Flying High at Cocktail Cove

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Speaker 2 They seemed so perfect, this golden couple. He who soared so fast and high, she who dazzled down below.

Speaker 2 And their life?

Speaker 2 Why, it was a dream come true. Their plentiful money appeared as if from thin air.
And in their mansion, French chateau style.

Speaker 2 They cared for their children, collected fine things, and lived well-earned success out loud.

Speaker 2 In fact, it could be said that on land and in the water and in the air, Marcus and Michelle Schrinker made waves, perhaps of envy, among those less lucky in life.

Speaker 2 And then,

Speaker 2 ah, yes, and then.

Speaker 2 The stage on which this bizarre play soared then crashed 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.

Speaker 2 The locals even have a nickname for it, a cheesy reflection of a less sober time, Cocktail Cove.

Speaker 2 A little less frothy these days, perhaps, but once upon a time, particularly in a certain imitation chateau,

Speaker 2 it was shaken and stirred.

Speaker 2 On a weekend in the warm summer sun, Cocktail Cove on the Geist Reservoir outside Indianapolis is the place to be. The lake is man-made, as is the life.

Speaker 2 The water sports, the boating, the sense of achievement, lubricated in suntan oil, new money, and an all-day happy hour. Former Indianapolis television personality Pat Carlini lives here.

Speaker 3 About every other house has a pool and a hot tub. They have a lot of parties.
They have a lot of fun. I think the people are very work hard all week long.
It comes Friday. It's the weekend.

Speaker 3 They want to play. They play hard.

Speaker 2 Almost gives you an idea for a TV show or something.

Speaker 3 That's been talked about a lot.

Speaker 3 The whole desperate housewives feel. They've dubbed the streets Wisteria Lane.
I can totally see a reality show, you know,

Speaker 3 the Geist gals.

Speaker 2 But there was one of those Geist gals Pat and the neighbors didn't see very often. Yet everyone seemed to know who she was.

Speaker 2 Michelle Shrinker, the attractive young wife of the well-to-do hotshot who built one of the biggest houses on Geist.

Speaker 4 And it's a nice, affluent neighborhood.

Speaker 4 But it's, I mean.

Speaker 2 A bit of a patent place? Yeah. Secret backbiting going on, that kind of thing.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that can be said about it. Absolutely.
I'm usually the one they're talking about.

Speaker 2 What do they usually say about you?

Speaker 4 Well, I don't know if it's so much about me, but more about my husband.

Speaker 4 I know the backstabbing that went on, and it's just not something I wanted to participate in. I didn't want to be a part of it.

Speaker 2 From the beginning.

Speaker 4 From the beginning.

Speaker 2 The beginning.

Speaker 2 She met him one summer in the early 90s while both were on summer break from Purdue University.

Speaker 4 Was in town for a weekend and just kind of caught my eye. We had a lot of fun.
Our first date, we went flying nonetheless. Kind of a unique first date.

Speaker 4 But a little scary at first.

Speaker 2 It soon became comfortable. They married in 1995.

Speaker 4 I mean, I adored him.

Speaker 4 I mean, I really loved him.

Speaker 2 He was a young man in a hurry. In his 20s, Marcus launched a career as an investment advisor.
The business seemed to grow steadily.

Speaker 2 It had several names over time, including Heritage Wealth Management.

Speaker 4 I would just describe him as a

Speaker 4 financial advisor who,

Speaker 4 did portfolio management for affluent individuals. You know, he managed the business and I managed the home.

Speaker 2 And that may be. But go back a few years and take a look at the Heritage Wealth Management website, circa 2005.
There's Marcus.

Speaker 5 Hi, I'm Marcus Schrinker, President and Senior Advisor of Heritage Wealth Management.

Speaker 2 With what now seems an oddly foreboding sales pitch.

Speaker 6 Your investments are your parachute.

Speaker 2 Then there's Michelle.

Speaker 8 I'm Michelle Schringer, Chief Financial Officer of Heritage Wealth Management.

Speaker 4 That was done,

Speaker 4 gosh, a few years ago, and each employee at the time did a little spot.

Speaker 4 The dialogue was written by Marcus.

Speaker 4 Marcus wanted to create an image. It was done for marketing purposes.

Speaker 2 A big company.

Speaker 4 company. To make it seem bigger, maybe than it was at the time.

Speaker 2 Michelle says she was really a stay-at-home mom, focused on her children, and by all accounts, did a wonderful job.

Speaker 4 They had it all.

Speaker 9 Beautiful children.

Speaker 2 Friends, like Cindy Gooding, say the Shrinkers were a perfect family. In fact, when Cindy took the kids to lunch one day, she said, a stranger stopped her.

Speaker 9 And he said, I have to tell you,

Speaker 9 your children are the most well-behaved children I have ever seen. I started tearing up.
You know, I was so proud of them. That's the kind of family they were.

Speaker 2 To some, that is. But around Geist in recent years, strange stories began circulating about Marcus.

Speaker 5 I would describe his personality as, you know, it's been described as Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde.

Speaker 5 I could see that.

Speaker 2 Tom Britt, who runs the popular Geist magazine, knew the Shrinkers and liked Marcus.

Speaker 5 You heard from his neighbors and people lived across the street about what was going on and It was just hard to believe. It didn't sync up with the guy that I knew.

Speaker 5 You know, there's a lot of stories and they're urban legends, but

Speaker 5 if you hear so many of them, you have to believe at least one of them is true. And if any one of them are true,

Speaker 5 you just think this guy's crazy.

Speaker 2 And as the stories got stranger and stranger, questions began to percolate in the waters of Cocktail Cove.

Speaker 2 In an upscale neighborhood known as Cocktail Cove near Indianapolis, a young investment advisor with big ambitions was making an even bigger name for himself.

Speaker 2 But it wasn't quite the reputation Marcus Schrinker might have wished. Pat Carlini lived nearby.

Speaker 3 It seems like he just had run-ins with one neighbor after another.

Speaker 4 Over what?

Speaker 3 It could be the fact that somebody is building a house next to him and the stone on that house would look too much like the stone on his house.

Speaker 2 That might sound like typical neighborhood pettiness, but to others Marcus Schrenker had reputedly turned into the neighbor from hell. A pretty bad tenant too.

Speaker 2 He rented office space at a building near his home. Tom Britt runs the local magazine.

Speaker 5 A couple years ago, he had an argument. With then his landlord.

Speaker 5 The next day, the guy wakes up and he goes out to his dock and his boat isn't there and he gets a call from the fire department saying that there was a boat registered to him that had gone over the dam and had crashed.

Speaker 5 And nobody could ever pin it on Marcus.

Speaker 2 All the while Marcus was living the good life with his wife Michelle and their three children in their big house on the water. What did he tell you about that?

Speaker 4 That he didn't do those things.

Speaker 4 That is ridiculous that he did those things.

Speaker 2 Michelle was at Marcus's side on the local news after he sued the County Sheriff's Department for wrongful arrest after a dispute about one of his motorcycles.

Speaker 10 He grabbed me and handcuffed me,

Speaker 10 threw me to the ground right here, and

Speaker 10 basically just wrestled me as hard as he could.

Speaker 2 The Sheriff's Department denied any wrongdoing and the lawsuit was settled. But on Cocktail Cove, there was something unsettling about Marcus's ability to grab the spotlight.

Speaker 4 I know they always wondered about our income and that sort of thing. I know there was a lot of talk about Marcus.

Speaker 2 Where do they get their money?

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 2 But others did.

Speaker 10 He made a big splash with the plane flying over the reservoir and buzzing people.

Speaker 7 I heard those stories.

Speaker 2 You just summed that up pretty well because Chris Prophet covered the area around Geist for more than two decades as a reporter for NBC affiliate WTHR in Indianapolis.

Speaker 10 This was a guy that favored Armani suits. He had an attractive wife.
He had cars, he had planes. He seemed to have a really good life.

Speaker 10 I think it's become clear that Marcus wanted to give the appearance of success.

Speaker 2 And did he ever. 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.

Speaker 2 With his camera in the cockpit, he was a regular at air shows where he could display his pilot skills, his daredevil streak. For Marcus, airplanes were at the center of everything.

Speaker 2 Even a full-page ad the Shrinkers did for a luxury car dealership which featured Marcus, Michelle, the Lexus, the airplane.

Speaker 4 It was flattering that they asked us to do it. I mean, it was nice, so we did it.
I mean, we had bought Lexus there before, and we knew the manager over there who had lived in our neighborhood, so,

Speaker 4 you know, it was no big deal.

Speaker 2 No big deal. Everything about Marcus Schrenker and his apparent success was no big deal.
The man just seemed to rake it in.

Speaker 2 Despite a few neighborhood suspicions, very few questions were asked. Nothing seemed out of place for this all-American success story of a family.
There was one odd thing, though, back in 2005.

Speaker 2 Marcus Schrenker suddenly turned to his wife, Michelle, and said,

Speaker 2 We're leaving town, moving down south to Atlanta. How was the move?

Speaker 4 It was hard. At least it was hard on me and hard on the kids to adjust, but we did it, so it wasn't a happy time.

Speaker 2 The Shrinkers lived in another beautiful home in a gated subdivision. Turns out Atlanta is home to thousands of pilots, and Mark has made a specific pitch to them on his website.

Speaker 6 While your focus is on the lives of others, whose focus is on yours? Your investments are your parachute.

Speaker 2 Marcus already had entree in Atlanta. He already knew a pilot, Charles Kinney, and they became close.

Speaker 13 I got to hold his baby, play with his kids. We knew his family.

Speaker 2 Some of Charles' family members invested with Marcus, as did pilot David Smith.

Speaker 14 We had a lot of fun. We went skeet shooting.
We went down to see the space shuttle launch. So we became pretty close friends rapidly.

Speaker 2 But after 18 months or so in Atlanta, Marcus had another surprise for Michelle.

Speaker 4 He woke up one morning and just said, I've decided we're gonna buy a lot in our old neighborhood and we're gonna build a house and move back.

Speaker 2 Before long, the Shrinkers were back on Cocktail Cove. Where did the money for their good life come from? How did his business work?

Speaker 4 He made the trades. He managed people's funds, but I don't know.
I didn't specialize in what he did. That was his business.
My focus was not the business. My focus was our family.

Speaker 2 But Marcus was focusing on a new incarnation of the business. Heritage Wealth Management soon got a new name.
And Marcus called the man who runs the widely read magazine covering the Geist area.

Speaker 5 He contacted me and said, hey, I'm going to go through this rebranding, and I want to get your input on it, and I'm going to get your help.

Speaker 5 And I thought, you know, I might get an advertiser out of it.

Speaker 2 And he did.

Speaker 2 A four-page ad. 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.
A far-flung empire.

Speaker 5 The way he portrayed it to me was he said that they were already established business and they were buying his business. And he was just going to be managing and selling securities for them.

Speaker 2 Life looked very good indeed for the Shrinkers and remarkably continued to look good even as markets the world over were collapsing.

Speaker 2 And then quiet signs of trouble. Referring to Icon Group, Marcus sent an email to a friend saying, we have a compliance issue.
Another said, I've had to take some time off for stress.

Speaker 2 And during the holidays, a close family friend got a phone call.

Speaker 9 I think it was Christmas Eve

Speaker 9 when

Speaker 9 another investor had contacted my husband and said, hey, Hey, something's just not right.

Speaker 9 And they did a little digging.

Speaker 2 Christmas, joy was in the air around Cocktail Cove. But at the big house on the water,

Speaker 2 well, joy would not be the word. Earlier, Michelle Shrinker had stumbled on a painful discovery.
How did you find out? How did he finally

Speaker 2 tell you?

Speaker 4 He never really told me. I uh

Speaker 2 caught him

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 I saw him and her moving into the condo together.

Speaker 2 What'd you do?

Speaker 4 I confronted him.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 In November, Michelle says she had filled out paperwork for a divorce but didn't go through with it. The kids, she says, had been looking forward to a family Christmas, a vacation.

Speaker 2 Where were you going to go on this family vacation?

Speaker 4 Florida to see his family.

Speaker 2 So why didn't you go?

Speaker 4 His parents got sick, and

Speaker 4 I said, well, let's just get a hotel somewhere and still go. And he said, well, we really can't afford it.

Speaker 2 Can't afford it? The high-flying Marcus Shrinker couldn't afford a brief vacation in Florida?

Speaker 4 And I said, said,

Speaker 4 okay, fine, you know. And then

Speaker 4 a couple days later, ironically, he could afford to go to Key West, could afford to go to Key West with his girlfriend.

Speaker 2 Airport surveillance video from December 29th, 2008, showed Marcus and his girlfriend before leaving for Key West. That decided Michelle was the end.

Speaker 2 And so while he was away, on December 30th, 2008, she filed for divorce. The next day, New Year's Eve, she was upstairs.

Speaker 4 And my six-year-old came,

Speaker 4 came up

Speaker 4 and said, Mommy, there's a policeman that wants to talk to you.

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Speaker 2 It was the last week in December 2008. Financial advisor Marcus Schrinker was in Key West, Florida with his girlfriend.

Speaker 2 Back in the Indianapolis area, in the neighborhood known as Cocktail Cove, Shrinker's wife Michelle was brooding about the future.

Speaker 2 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. And then the youngest called out.

Speaker 2 A policeman was at the door.

Speaker 4 And I said, he wants to talk to me. What are you talking about? Where's the policeman? And he said, downstairs, he asked for daddy.
But he wants to talk to you. And they started yelling, Mr.

Speaker 4 Schrinker, get down here right now, right now.

Speaker 2 In fact, several investigators had arrived, and they had a search warrant. They went through the huge house room by room.

Speaker 2 Do you think he knew when he left to go on the little vacation with his girlfriend that he was about to get

Speaker 2 raided?

Speaker 4 I don't know for sure, but I felt like it.

Speaker 2 In fact, whether Marcus Schrenker knew it or not, regulators had been following a trail through his financial papers for the previous eight days. Then-Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rikita.

Speaker 7 It started December 23rd for us,

Speaker 7 and it's been going at breakneck speed. 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.

Speaker 2 According to investigators, Marcus had been selling investments without a license. And they were finding, they say, other significant evidence of wrongdoing.
How much money is involved?

Speaker 7 We're talking about millions, but we're not talking about tens of millions.

Speaker 2 Criminal charges had not yet been filed, but Marcus knew the law was closing in. His personal problems were, too.

Speaker 2 And then suddenly, it was as if time began to spin faster and faster. Marcus returned to Indiana the first week of January.
He stayed with his girlfriend. Michelle called him about the the divorce.

Speaker 2 What was his reaction?

Speaker 4 I think he was surprised and said he didn't want it. He didn't want a divorce.
Please don't do this,

Speaker 4 which I found very ironic.

Speaker 2 Then, January 4th, Marcus's stepfather died. He attended the funeral.
But around Geist Reservoir and Cocktail Cove, the talk was about business.

Speaker 5 I got a voicemail on my cell phone, and it was Mark, and he said, Tom,

Speaker 5 I'm calling because something's happened to the company.

Speaker 2 On January 9th, Marcus was hit with a half million dollar judgment in a federal lawsuit brought by an insurance company. He'd been holding on to commissions.
He should have returned to the insurer.

Speaker 2 And over recent weeks, Michelle couldn't help but notice that Marcus was growing increasingly agitated.

Speaker 4 And I would ask him what he was stressed about, and he would just say,

Speaker 4 there's always somebody yelling at me. But he would never elaborate.

Speaker 2 Then January 10th, Marcus drove to Alabama using a trailer to drop off a red motorcycle and then quickly back to Indianapolis.

Speaker 2 And then on the evening of Sunday, January 11th, he filed a flight plan for Destin, Florida.

Speaker 4 Yeah, he told me he was going to visit his dad.

Speaker 4 And I didn't think much of it.

Speaker 2 That evening, airport security cameras caught Marcus's pickup truck doing doughnuts on the snow-covered tarmac. They brought his plane out.

Speaker 2 And in his high-powered, $1.9 million Piper Meridian, Florida was less than three hours away.

Speaker 2 It was 6:45 Eastern Time when he took off.

Speaker 2 Destination Infamy.

Speaker 2 Michelle was at home with the kids. It was around 9 o'clock.

Speaker 16 I

Speaker 4 got a call from a controller from Alabama and said they needed his cell phone number.

Speaker 4 And I said, why? And they said, we lost contact with him. And I said, is everything okay? And they said, yeah, we just lost contact with him and we're just trying to get a hold of him.

Speaker 2 And then an hour passed. And then another.

Speaker 4 And then about 12.30 in the morning, the Air Force called me and started asking me questions about who owned the plane and then I knew something was really wrong.

Speaker 2 Oh something was wrong, all right. Dreadfully so.

Speaker 2 It was supposed to be a routine flight, or so its ordinary flight plan advertised.

Speaker 2 on the night of sunday january 11th a high-performance single-engine turboprop belonging to investment advisor marcus shrinker was en route from anderson indiana to destin florida marcus was at the controls to 1200 for 1700 less than two hours into the flight while the plane was somewhere over northern alabama air traffic controllers received a distress call it was marcus

Speaker 2 In a frantic voice, he told them his windshield had imploded. He was bleeding profusely.
He needed emergency help. Then, nothing.
Controllers radioed back, land at the nearest airport. No response.

Speaker 2 The plane kept flying on and on and on.

Speaker 2 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 and the sensitive military installations near Pensacola.

Speaker 17 Santa Rosa Sheriff's Office, may I help you?

Speaker 2 Soon, in the Florida Panhandle, an emergency call came into the Santa Rosa County Sheriff's Department. It was from a military air traffic controller.

Speaker 11 As it started to unfold, it started becoming very obvious that this was something that was very bizarre.

Speaker 2 Residents heard sonic booms, saw flares lighting up the sky. Word was a pilot was in big trouble.

Speaker 2 Later, back home in Indiana, in the big house on Cocktail Cove, Michelle Schrinker was trying to comprehend what was wrong, getting calls from air traffic control and the military asking who might have been flying on Marcus's plane.

Speaker 2 They wouldn't tell you why they were calling other than that?

Speaker 4 They said they were looking for him.

Speaker 2 They couldn't find him.

Speaker 4 And I asked what had happened and they said we're just looking for him.

Speaker 8 He got off the radar.

Speaker 2 Within an hour, another call came in from the Air Force.

Speaker 4 By then I was

Speaker 4 crying and I said, you know, what's going on? I mean, has something happened to him? You know, what's going on? And she asked if I had family there.

Speaker 4 And I said, no, I've got three sleeping kids.

Speaker 2 Then, finally, near Pensacola, Florida, confirmation. In a place strangely reminiscent of Cocktail Cove, a plane had in fact crashed.

Speaker 11 And I knew something was odd right away because there were military aircraft, jets, circling ahead.

Speaker 2 Now a ground search was on. It took nearly an hour to get to the crash site.

Speaker 2 It was Marcus's plane. Was Marcus alive or dead?

Speaker 4 Somewhere in the three o'clock area, my doorbell rang.

Speaker 4 And a sheriff and a colonel rang my doorbell. I just started shaking because I knew when they come to your door, it's not good.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 they said,

Speaker 4 are you Mrs. Shrinker?

Speaker 4 And they said, um,

Speaker 4 your husband's plane has gone down and

Speaker 4 my knees kind of gave out underneath me.

Speaker 2 But that wasn't all.

Speaker 4 He said, but his body isn't in the plane, which is good, so we're still looking for him.

Speaker 2 No body?

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 19 When we got there with the dogs, we didn't locate any blood. We didn't locate

Speaker 19 any imploded windshields, such as the emergency call stated. That's when we realized that something was definitely not right with the situation.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 10 I said, do you know?

Speaker 10 That Marcus Schrinker's plane went down in northwest Florida last night.

Speaker 5 I knew something was up.

Speaker 5 My immediate radar went up and said there's something going on.

Speaker 19 He goes, Chris, he would fake his death and I'm positive of it.

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Speaker 2 The 38-year-old Indianapolis businessman left the Anderson airport alone in his six-seat.

Speaker 2 In the early morning hours of Monday, January 12th, 2009, at the big house on Cocktail Cove, Michelle Schrinker tried to focus.

Speaker 2 Her estranged husband's plane, she'd just been told, had crashed in a Florida swamp. But the plane was empty.
No Marcus.

Speaker 4 So it's been a roller coaster.

Speaker 2 But hundreds of miles to the south, investigators were finally sorting out the bizarre details.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 11 We find out from the military pilots that were up there that when they flew along next to this aircraft, that that the doors were already open

Speaker 11 and the cockpit appeared dark and empty, they said.

Speaker 2 A pilotless plane? It sounded too weird, too eerie to be true.

Speaker 2 Then, more surreal news. The colonel got a call, and

Speaker 4 I said,

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 did you find him?

Speaker 18 And he said, Yeah, he's alive.

Speaker 4 And apparently, he parachuted out.

Speaker 2 Parachuted out?

Speaker 2 It seemed almost too far-fetched.

Speaker 2 But according to federal authorities, the night before, at about 2,000 feet above Alabama, Marcus jumped out the door of his plane and pulled the ripcord.

Speaker 2 A pilot who abandons a perfectly healthy airplane? What other conclusion but this? Marcus Schrinker must have tried to fake his own death. Then, waiting at home, Michelle got some news.

Speaker 2 He'd been spotted.

Speaker 4 He went to a house and told him he was in a canoeing accident. And

Speaker 4 I was

Speaker 4 dumbfounded.

Speaker 2 But it was Marcus. Sopping wet from the knees down, he'd made it to a highway, hitched a ride to a motel.
Then he took off on that red motorcycle, which he'd stashed away two days earlier.

Speaker 2 near the motel.

Speaker 2 And a manhunt was on.

Speaker 4 I didn't know if they were

Speaker 4 going to arrest him, shoot him. You know, what was going to happen.

Speaker 2 At a KOA campground near Tallahassee, a motorcyclist pulled in a few hours later.

Speaker 21 Real friendly, asked for a tent site, needed electricity. I assumed he had a laptop.
With him, he needed internet access.

Speaker 2 Owner Caroline Hastings said the motorcyclist went online for a while, then began to act quite strange.

Speaker 2 Back in Indiana, Tom Britt was checking his messages.

Speaker 5 And I checked my email and an email pops up from Marcus Shrinker.

Speaker 2 There it was, an email from Marcus. He wrote that he really did have a window implode in flight.
He said he lost consciousness.

Speaker 2 He said he still loved Michelle and how sorry he was for treating her so terribly. He also said, I have embarrassed my family for the last time, and by the time you read this, I'll be gone.
So,

Speaker 2 what do you think?

Speaker 5 Well, my initial reaction was, I have to assume the worst, and he's really going to take his life. I know the walls have been caving in around him, and the first thing I did was call the police.

Speaker 2 At the KOA campground the next day, Caroline Hastings and her husband drove by the motorcyclist tent.

Speaker 21 My husband pulled up on the golf cart and noticed some red tinge on his tent that he didn't see the night before.

Speaker 21 So he got an uneasy feeling.

Speaker 2 The sheriffs came then. The U.S.
Marshal Service, too. They opened the tent.
It was a ghastly sight.

Speaker 21 Blood, lots of blood. Right around the time that the ambulance was pulling in, they walked over to say, yeah, he had sliced a wrist and they didn't think he'd make it.

Speaker 2 It was Marcus. On the internet the day before, he'd learned his plane crashed on land, had been found, identified.
If he had tried to fake his death, he'd blown it.

Speaker 2 He was rushed by a Flight for Life helicopter to a nearby hospital. He almost made good on the the cryptic threat in the email.

Speaker 2 While Marcus recovered, officials in Indiana were pursuing their case against him.

Speaker 12 They would say he's the madeoff of Indianapolis.

Speaker 2 Investigators say Marcus simply pocketed some of the money he was supposed to be investing for his clients. And there was more.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 2 Investigator Harpino had heard from Marcus's old pilot friends in Atlanta.

Speaker 14 When the light goes off, you realize, oh my god, I've been head.

Speaker 2 When Harpineau poured through the pilots' documents, she found that Marcus had taken their investments and shifted them from one annuity to another, each time earning a handsome commission and each time passing on huge fees to his unsuspecting pilot clients.

Speaker 2 It's a practice known as churning.

Speaker 13 We're talking about surrender fees of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Speaker 12 They find out that their nest eggs that they had been working on for years was dwindling quickly.

Speaker 2 Investigators say Marcus's alleged wrongdoing is a perfect example of what's known as affinity fraud.

Speaker 7 You're going to see it

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 4 I mean, all these things started coming in that I had no knowledge of, just

Speaker 4 complete and utter shock of all these things that I had no idea about.

Speaker 2 It was a house of cards.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And you didn't know.

Speaker 2 Anything?

Speaker 2 None.

Speaker 2 Even around Cocktail Cove, no one seems to know the extent of Marcus's alleged fraud or how many friends have been taken in.

Speaker 9 It's over $100,000.

Speaker 2 Cindy Gooding was one of Marcus and Michelle's closest friends, godmother to their youngest child.

Speaker 2 She and her husband say even they were ripped off by Marcus, the dashing young man they loved like a son.

Speaker 4 It's wrong.

Speaker 9 Who has the right to take anything from someone else that they haven't earned? That's just wrong.

Speaker 2 It was January 2009, and Michelle Shrinker was left at the big house on the cove with her three children. Along with all of Marcus's assets, her assets were frozen too, and she said she was penniless.

Speaker 4 I'm left holding the bag with everything.

Speaker 2 And whether or not it's true, you feel like maybe that was his intent?

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 2 But there was a bigger question. Did Michelle Shrinker just enjoy the proceeds? Or was she and her husband's alleged schemes up to her eyeballs?

Speaker 2 In March 2009, Michelle Schrinker had been left out in the rain and, she said, left holding the bag.

Speaker 2 Michelle Shrinker's estranged husband, Marcus, was the one in custody, accused of bilking clients and then attempting to fake his own death.

Speaker 2 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 in fines and restitution to victims of his annuity scheme.

Speaker 19 Michelle's assets were frozen as well.

Speaker 2 She, however, claimed she was utterly penniless, had to rely on gifts from friends even to buy food for her three children.

Speaker 2 She felt like a virtual prisoner, she said, in the big house on Cocktail Cove.

Speaker 4 I have nothing. I have nothing of my own.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 4 These funds went other places and not to me. I know that I haven't done anything.

Speaker 2 A lot of people don't believe you.

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 2 They'll vilify you.

Speaker 2 They think you're lying.

Speaker 2 They think you must have been in on it.

Speaker 4 That's unfortunate. I mean, I don't know what else to do but tell the truth, and that's what I'm doing.

Speaker 2 Did you know that he was in trouble with the law?

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 2 Did you know that his business was tanking?

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 2 How could she not have known? Michelle says it's because all she could think about back then was her husband's extramarital affair.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 8 I'm Michelle Schringer, Chief Financial Officer of Heritage Wealth Management.

Speaker 2 But years earlier in that website promo tape, Michelle certainly seemed to have a hand in running the firm.

Speaker 8 I basically deal with the day-to-day operations of our company.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 Marcus, I don't do that stuff?

Speaker 4 Yeah, a little bit.

Speaker 4 But I just kind of just go along with it, and you think it's not hurting anything.

Speaker 7 She was the chief financial officer of his company,

Speaker 7 and she lived a beautiful life.

Speaker 2 Then Indiana's Secretary of State Todd Rikita.

Speaker 7 The ill-gotten gain that this family lived on

Speaker 7 for years

Speaker 7 is reason. to try to get the assets that are left back into those into the hands of those who've been hurt.

Speaker 2 Indeed, there were some eyebrow-raising checking account records.

Speaker 2 Around the holidays, including the very day she was dealing with her divorce, December 30th, 2008, and the day her house was raided, December 31st,

Speaker 2 she cashed out more than $70,000 from the corporate account. You made some withdrawals from the bank accounts during that period, like $5,000 here, $10,000 there, and so on.

Speaker 4 They weren't withdrawals. They were just transfers he had asked me to make to other accounts

Speaker 4 prior to the end of the year to get bills paid.

Speaker 2 Outside court in February 2009, Michelle cast herself as a victim, as much of a victim as any of Marcus' clients.

Speaker 4 The only thing my husband did was give me a glorified title in that company.

Speaker 2 Does it worry you sometimes when you're trying to go to sleep at night that because of this title of CFO,

Speaker 2 you could

Speaker 2 spend time in jail, lose your kids,

Speaker 2 everything.

Speaker 4 I worry about it, but I know I haven't done anything.

Speaker 4 I haven't done

Speaker 4 anything.

Speaker 4 I went in and I paid some bills, and I had a title. I didn't act as a CFO.
That is not what I did at all.

Speaker 2 Michelle's attorney, Mary Schmidt.

Speaker 18 The fact that she has the title of CFO and not the duties of an acting CFO makes a huge difference.

Speaker 18 Her duties 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,

Speaker 18 and go home and be a mom.

Speaker 2 In July 2009, Michelle and the kids had to move out of the big house on Cocktail Cove.

Speaker 2 Neighbor Pat Carlini.

Speaker 3 I think he has about $2 million into it. They wanted $1.6, and I think they got just over $1.1 million.
Bargain for a million. It was a bargain.
It was a steal for somebody.

Speaker 2 The proceeds went to partially partially repay fleeced investors.

Speaker 2 As for Michelle, we caught up with her for a second interview in downtown Indianapolis.

Speaker 7 How are you hanging in there?

Speaker 4 Just taking in a day at a time.

Speaker 2 Turns out Michelle wanted to talk to us again, especially about documents from the Shrinker investigation.

Speaker 2 In interviews with investigators, Marcus's former business associate, a whistleblower in the case, said that when it came to Michelle's chief financial officer job, quote, it is just like I I had, a glorified title where I was just a support person.

Speaker 2 When asked if Michelle had training or experience, the whistleblower said, quote, as far as I know, my impression of Michelle

Speaker 2 is a victim.

Speaker 4 Yes, he said, I was a victim, 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.

Speaker 4 Everything that I've been saying the entire time, that all I had was a glorified title, like everyone else.

Speaker 17 According to this guy.

Speaker 4 According to this guy and according to the deposition he gave back in December and back in April. I've known they've had it for so long and I've just been hoping it would surface.

Speaker 2 And then in a written statement in August 2009, the spokesman for Indiana's then Secretary of State confirmed, officially, she is not being charged at this time.

Speaker 2 Later, Michelle reached a civil settlement with the receivership of the Shrinker business, but she was never charged of any criminal wrongdoing and always hoped her name would be cleared.

Speaker 2 What would you say to people about a situation like this?

Speaker 4 I wish people wouldn't judge so quickly.

Speaker 12 You know, I've,

Speaker 4 you know, guilt by association is not always true. And I, you know, so many people have been judging me based on the fact that it's, you know, what they've read in a newspaper.

Speaker 2 For Marcus Schrenker, however, it was another story.

Speaker 2 In August 2009, Marcus Schrenker was sentenced to more than four years in prison after he pleaded guilty to federal charges of crashing his plane intentionally and making a false distress call.

Speaker 2 In an emotional statement, Schrenker apologized to his family and air traffic controllers and residents of the area where his plane crashed and narrowly missed several homes.

Speaker 2 To this day, I cannot believe I could do something so reckless and selfish, he told the judge. Schrenker later pleaded guilty to five state securities fraud charges in Indiana.

Speaker 2 He was released on parole in 2015. You know him probably better than anybody, in spite of the lies.

Speaker 2 What happened to him?

Speaker 4 I wish I knew.

Speaker 4 I don't know. Did he want too much?

Speaker 2 Were his ambitions too big?

Speaker 4 I can only guess. He was just trying to fill

Speaker 4 holes

Speaker 4 with things.

Speaker 16 I don't know.

Speaker 4 Because it sure wasn't buying happiness.

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