A 24-year-old Greenwich man posed as a hedge fund manager and took more than $33,000 from an unemployed Stamford man who was promised $7,000 a month in returns on his investment, police said. Mark Traisman, 24, of 1 Indian Chase Road, Greenwich, was arrested Monday morning at the Stamford Police Department and charged with first-degree larceny and second-degree forgery. He was brought to the Wilton Police Department shortly afterward to face larceny charges, police said. Stamford police Sgt. Peter diSpagna said a 26-year-old Stamford man and his 53-year-old mother came to the Greenwich Police Department in August to report a con in which Traisman allegedly posed as a hedge fund manager and tricked the son into giving him a $30,000 investment. He allegedly told the 26-year-old son that in exchange for the investment he could give him $7,000 to $8,000 a month in returns. [Stamford Advocate via BI]

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You can stop giving yourselves a hernia.

After being stalked at his Darien house and Greenwich, office; after the Herald Tribune published a yearbook picture of him sporting a mullet at the age of 16, with threats to do worse (their version of a hostage situation); the heir to the Berkshire Hathaway fortune finally relented on Friday night, where he agreed to have his picture taken at a hockey game in Stamford, and possibly called in the tip as to his whereabouts himself (or Bloomberg has been cozying up to the towel boys). [Bloomberg via BI]

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As we have previously discussed, when one grows up in Greenwich, CT, there are certain expectations. Prep school, college, Wall Street, death. And in the beginning, Garrett Hoelscher did what he was told. He attended the Brunswick school, then Emory and did a summer internship at RBS. But he was just going through the motions. “Nobody there [was] passionate,” he told Business Insider. “It’s all just numbers and spreadsheets.” (Also, people smoked “two packs a day,” which offended him.) But he still took a job working at Wedbush Investments in LA, where the unhappiness followed. It wasn’t until a transformative weekend in Stratton, VT that decided he needed a change. And that’s when Hoeslscher, whose favorite quotation on Facebook is “Don’t talk about it; be about it,” came up with a plan. To sell waffles in Aspen.

He had spent the week cold calling potential clients and thinking, “I want to be the guy making the calls,” when the sweet aroma from Stratton’s mountainside waffle shack wafted into his nostrils. Lightbulb. He could build waffle shacks on ski mountains where they hadn’t been built yet, like Aspen. Then, he “learned the dynamics of dough and how to bake,” he explains, and spent over 4 months perfecting a secret recipe before “finally figured out what worked.” Hoelscher teamed up with two friends from Brunswick, a private high school in Greenwich, Colin Constantine and Brian Wells, and prepared a business plan to submit to the Aspen board…With two huts, the business should be fairly profitable, bringing in a conservative estimate of about $200,000 in the first year, he says.

Garrett Hoelscher: “Nobody I Met On Wall Street Was Passionate,” So I Quit My Job To Build Waffle Huts [BI]

Related: Greenwich Youth Abandons Wall Street For Siren Song Of Teddy Bear Manufacturing

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Growing up in Greenwich, with a father who works in finance, there were expectations placed on Matt McCarty. You know the ones. Prep school, followed by an Ivy or Ivy-esque college, a job on Wall Street, all that stuff. And in the beginning, those expectations were met. Matty attended the Brunswick school, then Vanderbilt, and did a summer internship at CRT Capital Group. But he always felt like there was something else he was meant to do. And one day, he got up the courage to go for it.

…after he graduated, he worked on a side project that was an idea of his mom’s – a teddy bear that travelled the world wearing cute clothes. “At a bank, you’re looking at numbers. You’re taking a cursory glance at everything. There’s a glaring difference from that and what it’s like working on a start-up.”

“At first I was getting skeptical looks from people when I told them what I do for a living,” McCarty says about working in what’s called the “plush market.”

“I thought, do I really want to be a guy working in the toy business?” He did. And now he’s fast becoming an unabashed expert of the business. “I started focusing on how to use the web and all the tools available on it to build this brand,” he says. “Looking at it that way, it doesn’t feel weird, because its just like any other startup. It took me just realizing that that was what was interesting about this to be “ok” with being a guy in the toy biz.”

Meet Matt McCarty, The Greenwich Guy Who Ditched Wall Street To Make Teddy Bears With His Mom [BI]

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$$$ Bernanke Defends Record On Lehman
[WSJ]

$$$ Obama’s Too Small Steps On The Economy [TDB]

$$$ Paolo Pelligrini: The US Continues To Dig Its Hole Deeper [BI]

$$$ Bedbugs Make Selves Home In Greenwich [GT]

$$$ Russian Girls Invade Hamptons In Hopes Of Becoming Trophy Wives [TDB]

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$$$ Bernanke Defends Record On Lehman
[WSJ]

$$$ Obama’s Too Small Steps On The Economy [TDB]

$$$ Paolo Pelligrini: The US Continues To Dig Its Hole Deeper [BI]

$$$ Bedbugs Make Selves Home In Greenwich [GT]

$$$ Russian Girls Invade Hamptons In Hopes Of Becoming Trophy Wives [TDB]

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“Is Greenwich ready for bestiality?”

This is not a rhetorical question and one that requires a serious answer. Is that answer:

a) yes, finally

b) yes, but more to the point, when has Greenwich not been ready for bestiality

c) no– we keep our sexual deviance related to whiteboard markers and scenarios involving being tied down and force-fed melted Milky Way bars through a funnel only, thank you very much.

d) write-in

Hat Tip to the New York Times for getting the conversation started.

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

$$$ UBS May Escape ‘Game of Chicken’ as Lawmakers Vote on Treaty [Bloomberg]

$$$ Bank of America Merrill Lynch has ordered its traders not to enter into oil trades with BP that extend beyond June 2011 [Reuters]

$$$ Study of Dominant-Looking Men Yields Surprising Result [LS]

$$$ Have the banks already won the debate over derivatives? [CNBC]

$$$ “Is Greenwich ready for bestiality?” a well-dressed woman said during the intermission of Hans Werner Henze’s “El Cimarrón” (“The Runaway Slave”), which opened on Thursday evening at the Theater at St. Catherine of Siena in the Riverside section of Greenwich. [NYT]

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Forget about stashing your cash with Bank of America, JPMorgan or Citigroup. The real grandfathers of finance take their dough to Fieldpoint Private Bank & Trust. The Greenwich institution was founded by some ex-Merrill Lynch execs, including Dan Tully and David Komansky, in 2008 as a place where senior BSD’s can get the top notch service they deserve.

Those who have the wherewithal to bank with Fieldpoint include James Kilts, former CEO of Gillette; private equity pioneer Jerome Kohlberg; John “Launny” Steffens; former Home Depot CEO Bernie Marcus; Ken Langone and Joe Grano. (No, you can’t play Dick Fuld and Stan O’Neal)

The bank, which now has $345 million in assets, offers premium services including helping former Time Inc. honcho Reginald Brack refinance his daughter’s apartment, among other things.

The bank helped him revise an outdated estate plan, refinanced his daughter’s apartment, put him together with outside money managers he likes, and holds a lot of his cash. Like many relatively small banks, Fieldpoint sometimes turns over deposits above $250,000 (the current FDIC insurance limit) to the Certificate of Deposit Account Registry Service (CDARS), which spreads the excess among its network of banks. Because the CDARS system helps to attract deposits, Brack calls it our “electric toaster.”

The Millionaire Boys’ Bank [Fortune]

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Thought you should know, a revolt is afoot at Citi, as IT just put a block on ESPN.com. Definitely at 388 Greenwich Street, probably firmwide. During March Madness no less!

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