Brokers, Bagmen, & Moles TRANSCRIPTS

[00:00:00] Anjay: Previously on Brokers, Bagmen, and Moles.

[00:00:06] News: The FBI was investigating possible massive fraud in the future's markets. No indictments have been returned. No arrests have been made.

[00:00:15] David Greising: We'll start with the small ones and work our way up to the big one.

[00:00:17] John Troelstrup: The agent who had been in the pit appeared at the door with another one or two agents.

[00:00:21] Vinny Provenzano: No one trusted anybody. No one knew who was flipping.

[00:00:24] John Troelstrup: We have that on take, don't you want to talk to us about that?

[00:00:27] Vinny Provenzano: One of the guys in their group did flip. And uh, then they had something.

[00:00:42] Pat Arbor: Seven months all alone

in a cage made of stone

24 hours of isolation,

but no prospect of liberation.

[00:00:52] Anjay: This is Pat Arbor. He was the longest running chairman of the Chicago Board of Trade. You're listening to him reading a poem he wrote while he was in jail, but he wasn't in jail for anything he did while he was at the Board of Trade.

[00:01:09] Antoinette Arbor: I don't want Pat to rot in jail. I don't get pleasure out of this. This has been a disastrous experience for my children and for me. Pat Arbor had a chance to stay here. Go through the divorce process like everybody else does.

[00:01:30] Anjay: That's Pat's former wife Antoinette. In 2012, she obtained an 18 million divorce settlement against Arbor. Pat decided he did not like that settlement.

[00:01:44] Pat Arbor: So I just decided not to show up for a court hearing. But this was like a six, seven years ago and I said, gee, I've got six or seven years left. Do you wanna, I wanna spend it in court or go climb some mountains and try to enjoy my remaining years.

[00:02:02] Anjay: Rather than settle his divorce, he fled to Switzerland and moved most of his money overseas.

About five years later, he snuck back into the US to attend his grandson's graduation and was arrested as an 81-year-old. He decided to spend nine months in jail rather than to settle up with his ex-wife. He claimed he lost most of his money in a defunct Portuguese bank and that the rest of it was tied up in a trust that he couldn't access while he was in custody. Antoinette thought otherwise.

[00:02:37] Antoinette Arbor: And so I think he's doing this because he wants to win and winning means not giving me a penny.

[00:02:47] Anjay: Eventually, they settled out. And Pat was released, but his prison poetry lives on.

[00:02:55] Pat Arbor: My annual orbit around the sun

has only just begun.

If I complete the circle, it would be my 83rd girdle.

Prosecution of my life

by an evil ex-wife

has mired me in limbo with nowhere to go.

[00:03:11] Anjay: One thing is clear. Pat Arbor was a rich and powerful man that you did not want to cross. Today we're talking to someone who did just that and was caught red-handed.

I am Anjay Nagpal, and this is Brokers, Bagmen, and Moles.

[00:03:45] Dave Skrodzki: They did the usual. We can take your house, we can take this. Where I got in trouble was when I was filling orders.

You fucked up. Don't do it again.

You know, and at that point everybody's running scared, you know, I'm sure everybody had talked to an attorney. Again, I'm, you're not supposed to be a traitor, but you know, sometimes you gotta get out.

Talk about shitting in your pants. I was so fucking nervous.

[00:04:16] John Ryan: I am John Ryan. Was at the Board of Trade from 1974 until they turned the lights out in 2016.

[00:04:25] Anjay: In episode one, I interviewed a trader named John Ryan. He was ultimately convicted of four counts of trading violations such as prearranged trading, and trading after the closing bell. The dollar amount of his wrongdoing totaled just over $1,000.

He estimates he spent a million dollars fighting the charges and a decade trying to get his trading privileges reinstated. In short, the penalty did not fit the crime. It was clear he's still hurt by his experience, but despite that, John didn't have much to say when I asked him about the FBI agent in his pit.

[00:05:08] John Ryan: Um, I'd rather not, I don't think you want my opinion of it. So.

[00:05:14] Anjay: I absolutely do. I'd love to get your opinion.

[00:05:18] John Ryan: Well, I don't think it'd be beneficial for me. There are a lot of people that built their careers in the government side as a result of, of that investigation.

[00:05:30] Anjay: John didn't really wanna talk about anyone, not his fellow traders in the pit, not the lawyers, not the judges involved.

He was pretty quiet about the whole thing. And then right before our interview was over, there was one more name on our list of soybean traders that I forgot to ask him about.

I missed a name on here earlier. Sorry. Dave Skrodzki?

[00:05:52] John Ryan: Yeah, he was a guy that worked for the government, pleaded guilty, worked for the government, testified against me, made most of it up, all of it up. He should have been charged with perjury.

[00:06:08] Anjay: Wow.

[00:06:10] John Ryan: He was using cocaine, selling cocaine. He told, he said whatever they asked him to say. He said whether it was true or not true, and they knew it wasn't true.

[00:06:19] Anjay: Sounds like they were pretty desperate to get, you know,

[00:06:22] John Ryan: Well, you know, you do what you gotta do.

You're the government, you got all the money all the time, all the personnel, you know, what do they care?

They don't care.

[00:06:41] Anjay: John didn't have the nicest things to say about Dave Skrodzki. So I tracked down Dave online and he agreed to be interviewed.

[00:06:51] Dave Skrodzki: I really didn't kind of expect anything when all of a sudden there he was loud banging on the door at 6:15 in the morning.

[00:06:59] Anjay: That's Dave describing the FBI, paying him a visit in January of 1989.

Since he cooperated, I presumed he would've spent a lot of time with the FBI agents and be able to shed light on the inner workings of their investigation.

[00:07:16] Dave Skrodzki: They came—two of them came—this woman and some guy, you know, pull up in a Mercedes, my wife, said that they’re not the FBI. You know. So he sat me down the living room and kind of spelled it out for me. I'll never forget my deceased wife coming down the stairs, carrying our daughter. Being all tears and what's going on, and.

[00:07:40] Anjay: Dave's wife tragically passed away a few years after the investigation.

He now lives with his second wife on the East coast. They seem really happy and I can't blame him for getting out of Chicago after the ordeal that he went through.

Do you remember anything specifically that they, they told you you were going to be charged with when they first talked to you?

[00:08:03] Dave Skrodzki: I do not.

And I really mean that. I don't know what.

They did the usual. We can take your house, we can take this, we can take that. We know how much we paid for your house. We know what your mortgage is and you know, all that sort of stuff. But we can take all this, the, the, you know, it was like, you know, a lot of pressure on you.

[00:08:21] Anjay: I, I can imagine a lot of traders were sitting there and like, this is not a big deal. Uh, this is just how the business is done.

[00:08:29] Dave Skrodzki: Bingo, no question. But it was also blatant. Here's, I'll send you a hundred. You know, I got a hundreds we supposed to sell yesterday here. You can have a five something, the market, you're gonna make money, and then I'm gonna want split or I'm gonna want something out.

There's going on all over the place. People who say it wasn't, they're in denial.

[00:08:51] Anjay: Like most traders, Dave talks pretty fast and it's okay if you didn't catch all the details. He was describing how brokers manipulated customer orders, and he says it was widespread. But he really had no idea what he was facing. The agents were simply there to serve a subpoena, but they stayed for about two hours without an arrest warrant or a search warrant.

[00:09:17] Dave Skrodzki: I, I was in limbo because I. I was like, well, I might go to jail.

When I was 12, I started caddying at a local golf course. It's called Green Acres country Club in Northbrook, Illinois.

[00:09:45] Anjay: If you couldn't tell already, Dave Skrodzki is not like the other traders that we've been talking to. For one, he's the guy that cooperated, he broke the unwritten Chicago code. And the other thing is that he's not from the city, but rather a swank North Shore suburb called Northbrook.

Instead of growing up boxing in the streets or spending his summers driving a beer truck, Dave grew up caddying for rich guys on a golf course.

[00:10:15] Dave Skrodzki: Caddied a lot for the quote-unquote gamblers. They were always the best tippers, played for a lot of money.

[00:10:24] Anjay: One of the gamblers was a man named Hank Shatkin, and he ran one of the biggest brokerage firms at the Board of Trade.

[00:10:32] Dave Skrodzki: So I got friendly with Hank Shatkin.

That's how I got in.

[00:10:37] Anjay: Like T-Bun and Ray and all the guys at the Merc.

A connection helped Skrodzki get onto the floor at the Board of Trade. The board was known to be a little more, shall we say, refined than the Merc. But Dave doesn't exactly make it sound tame.

[00:10:53] Dave Skrodzki: It was a circus, all drugs and you know, and all kinds of stuff. And, you know, it was, it was a really cool place. We were all very tight. Great fricking job. It was a great job.

[00:11:07] Anjay: Dave started out as an intern with Shatkin's brokerage firm.

[00:11:12] Dave Skrodzki: And I pretty much checked trades in the wheat pit. Um, it was intense. I mean, we had some huge markets.

[00:11:20] Anjay: The first thing he learned was to be a trade checker, and this is important because it's one of the main things the FBI asked about.

So I think it's worth spending a little more time understanding what a trade checker does.

[00:11:33] Dave Skrodzki: You would start with the, uh, going through the out trades that were processed.

The night before, you could have 30, 40, 50 pages of out trades. Uh, you pretty much had free reign with the traders. I knew whose guys prices I could change and they were gonna come back and say, wait a minute, I had, I get debit 25 bucks or whatever.

[00:11:51] Anjay: He's saying that most customers never really knew about their out trades because for the most part, brokers and locals just agreed to fix the trade on the floor and change the price to suit whatever the broker and the customer was supposed to get.

[00:12:07] Dave Skrodzki: So the letter of the law, I guess, and I, I'm very clear, I don't know for sure, was I should have handed you the trading card.

And you would go and broker A and say, broker A I'm supposed to be, I'm trying to buy this at 850. You're trying to sell it to me. At 850 and a half, you would come back to me and say, Hey, change this price. Debit me $50.

[00:12:24] Anjay: So it sounds like there were, you know, quite a fair amount of minor errors in communication between traders and brokers.

Would you, would you say that's, that's fair?

[00:12:36] Dave Skrodzki: Some minor, not so minor.

[00:12:38] Anjay: Dave told me about one big broker who seemed to have a not so minor error every day. But in general, most of the errors were small, and the brokers and locals just figured them out on their own because of the rapid growth of the exchanges in the ‘80s and the high turnover companies like Shatkin, were constantly looking for new brokers. Soon enough, it was Dave's turn.

[00:13:07] Dave Skrodzki: My six months was off for nine months or whatever the fuck it was, and I decided to lease a full seat, and that's what I did. This guy asked me if I wanted to give him some help filling orders. He was a big broker. He said, I need some help for the smaller shit I said sure. I moved from one side of the pit over to the other and started filling orders for him.

[00:13:25] Anjay: But he only lasted a year as a broker before deciding to become a local. He felt more comfortable risking his own money than potentially screwing up customer orders and having to pay for them.

[00:13:40] Dave Skrodzki: Too much pressure. I'd rather take all the pressure myself.

[00:13:44] Anjay: But just before Dave made the transition to being a local, he was acting as a broker one day for Shatkin and his business partner, who was none other than Pat Arbor.

The former Merc Chairman from the cold open who chose going to prison over paying his ex-wife a divorce settlement. He was a guy you did not want to cross.

[00:14:08] Dave Skrodzki: Where I got in trouble was when I was filling orders.

[00:14:20] Anjay: Pat Arbor spent most of his days off the floor managing his brokerage firm and dealing with exchange politics. But just like Leo Melamed and other exchange heads, he liked to speculate on the market. So one day he sends a buy order down to the pit and it goes to nine. Another than Dave Skrodzki.

[00:14:44] Dave Skrodzki: So I had an order to fill for him. I got it filled that the market took off, and I kept the trade for myself instead of filling his order and changed the price on it.

[00:14:54] Anjay: Remember back then brokers could trade for their own accounts and fill customer orders. That's called dual trading, and it was legal. But what Dave did was called front running.

He took a trade that was profitable and instead of giving it to the customer, Pat Arbor, he kept it for himself and he gave Pat Arbor a worse price. That is definitely not okay. It looked like he got away with it until he saw none other than Pat Arbor giving him a death stare from across the pit.

[00:15:32] Dave Skrodzki: I, no question. I traded ahead of his order, took it for myself and of course he saw me do it.

And I said No, I bought at eight and a half, said, No you didn't and I saw you. He was standing outside the, I specifically watching me or just happened. It was wasn't very busy, you know? So yeah, he dragged me off the floor. I had to throw the deck down.

[00:15:48] Anjay: Wow. Arbor just so happened to have come down to the floor to watch Dave basically steal from him.

[00:15:57] Dave Skrodzki: People are looking at me and took me into Shatkin's office and Shatkin was kinda like, you fucked up. Don't do it again. You know.

[00:16:07] Anjay: After Pat Arbor flipped out on him and Shatkin took Pat's side, Dave swore he'd never do it again, and maybe he wouldn't have.

But little did Dave know, Pat wasn't the only one watching Dave that day. Dave's actions also caught the attention of a guy named Rick Carlson.

[00:16:28] Dave Skrodzki: Rick Carlson was, I guarantee you he was, how far is your door from where you're standing now?

Eight feet, ten feet. You know, that's how close he was to me, you know, 15 feet. And he always stood by me. So that's where, that's when things started to go south.

[00:16:45] Anjay: Because Rick Carlson wasn't just another local trader. He was one of the undercover FBI agents at the Board of Trade and when Dave was filling orders, he traded with Rick Carlson a lot.

[00:16:58] Dave Skrodzki: Nice guy. Easy calling. Wasn't a big loud or boisterous guy or just kind of a talk friendly play. He played his role well. Good actor.

[00:17:11] Anjay: Did you get the sense that he a kind of understood trading?

[00:17:15] Dave Skrodzki: Yeah. He got it. Mm-hmm. He and I talked about that after the fact.

He was a smart guy and he was, you know, good at what he did. And you know, my lovely wife, even today says, what you did was wrong, but it was widespread. It was a big, big place. I don't know if you'd have a map of where everybody stood that got convicted, you know, or got in trouble. Well, pretty much together.

[00:17:41] Anjay: What Dave is describing here to me, seems like one of the fundamental stumbling blocks of the investigation. Because they chose to go undercover as new locals who traded small, they could only get exposure to smaller brokers, inherently limiting the scope of the investigation.

They would be totally cut off from the biggest brokers anyway. I wondered if people suspected Rick was an agent like they did at the Merc.

[00:18:12] Dave Skrodzki: Not until January, mid-January 1989, I word kind of started to leak out right at the beginning of the year. It might be undercover people or whatever, being 30 years old or 31 years old.

They're like, ah, that's, you know, that's never gonna happen here.

[00:18:29] Anjay: Never gonna happen until one day you wake up at 6:15 in the morning with the FBI banging on your door. After they left, Dave was advised to stay calm, go to work. And act like nothing happened. He says, the next few days were a blur.

[00:18:48] Dave Skrodzki: The next four or five days I met with my attorney and you know, every day after work. And at that point everybody was running scared, you know, I'm sure everybody had talked to an attorney, probably everybody in the fifth had talked to some attorney and who knew what was going on then. So all it takes is one, you know when you can go to the jail, so.

[00:19:07] Anjay: Dave had a hard choice to make. Sure he could refuse to cooperate and hope for the best.

But remember, he got caught red-handed, front running Pat Arbor's order in front of the whole pit, and the Feds told him he could go to jail for a really long time.

Do you remember what your next contact with them, or how did that evolve over time?

[00:19:33] Dave Skrodzki: Shortly thereafter, being dragged to the federal building and meeting with, always with my lawyer.

Meeting with Tom Durkin…

[00:19:46] Anjay: Tom Durkin was the assistant US attorney at the time.

[00:19:50] Dave Skrodzki: There was never any interaction with Carlson. He was gone by now, or Rick Ostrom. In other words, he was never, he was, keeps out the pit by then and gone and everybody got figured out it was, or some, somehow it got out. I have no clue.

[00:20:01] Anjay: Before we sat down, I was hoping that Dave could shed more light on the FBI's targets or strategy, but since this investigation had been leaked, And the FBI agent's cover was blown. They were gone for good. And it was mostly the US attorney's office who dealt with Dave from that point on.

[00:20:20] Dave Skrodzki: It was several days of, you know, here's your options and, and I went to Shatkin and I said, what do I do?

You know, I'm kinda... he said, you gotta make up your own mind, you know, and then when we heard RICO charges and, you know, so they kind of had my, you know, fingers to the fire. And then at some point, pretty quickly on, I said, okay, fish, or cut bait. Or again, I'm, you're not supposed to be a traitor, but you know, sometimes you gotta get out.

And I was like, I'm getting out.

[00:21:06] Anjay: Dave met with the US attorneys more than a dozen times. He continued trading on the floor. On May 5th, 1989, he agreed to cooperate. Exactly a week later on May 12th, they sent him to the floor wearing a wire.

[00:21:23] Dave Skrodzki: Did you ever watch The Sopranos?

[00:21:24] Anjay: Of course. Yeah. No, I, I, I love the mafia genre. I watch...

[00:21:28] Dave Skrodzki: Get him out, Chrissy.

Take everything off. I said everything. When Paulie does that, you know, I guess you could call that a dick.

Remember that, that scene? So yeah.

[00:21:36] Anjay: I could talk Sopranos all day long, but we're here to talk FBI.

[00:21:42] Dave Skrodzki: So I mean that's what it was like. I mean, they put a wire on and it was awful.

[00:21:47] Anjay: Do you think it was targeted or were they kind of spraying and praying to, to kind of figure out who's who and what's what in this thing?

[00:21:54] Dave Skrodzki: Probably a little bit of both. There was a whole cadre of stuff, you know, cuz remember, I. You think of the pit as like this. For a while, I stood over here, but then I moved over here.

[00:22:09] Anjay: The FBI strapped a wire onto Dave and sent him over to a corner of the pit where Agent Carlson wasn't able to infiltrate. His goal?

Simple. Get traders to admit they were cheating.

[00:22:24] Dave Skrodzki: They didn't have an in on that side of the pit. Yep. Carlson didn't pray with those guys fucking, they didn't have it again, and there was a pretty couple of pretty good size broker groups over there.

[00:22:37] Anjay: Unfortunately for us, Dave was given very little information by the US Attorney's office. But he agreed to cooperate, so he clicked on his tape recorder and stood by a man named Eddie Cox.

[00:22:52] Dave Skrodzki: Talk about shitting in your pants. I was so fucking nervous. It lasted 10 minutes.

[00:22:58] Anjay: During our investigation, we obtained a transcript from Dave's tape recorder in the pit. Here's how it went down.

[00:23:10] Eddie (Actor Read): Hi Dave.

[00:23:11] Dave (Actor Read): Hi Ed. Hey, you got a second?

[00:23:15] Eddie (Actor Read): What's up?

[00:23:16] Dave (Actor Read): Uh Come here.

Uh, I got a little, uh, a phone call from my attorney yesterday.

[00:23:25] Eddie (Actor Read): Oh.

[00:23:26] Dave (Actor Read): And, uh, I hadn't heard from him in like two months, and he told me that the government is requesting from Shatkin my trading cards from 1988 and early 1989.

[00:23:37] Eddie (Actor Read): Yeah.

[00:23:38] Dave (Actor Read): And specifically they were asking for in January this year.

[00:23:42] Eddie (Actor Read): Okay. January of this year.

[00:23:45] Dave (Actor Read): Remember the trade we made and put Kevin authority in the middle?

[00:23:48] Eddie (Actor Read): No, not really.

[00:23:50] Dave (Actor Read): And then he asked Bill about it. He brought it back to Bill.

[00:23:54] Eddie (Actor Read): Yeah.

[00:23:55] Dave (Actor Read): And, and, and Bill asked you about it.

[00:23:59] Eddie (Actor Read): Yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't, I, I just thought it was a regular shade.

[00:24:03] Dave (Actor Read): Yeah. But I, you know, I think you told me, you said to Bill, just tell Bill it was an out trade payback, or, you know what I mean?

[00:24:14] Eddie (Actor Read): No, I didn't say no. No, I didn't say anything. I just said it was a regular trade.

[00:24:19] Dave (Actor Read): Yeah, but you and I both know it wasn't, and what's gonna happen if my attorney says they want to know about this and they

[00:24:26] Eddie (Actor Read): Just a regular trade, Dave, that's the way everything is.

[00:24:30] Dave (Actor Read): Yeah, yeah, yeah. But...

[00:24:31] Eddie (Actor Read): Normal, normal trade.

[00:24:34] Dave (Actor Read): But you and I both know it wasn't.

I mean, what happens if they ask me What am I supposed to do? Are you gonna stick to that story if they ask you?

[00:24:45] Eddie (Actor Read): What? There's no story, Dave, that that's the way it is. Period.

[00:24:50] Dave (Actor Read): Yeah, but Eddie, you know that, that trade…

[00:24:52] Eddie (Actor Read): Dave, Dave…

[00:24:54] Dave (Actor Read): Eddie.

[00:24:56] Eddie (Actor Read): Every trade that we've ever made has been a legitimate trade.

[00:25:05] Dave (Actor Read): Well, there's been times when you've been stuck, I've helped you out, or something like that, which is no problem.

[00:25:10] Eddie (Actor Read): Every trade has been a legitimate trade, Dave, and, and you know it. Okay?

[00:25:19] Dave (Actor Read): But that trade I was giving you…

[00:25:20] Eddie (Actor Read): Including, including all, all closes, and all…

[00:25:25] Dave (Actor Read): I'm, I'm just afraid, I'm just afraid Kevin might have said something to Bill.

[00:25:29] Anjay: Dave barely made it off the floor that day without throwing up. The new traders that Dave stood by. They didn't take the bait, and that was the last time Dave Skrodzki ever stepped on the floor. In hindsight, that tactic was never gonna work because all the traders were paranoid since the investigation was leaked by the Tribune. The fact that the FBI made Dave wear a wire onto the floor four months after that leak, it tells me that the FBI was scrambling for evidence.

[00:26:10] Dave Skrodzki: I sold my seat for $320k or something like that. And now I have this fairly large chunk of change that I had to live off of too. I mean, what am I gonna do? You know what I mean? I, I was in limbo because I, that is an excuse probably, versus...

[00:26:25] Anjay: Dave didn't really do anything for at least a year. He stayed afloat from the money he made selling his membership or seat on the exchange.

He waited for the trials to begin, and like the rest of the traders, he wondered what the heck was the F B I was doing on the trading floor.

[00:26:45] Dave Skrodzki: The story goes is that Archer Daniels Midland ADM and Dwayne Andreas got pissed off and that's how it started. Uh, does that ring true to what you've heard or read or seen?

[00:26:58] Anjay: I filled Dave in on what I learned so far that I thought Andreas might have played a role in getting the FBI down there, but that I didn't think he was the sole cause of the investigation. I'd hope Dave could tell me what the FBI was after. Instead here he was asking me.

You know, again, the FBI spent all this time and money, the fact that they physically couldn't get near the people that they wanted to, the people that could have been the biggest perpetrators I find almost, you know, there's, there's some dark comedy there.

[00:27:31] Dave Skrodzki: Remember I worked in the back office and I saw some statements. I mean, guys making and losing half a million, 750,000 in a day. Come on. There's just too many people, too much business. That there wasn't stuff happening.

[00:27:48] Anjay: As in there was plenty of illegal activity. You just had to know what to look for.

[00:27:55] Dave Skrodzki: Part of that did happen to be population, meaning it was so crowded, you know, you are, can get up near the top stuff unless you were a pretty big trader.

So three, four steps down you weren't going to do anything.

[00:28:05] Anjay: Do you think that the FBI understood that dynamic going into the investigation?

[00:28:10] Dave Skrodzki: No. No. Probably not. I would guarantee that they had gotten to those guys who, you know, were big traders or either the brokerage groups or the heads of the exchanges.

I think, you know, that might have been a different, that might have been a different story. I was on this side of the fence. I think if more people cooperated there might have been more.

[00:28:36] Anjay: To recap, it's clear that a good amount of traders were playing fast and loose with the manual system of open outcry. Most violations seemed relatively minor, but Dave and others like reporter Bill Crawford told us that there were much bigger fish who took advantage of the system.

[00:28:57] Dave Skrodzki: So Pat Arbor trade over the limits and hide the stuff in their accounts.

We'd have to always do these transfer and cuz he, he'd trade over the limits, which was so rolled. He used to have two lackeys. I can't remember their names. Small potato guys. So he'd hide his over the limit positions in their accounts and then they'd go get out of them. And you know.

[00:29:16] Anjay: Dave is saying that Pat was trading so big that he was taking directional bets on the market that exceeded the legal allowable trading size for one person.

So he found two bagmen and used them to park his trades. This allowed him to have a position three times the maximum allowable size. This is a guy who spent many years as the chairman and vice chairman of the Chicago Board of Trade, using illegal measures to take massive positions in the market. Yet he was never subpoenaed or interrogated by the FBI.

I had a few more questions for Dave.

The book makes it seem that, you know, you received anonymous, a few anonymous death threats. Where do you think that came from?

[00:30:06] Dave Skrodzki: Couple of people, might've called me and I did inquire, and they'll tell you this, I did inquire about what about witness protection? And they're like, my attorney was like, this is not the kinda case.

This isn't the Hoodlums; this isn't Tony Soprano. You don't need witness protection.

[00:30:20] Anjay: Before we ended the interview. I had to give Dave a chance to tell his side of the story with regards to John Ryan's allegations that Dave was a cocaine user and seller, and more importantly, a liar.

[00:30:34] Dave Skrodzki: That's what this guy said about me? Oh sure I've used drugs, I didn't sell 'em. Uh, I didn't perjure myself. What, what I have to gain, you know, trust me. It's probably, honestly with you, Anjay, the only time of my life I have been 100% forthcoming. Sure. I used drugs who didn't, you know? Again, so that person, the way I look at it is sour grapes.

And I broke the code of silence at the Board of Trade. Not gonna rat on each other.

[00:31:07] Anjay: Looking back on, on those times, would you have, would you have done anything different?

[00:31:11] Dave Skrodzki: I guess I wouldn't have taken for granted. You know what I had, you know, you know, it's unfortunate that the guy was standing 10 feet from me, you know?

But then again, I was doing things that were wrong. Probably too big for my britches. There was a percentage of the be doing wrong things. Sure.

Was it a percentage of the way lay the land? Absolutely.

What I do it, again, looking back on cooperating, not cooperating? Man. I'm not proud of cooperating. I certainly didn't wanna do it, you know? But again, no one's going to jail for you, you know? So you're on your own here. Was it worth it.

I don't know.

[00:31:55] Anjay: Could, could you have gone back to trading if you wanted to?

[00:31:59] Dave Skrodzki: No, no. I was a pariah because I cooperated.

[00:32:05] Anjay: Skrodzki flipped on May 5th. A few more guys followed. And finally on August 3rd, 1989, nearly eight months after the Tribune leaked news of the investigation, the head of the FBI and a bunch of other big shots hosted a press conference in Chicago.

[00:32:29] News: The activities uncovered at these exchanges, the largest of their type in the world, simply cannot and will not be tolerated.

[00:32:40] Anjay: I talked to Skrodzki around Thanksgiving of 2020, and it was about that time that I stumbled upon an interesting documentary on YouTube. It was about a legendary Merc Trader with a crazy life story. Lewis Borsellino.

[00:32:56] News: He is one of the major traders in the Chicago Merc pits. And he joins us now from the Mercantile Exchange.

[00:33:02] Anjay: Lewis Borsellino was gone before I got to the floor, but I'd heard his name tossed around in David and Laurie's book. He was a big time trader, but other than an association with ABS Partners, he didn't seem to have anything to do with this investigation. He wasn't in any of the four pits that the FBI were in, and he definitely didn't get indicted. Late one night while catching up on email and sipping a glass of wine—this was the pandemic after all—I decided to watch Mr. Borsellino's story, and I'm glad I did. Because it changed the entire course of this podcast.

[00:33:41] Lewis Borsellino: I looked at my clerk, Joni at the time. I said, those guys look like FBI agents or something.

[00:33:46] Joni: There's something with that guy. And he was standing in there and he was being real friendly and there was just something about him and I kept saying, he's a Fed, he's something.

[00:33:58] Anjay: I had to talk to Lewis Borsellino, so I called Stretch.

[00:34:04] Stretch: The weird thing is, like, the Borsellinos, they all went to my grade school. It's just a weird, I don't know what it is when Lombard and fucking mobsters, like there's a lot of mobsters that grew up in Lombard. It's weird. So, yeah. I don't know if you wanna reach out to Lewis through Big Cone while I'm reaching out to JJ or I'll connect it.

Yeah.

[00:34:23] Anjay: As predicted, it was easy to find Mr. Borsellino. What I didn't expect was just how many bombs he would drop on us.

[00:34:34] Lewis Borsellino: So literally the defense attorney told me that I was the number one target. The reason was I must be laundering money for the mob.

[00:34:43] Anjay: That's next time on Brokers, Bagmen, and Moles.

Before you go. If you or someone you know might have a hot tip or just a funny story related to our show, we have a hotline for you. Call us at (646) 820-1452.

That's 646 820 1452. And please follow us on social media. Our handle is @entropymediaco. That's at Entropy Media Co where we'll be posting additional information about the case and awesome behind the scenes action.

This has been a production of Entropy Media in association with Stretch Productions.

This is Entropy's very first show, so if you've enjoyed it, please follow wherever you listen to podcasts and rate us there too. Every follow rating or even a personal recommendation to a friend or family member really helps.

I'm your host, Anjay Nagpal. Our showrunner and senior producer is Danielle Elliot.

Our producer is Jenn Swan.

Our executive producers are Tim Hendricks, Kevin "Stretch" Huff, and Dennis Stratton. Original music, sound design, and editing by Gerard Bauer.

Music clearances by Deborah Mannis-Gardner from DMG Clearances.

Production legal by Bruns, Brennan, and Berry.

Legal clearance/Fair use by Rachel Strom at Davis Wright Tremaine.

Fact checking by Delilah Friedler.

Show art by Rebecca Hendin.

And from Entropy Media, our in-house executive producer is Josh Fjelstad. Our head of operations is Nuna Eboe. Our project manager is Sebastian Perry. Our associate producer is Heidi Roodvoets. Our development coordinator is Simona Kessler.

And I wanna send a very special thanks to Laurie Morse and David Griesing.