03/30/09 The Noel's are not like you and me -- Or -- The greedy will always be with us. ...

Andres Piedrahita, Another One Of Walter Noel's Family Members To Find Odious

The Charming Mr. Piedrahita Finds Himself Caught in the Madoff Storm
Wall Street Journal

Andrés Piedrahita's job title for the past two years was managing partner of Fairfield Greenwich Group, the hedge fund that lost $6.9 billion to Bernard Madoff's pyramid scheme. But Mr. Piedrahita's real job, he once told a friend, was "to live better than any of my clients."


With an apartment in Manhattan and a mansion in London, and then in Madrid, a butler, a chauffeured car and a private jet, he did just that. The Colombian threw lavish parties, assembled an impressive art collection and held court from his Falcon yacht anchored off the Spanish island resort of Mallorca, where he has a hacienda. Friends he entertained included the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Felipe, the heir to Spain's throne, and top models like Elle Macpherson.


"I've never seen anybody live like him and spend like him, and I know billionaires who are 10 times wealthier than he is," says Fernando Botero, the son of the Colombian artist of the same name. "His job was to live grand."


Married since 1989 to Corina Noel, the daughter of Fairfield Greenwich founder Walter Noel, Mr. Piedrahita was one of four of the five Noel sons-in-law to work in the family business. But his outstanding public-relations skills set him apart from the others. Analysts say Mr. Piedrahita, 50 years old, played a key role in expanding the reach of the Madoff fraud by wooing wealthy Latin Americans and Europeans to invest in Fairfield Greenwich, which had about half its assets with Mr. Madoff.


....Now, with the collapse of Mr. Madoff's $50 billion scheme, Mr. Piedrahita finds himself in a legal and financial storm. Spanish anticorruption prosecutors are investigating Fairfield Greenwich as well as Mr. Piedrahita to determine what they knew about Mr. Madoff's fraudulent funds when they sold them to Spanish clients. Mr. Piedrahita and Fairfield Greenwich are the targets of at least three class-action suits filed by angry investors in U.S. who say the company and its directors were grossly negligent in investing their money with Mr. Madoff.....


.....After graduating from B.U., Mr. Piedrahita knocked around New York working variously as a commodities broker, selling penny stocks and as an investment adviser. His budding financial career was almost clipped in the early 1980s. At the time, Mr. Piedrahita, who was working for a small commodities dealer then called Balfour Maclaine, got a number of his father's Bogota friends interested in investments that quickly went south. Many of his investors "stayed quiet and lost their money with dignity," says one of the investors. "They valued their friendship with the father over their investment." Balfour, now called Balmac International Inc., declined to comment......


....But one investor didn't. He says he asked Mr. Piedrahita frequently for information on how his investment was doing. Mr. Piedrahita avoided the issue, even claiming on one visit to Bogota from New York that he had forgotten to bring along the client's accounts. Growing suspicious, the client says he hopped a plane to Manhattan, went to Mr. Piedrahita's office and confronted his boss, asking for the information Mr. Piedrahita had avoided providing. "It was catastrophic," the client says, remembering the state of his account.

Bottom line: Mr. Piedrahita lost his job, says the client, who recovered all his money......


.....Friends say Mr. Piedrahita settled down after his marriage to Ms. Noel. He merged Littlestone with Fairfield Greenwich in 1997. Shortly after, he moved to London to a mansion on Chester Square. He entertained lavishly. One friend remembers a dinner party flush with English dukes and members of European royal houses. "The only dukes not there were the Dukes of Hazzard," ....

.....Just days before the Madoff collapse, Mr. Piedrahita was trying to sell a fund called Fairfield Sentry whose assets were managed by Mr. Madoff, to friends and acquaintances, says Martin Varsavsky, an Argentine businessman who lives in Madrid and says he was approached by Mr. Piedrahita. "I didn't invest because neither Andrés nor anyone else could explain to me how that fund worked," says Mr. Varsavsky.......

"I look at myself in the morning, and I'm very proud of what I have done, and so are my partners," says Mr. Piedrahita

The Noel's and the Piedrahita's are not like you and me

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