said, yeah, we just lost contact with them and we're just trying to get a hold of them.
00:20:22
And then an hour passed. And then another. And then about 12.30 in the morning, the Air Force called me
00:20:30
and started asking me questions about who owned the plane and then I knew something was really wrong.
00:20:37
Oh, something was wrong, all right. Dreadfully so. It was supposed to be a routine flight, or so its ordinary flight plan advertised.
00:21:01
On the night of Sunday, January 11th, a high-performance single-engine turboprop
00:21:06
belonging to investment advisor Marcus Shrinker was en route from Anderson, Indiana to Destin, Florida.
00:21:12
Marcus was at the controls. Through 1,200 for 1,700. Less than two hours into the flight, while the plane was somewhere over northern Alabama,
00:21:21
air traffic controllers received a distress call. It was Marcus. In a frantic voice, he told them his windshield had imploded.
00:21:29
He was bleeding profusely. He needed emergency help. Then, nothing. Controllers radioed back.
00:21:36
Land at the nearest airport. No response. The plane kept flying on and on and on.
00:21:42
From New Orleans, two F-15 fighter jets scrambled into the night, hoping to catch up with the unresponsive plane as it hurtled toward the Gulf Coast
00:21:53
and the sensitive military installations near Pensacola. Soon, in the Florida panhandle, an emergency call came into the Santa Rosa County Sheriff's Department.
00:22:05
It was from a military air traffic controller. As it started to unfold, it started becoming very obvious that this was something that was very bizarre.
00:22:15
Residents heard sonic booms, saw flares lighting up the sky. Word was a pilot was in big trouble.
00:22:24
Later, back home in Indiana, in the big house on Cocktail Cove, Michelle Shrinker was trying to comprehend what was wrong,
00:22:31
getting calls from air traffic control and the military, asking who might have been flying on Marcus' plane.
00:22:37
They wouldn't tell you why they were calling other than that? They said they were looking for him.
00:22:42
They couldn't find him? Mm-hmm. And I asked what had happened, and they said, we're just looking for him.
00:22:47
It got off the radar. Within an hour, another call came in from the Air Force. And then I was crying, and I said, you know, what's going on?
00:22:58
I mean, has something happened to him? You know, what's going on? And she asked if I had family there.
00:23:04
And I said, no, I've got three sleeping kids. Then, finally, near Pensacola, Florida, confirmation.
00:23:11
In a place strangely reminiscent of Cocktail Cove, a plane had in fact crashed. And I knew something was odd right away because there were military aircraft jets circling ahead.
00:23:26
Now a ground search was on. It took nearly an hour to get to the crash site. It was Marcus's plane.
00:23:34
Was Marcus alive or dead? Somewhere in the three o'clock area, my doorbell rang, and a sheriff and a colonel rang my doorbell.
00:23:44
I just started shaking because I knew when they come to your door, it's not good.
00:23:50
And they said, are you Mrs. Shrinker? And they said, your husband, The plane has gone down and my knees kind of gave out underneath me.
00:24:06
But that wasn't all. He said, but his body isn't in the plane, which is good, so we're still looking for him.
00:24:15
No body? What could possibly have happened? Could he have been thrown from the plane, somehow survived, and walked away from the crash into the swampland of Florida?
00:24:24
When we got there with the dogs, we didn't locate any blood. We didn't locate any imploded windshields, such as the emergency call stated. That's when we realized that something was definitely not right with the situation.
00:24:41
As Monday morning dawned, Indianapolis TV reporter Chris Proffitt heard about the crash in Florida. He called Tom Britt, the man who runs the local magazine.
00:24:50
I said, do you know that Marcus Shrinker's plane went down in northwest Florida last night?
00:24:57
I knew something was up. My immediate radar went up and said, there's something going on.
00:25:02
He goes, Chris, he would fake his death, and I'm positive of it. The 38-year-old Indianapolis businessman left the Anderson Airport alone in his six-seat...
00:25:21
In the early boarding hours of Monday, January 12, 2009, at the big house on Cocktail Cove,
00:25:28
Michelle Shrinker tried to focus. Her estranged husband's plane, she'd just been told, had crashed in a Florida swamp,
00:25:34
But the plane was empty. No Marcus. It's been a roller coaster. But hundreds of miles to the south, investigators were finally sorting out the bizarre details.
00:25:46
Those sonic booms and flares some people reported near Pensacola overnight were from the F-15 fighters, which had scrambled to take a look at Marcus's unresponsive plane.
00:25:56
We find out from the military pilots that were up there that when they flew along next to this aircraft
00:26:01
that the doors were already open and the cockpit appeared dark and empty, they said.
00:26:09
A pilotless plane? It sounded too weird, too eerie to be true. Then, more surreal news.
00:26:18
The colonel got a call and I said, well, did you find him? and he said, yeah, he's alive.
00:26:28
And apparently he parachuted out. Parachuted out? It seemed almost too far-fetched.
00:26:37
But according to federal authorities, the night before, at about 2,000 feet above Alabama,
00:26:43
Marcus jumped out the door of his plane and pulled the ripcord. A pilot who abandons a perfectly healthy airplane?
00:26:51
What other conclusion but this? Marcus Shrinker must have tried to fake his own death.
00:26:57
Then, waiting at home, Michelle got some news. He'd been spotted. He went to a house and told him he was in a canoeing accident.
00:27:07
And I was dumbfounded. But it was Marcus. Sopping wet from the knees down, he'd made it to a highway, hitched a ride to a motel.
00:27:20
Then he took off on that red motorcycle, which he'd stashed away two days earlier near the motel.
00:27:28
And a manhunt was on. I didn't know if they were going to arrest him, shoot him, you know, what was going to happen.
00:27:39
At a KOA campground near Tallahassee, a motorcyclist pulled in a few hours later.
00:27:44
Real friendly, asked for a tent site, needed electricity. I assumed he had a laptop with him.
00:27:52
He needed Internet access. Owner Caroline Hastings said the motorcyclist went online for a while,
00:27:58
then began to act quite strange Back in Indiana Tom Britt was checking his messages And I checked my email and an email pops up from Marcus Shrinker
00:28:09
There it was, an email from Marcus. He wrote that he really did have a window implode in flight.
00:28:15
He said he lost consciousness. He said he still loved Michelle, and how sorry he was for treating her so terribly.
00:28:23
He also said, I have embarrassed my family for the last time, and by the time you read this, I'll be gone.
00:28:31
So, what did you think? Well, my initial reaction was, I have to assume the worst,
00:28:37
and that he's really going to take his life. I know the walls have been caving in around him,
00:28:41
and the first thing I did was call the police. At the KOA campground the next day,
00:28:45
Caroline Hastings and her husband drove by the motorcyclist's tent. My husband pulled up on the golf cart and noticed some red tinge on his tent
00:28:53
that he didn't see the night before. so he got an uneasy feeling. The sheriffs came then, the U.S. Marshal Service too.
00:29:01
They opened the tent. It was a ghastly sight. Blood, lots of blood. Right around the time that
00:29:08
the ambulance was pulling in they walked over to say he had sliced a wrist and I didn't think he'd
00:29:14
make it. It was Marcus. On the internet the day before he'd learned his plane crashed on land,
00:29:21
had been found, identified. If he had tried to fake his death, he'd blown it. He was rushed by a Flight for Life helicopter to a nearby hospital.
00:29:31
He almost made good on the cryptic threat in the email. While Marcus recovered, officials in Indiana were pursuing their case against him.
00:29:40
I would say he's the Madoff of Indianapolis. Investigators say Marcus simply pocketed some of the money
00:29:46
he was supposed to be investing for his clients. And there was more. I looked at the documents, I looked at the evidence, and I thought, wow, if these allegations are true, we've got a serious situation here.
00:29:58
Investigator Harpinow had heard from Marcus's old pilot friends in Atlanta. When the light goes off, you realize, oh my God, I've been had.
00:30:07
When Harpinow poured through the pilot's documents, she found that Marcus had taken their investments and shifted them from one annuity to another,
00:30:14
each time earning a handsome commission and each time passing on huge fees to his unsuspecting pilot clients.
00:30:22
It's a practice known as churning. We're talking about surrender fees of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
00:30:28
They find out that their nest eggs that they had been working on for years was dwindling quickly.
00:30:36
Investigators say Marcus's alleged wrongdoing is a perfect example of what's known as affinity fraud.
00:30:43
You're going to see it a lot in a bad economy. It's not fraud by a stranger. It's fraud by a family member, a church member, someone who runs in your social circles.
00:30:53
I mean, all these things started coming in that I had no knowledge of. Just complete and utter shock of all these things that I had no idea about.
00:31:03
It was a house of cards. Yeah. And you didn't know. Anything? None. Even around Cocktail Cove, no one seems to know the extent of Marcus's alleged fraud
00:31:16
or how many friends have been taken in. It's over $100,000. Cindy Gooding was one of Marcus and Michelle's closest friends,
00:31:24
godmother to their youngest child. She and her husband say even they were ripped off by Marcus,
00:31:31
the dashing young man they loved like a son. It's wrong. Who has the right to take anything from someone else that they haven't earned?
00:31:39
That's just wrong. It was January 2009, and Michelle Shrinker was left at the big house on the cove with her three children.
00:31:46
Along with all of Marcus's assets, her assets were frozen too, and she said she was penniless.
00:31:52
I'm left holding the bag with everything. And whether or not it's true, you feel like maybe that was his intent?
00:31:58
Yes. But there was a bigger question. Did Michelle Shrinker just enjoy the proceeds Or was she and her husband alleged schemes up to her eyeballs
00:32:21
In March 2009, Michelle Shrinker had been left out in the rain. And, she said, left holding the bag.
00:32:30
Michelle Shrinker's estranged husband, Marcus, was the one in custody, accused of bilking clients and then attempting to fake his own death.
00:32:37
The state of Indiana had frozen Marcus's assets, and in a civil case, a judge ordered Marcus to pay more than half a billion dollars
00:32:44
in fines and restitution to victims of his annuity scheme. Michelle's assets were frozen as well.
00:32:51
She, however, claimed she was utterly penniless, had to rely on gifts from friends even to buy food for her three children.
00:32:57
She felt like a virtual prisoner, she said, in the big house on Cocktail Cove. I have nothing. I have nothing of my own.
00:33:05
So, like Ruth Madoff, the wife of fraud king Bernie Madoff, Michelle fought back against the idea that she was a party to any fraud.
00:33:15
These funds went other places, not to me. I know that I haven't done anything. A lot of people don't believe you.
00:33:22
I know. They'll vilify you. Mm-hmm. They think you're lying. They think you must have been in on it.
00:33:34
That's unfortunate. I mean, I don't know what else to do but tell the truth, and that's what I'm doing.
00:33:39
Did you know that he was in trouble with the law? No. Did you know that his business was tanking?
00:33:45
No. How could she not have known? Michelle says it's because all she could think about back then was her husband's extramarital affair.
00:33:55
My mind was occupied with keeping my marriage and my family together and making sure my children were okay because my family was in complete turmoil.
00:34:05
I'm Michelle Schenker, Chief Financial Officer of Heritage Wealth Management. But years earlier, in that website promo tape,
00:34:12
Michelle certainly seemed to have a hand in running the firm. I basically deal with the day-to-day operations of our company.
00:34:19
She says she simply read from a teleprompter. So as you read from the teleprompter the script that he wrote for you, did you at any point say, Marcus, I don't do that stuff.
00:34:31
Yeah, a little bit. But I just kind of just go along with it and you think it's not hurting anything.
00:34:38
She was the chief financial officer of his company and she lived a beautiful life.
00:34:47
Then Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita. The ill-gotten gain that this family lived on for years is reason to try to get the assets that are left back into the hands of those who've been hurt.
00:35:03
Indeed, there were some eyebrow-raising checking account records. Around the holidays, including the very day she was dealing with her divorce, December 30, 2008, and the day her house was raided, December 31,
00:35:16
she cashed out more than $70,000 from the corporate account. You made some withdrawals from the bank accounts during that period,
00:35:23
like $5,000 here, $10,000 there, and so on. They weren't withdrawals. They were just transfers.
00:35:28
He had asked me to make two other accounts prior to the end of the year to get bills paid.
00:35:35
Outside court in February 2009, Michelle cast herself as a victim, as much of a victim as any of Marcus's clients.
00:35:43
The only thing my husband did was give me a glorified title in that company. Does it worry you sometimes when you're trying to go to sleep at night that because of this title of CFO
00:35:56
you could Spend time in jail lose your kids lose everything I worry about it but I know I haven done anything I Haven done anything I went in and I paid some bills and I had a title I didn
00:36:18
act as a CFO. That is not what I did at all. Michelle's attorney, Mary Schmidt. The fact that
00:36:27
she has the title of CFO and not the duties of an acting CFO makes a huge difference. Her duties
00:36:33
were to go into the office a couple days a week, pay bills from whatever accounts Marcus told her there were funds to pay bills with,
00:36:41
and go home and be a mom. In July 2009, Michelle and the kids had to move out of the big house on Cocktail Cove.
00:36:49
Neighbor Pat Carlini. I think he has about $2 million into it. They wanted $1.6 million, and I think they got just over $1.1 million.
00:36:57
Bargain basement. It was a bargain. It was a steal for somebody. The proceeds went to partially repay fleeced investors.
00:37:05
As for Michelle, we caught up with her for a second interview in downtown Indianapolis.
00:37:11
How are you hanging in there? Just taking it a day at a time. Turns out Michelle wanted to talk to us again,
00:37:18
especially about documents from the Shrinker investigation. In interviews with investigators, Marcus's former business associate,
00:37:25
a whistleblower in the case, said that when it came to Michelle's chief financial officer job, quote,
00:37:31
it is just like I had, a glorified title where I was just a support person. When asked if Michelle had training or experience, the whistleblower said, quote,
00:37:41
as far as I know, my impression of Michelle is a victim. Yes, he said I was a victim.
00:37:47
The same thing that I've been saying all along, that I paid the bills, that all I did was pay the bills and come in a couple times a week.
00:37:55
everything that I've been saying the entire time, that all I had was a glorified title,
00:38:00
like everyone else. It's true, according to this guy. According to this guy and according to the
00:38:04
deposition he gave back in December and back in April. I've known they've had it for so long,
00:38:09
and I've just been hoping it would surface. And then in a written statement in August 2009,
00:38:16
the spokesman for Indiana's then Secretary of State confirmed, officially, she is not being
00:38:21
charged at this time. Later, Michelle reached a civil settlement with the receivership of the
00:38:27
shrinker business, but she was never charged of any criminal wrongdoing and always hoped her name
00:38:33
would be cleared. What would you say to people about a situation like this? I wish people wouldn't
00:38:38
judge so quickly. You know, guilt by association is not always true. And so many people have been
00:38:48
judging me based on the fact that it's, you know, what they've read in a newspaper.
00:38:57
For Marcus Schrenker, however, it was another story. In August 2009, Marcus Schrenker was
00:39:04
sentenced to more than four years in prison after he pleaded guilty to federal charges of crashing
00:39:09
his plane intentionally and that he a false distress call. In an emotional statement,
00:39:15
Schrenker apologized to his family and air traffic controllers and residents of the area where his plane crashed and narrowly missed several homes.
00:39:24
To this day, I cannot believe I could do something so reckless and selfish, he told the judge.
00:39:30
Schrenker later pleaded guilty to five state securities fraud charges in Indiana.
00:39:36
He was released on parole in 2015. You know him probably better than anybody in spite of the lies.
00:39:43
What happened to him? I wish I knew. I don't know. Did he want too much? Were his ambitions too big?
00:39:54
I can only guess. He's just trying to fill holes with things. I don't know. Because it sure wasn't buying happiness.