Chapter 2Asensio: Exile on Third Avenue
The meeting turned nasty even before it began. Manuel Asensio walked off the elevator wearing a gray-striped Norman Hilton suit into the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) offices at One Liberty Plaza—a hulking black steel skyscraper in lower Manhattan. He was an hour late and offered no apologies.
As the dapper Asensio entered the lobby, a NASD case manager walked up to greet him, extending his hand as he did so. Asensio ignored it, and turned to his lawyer.
“I can't believe that this guy thinks I'm going to shake his hand,” he told him. There were really no reasons for niceties from Asensio's perspective. The NASD had been routinely badgering him for thousands of pages of documents over the years, and he thought their goal was to drive him out of business.
The NASD had summoned Asensio in September 2004 to answer questions about his short-selling firm as well as six research reports published on the Asensio.com website. The research was part of a series describing alleged Medicare fraud at PolyMedica Corp, a NASDAQ-listed telemarketer of blood glucose test kits.
Then things got ugly. At the hearing, Asensio wouldn't respond when asked about ownership of his firm, Integral Securities. Because it wasn't an NASD member, he said he didn't have to answer. In his street-inflected Brooklyn accent, he called the proceedings “a fraudulent, corrupt, intentional attempt to discredit my firm, keep me from doing my work.” Asensio declared ...
Get The Most Dangerous Trade now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
