Richard Wood --- Murdered

Wood was a paper (seller mortgages) seminar guru. He reportedly persuaded his seminar students to give him $4 to $6 million to invest in second mortgages. Instead, he used some of it to pay phony returns to later investors. Using the principal of early investors to pay phony returns to them and later investors is called a Ponzi Scheme after Charles Ponzi, the first to receive great publicity for using the scheme. Wood reportedly put the rest of the investor's money into his own accounts -- offshore. When he avoided investors or told them unbelivable stories explaining why he could not give them their money back, they forced him into involuntary bankruptcy. He stopped making payments on his $500,000 Las Vegas mortgage and was presumably about to flee the country when he was shot dead in front of his house.