Ralf Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, now infamously former hedge fund managers at Bear Stearns are in no danger of being asked to appear on Jeopardy! any time soon.  These men haven’t exactly fallen prey to a Danny Ocean caliber plan to catch them in the act of looting their clients out of billions of dollars.  No, all someone had to do was check their email outboxes. Brilliant.   So, while Moe and Larry were telling their enormously high net worth clientele to stay the course with the volatile hedge funds that centered on sub prime mortgage investments, they were taking their own funds out. “The subprime market looks pretty damn ugly,” Tannin wrote to Cioffi in April 2007. If Bear’s internal reports were accurate, Tannin suggested, “I think we should close the funds now,” and “the entire subprime market is toast.” The situation became so dire that Cioffi pulled $2 million of his own cash from the fund, but the pair still told investors that they should stay in and that the outlook was good, prosecutors said.  The indictment describes a meeting of Cioffi, Tannin and two unnamed colleagues in which Cioffi confided the hedge funds had narrowly “averted disaster” in February 2007 — news that “led to a vodka toast to celebrate surviving the month.“The complaint says Tannin expressed doubt about Cioffi’s management in one e-mail last March to a third fund manager with only question marks in the subject line. The e-mail said, “Is Ralph doing what he should be doing right now?”Around the same time, Cioffi wrote to a Bear Stearns economist: “I’m fearful of these markets. … As we discussed it may not be a meltdown for the general economy but in our world it will be. Wall Street will be hammered with lawsuits.”Tannin and Cioffi were repeatedly telling investors and Bear Stearns brokers responsible for selling funds that the outlook was good.  In once instance, prosecutors said, Tannin encouraged an investor to add money to the fund and said he would do the same, but never did.The Bear Stearns hedge funds had more than $20 billion in assets before collapsing in June 2007. Just before the collapse, Cioffi fretted in an e-mail that “I’ve effectively washed a 30-year career down the drain” if he couldn’t turn things around, the indictment said.For the record, their attorneys are “perplexed” as to why their clients are being made into scapegoats.  I guess they aren’t on Cioff andTannin’s group email list.

Tags: Bear Stearns, sub prime