Few people were surprised that Robert Serhant, a charming and well-read convicted swindler, died with a bullet in his chest.
What surprised many-including some of the 600 investors from whom he had bilked as much as $30 million in the early 1980s-was that somebody hadn`t killed him before he killed himself.
”I bumped into him in our law office, and I said I was surprised he was alive and that somebody hadn`t killed him,” said David Missner, an attorney who sued Serhant on behalf of a swindled investor. ”He hurt a lot of people.”
He brought flowers and books to a neighbor dying of cancer, then, after the man`s death, plundered the six-figure estate of his widow`s mother.
Authorities said he even swindled $825,000 from his own father.
The saga of the Oak Brook man`s life and death emerged last week during a Du Page County coroner`s inquest at which a jury ruled that Serhant, drunk on wine, put a .22-caliber bullet through his heart on Oct. 13 after killing his father.
In doing so, Serhant ended a career marked by an extraordinary aura of optimism and confidence. He sold lawyers and judges, doctors and dentists on millions of dollars of investments, then spent the money as if it were his own. Most of it was lost on wildly imprudent gambles on U.S. Treasury bond futures in the early 1980s.
A friend once asked Serhant, a voracious reader, why he never picked up novels. ”My life is a novel,” he replied.
The last chapter was written on Oct. 13, when his 85-year-old father, Joseph, a retired prominent Berwyn attorney, refused to sign over his Oak Brook ranch house to cover his son`s debts.
The 54-year-old son pointed a revolver at a spot just below his father`s right ear and pulled the trigger, according to police.
Robert Serhant, a master of shell games with other people`s assets, then made one last attempt to cover his scamming by trying to sign over his father`s house to a bilked investor.
As his father lay dead in the basement below, police said, Serhant met with Richard Cogswell, the chief executive officer of Laurel Motors Inc. in Westmont, to discuss turning the house over to Cogswell to cover the money Serhant had lost.
Serhant, sipping wine, told Cogswell that his father was napping.
”He was a supreme salesman, beyond any measure we are accustomed to,”
said Assistant U.S. Atty. Joseph Hartzler, who prosecuted Serhant in 1983.
”I`ve known a lot of bad people in my line of work,” said Karla Wright, an attorney who sued Serhant on behalf of some investors, ”but he was the only one I ever liked.”
At the Du Page coroner`s inquest last week, authorities sketched out the details of Robert and Joseph Serhant`s last hours-the final scene in an act that began when Robert Serhant was released from prison in 1987 after serving 5 years for fraud.
Serhant was jailed for engineering a scheme in which up to 600 investors were swindled out of as much as $30 million, by some estimates.
Vera Serhant, Robert`s mother, died shortly after her son was convicted, and friends blame the death on heartache.
When Serhant was released, his father went to Cogswell, a family friend, and asked him to put his son on the payroll at Laurel Motors to satisfy terms of his release, according to sources familiar with the case.
Serhant took a $5-an-hour job there, but didn`t bother cashing many of his paychecks.
Instead, he went back into the investment business with boyhood friend James Roman, who ran a Westmont-based investment company called Capital Consultants Inc.
According to James Tatooles, Roman`s attorney, Roman was trying to help out Serhant, giving him a hand, and has now himself lost money.
Tatooles said Serhant, less than two years out of prison, began taking money from Cogswell.
Just as he had done before, Serhant was bilking people, including those closest to him. At least two other unnamed investors entrusted a combined $210,000 with Serhant in recent years, according to police.
It appears he was back in his old groove.
In the 1970s and early `80s, Serhant had worked a classic ”Ponzi scheme,” making large ”interest” payments to accounts by using principle that was coming in from new investors.
He bragged that he had developed a sophisticated hedging plan that backed risky trades in treasury bond futures with the purchase of safer treasury bonds. Before the scandal was exposed, a headline in a 1981 article about Serhant read: ”He finds hedge to help investor sleep easier.”
One of those swindled in the early 1980s was Fred Ness, a friend who lost $1 million to Serhant and innocently brought in many other investors. Ness committed suicide three weeks after the scam broke.
Cook County Circuit Judge Anthony Bosco lost $157,000 to Serhant. The two had become close friends, going on vacation together, having dinner at each other`s homes. Bosco attended the first holy communion of one of Serhant`s daughters.
”To this day, I say he changed my life,” Bosco said in an interview in his Daley Center chambers. ”I don`t trust people and I don`t make new friends. He had access to my home, my family and my mind.”
It wasn`t until after Serhant`s death that Bosco learned from news reports that Serhant had again been involved in financial scams.
”At first I was surprised, because I thought he was too smart to go through that again,” Bosco said. ”But he was so good, so persuasive. He was unbelievably compelling.
”He was, simply, the best salesman in the world.”
So bitter are those swindled by Robert Serhant that rumors persist that the deaths, ruled a murder-suicide by the coroner`s jury last week, were in fact a double murder, elaborately staged by one of Serhant`s angry victims.
”When I first heard of his death, I thought they were both murdered,”
said Bosco.
”After hearing of the suicide note, I still think the theory of murder is possible. I am not a criminal detective, but Bob would have written those notes for someone who asked him, or maybe forced him.”
”I don`t believe suicide,” said attorney Wright. ”Not Bob. He found life too interesting.”
John Caluwaert, the attorney for Carol Taylor, Serhant`s estranged wife, remains skeptical as well.
He said he found it especially strange that a suicide note was not found until days after the original police search.
”That gives me reason to believe they were placed there after his death,” he said.
According to police testimony at the coroner`s inquest, Serhant`s life ended just a few hours after his father`s.
One of the two notes Serhant left behind said he had shot his father at 12:22 p.m. and feared prison and a repeat of the shame he had put his family through in the 1980s.
Drunk on wine, he turned the gun toward his own chest, aiming it just inside the left lapel of his blue blazer, and sent a bullet tearing through his heart and into his liver, according to the police account.
The gun was found 7 feet from his body.
Serhant`s only sibling, Joseph K. Serhant, was killed in a 1953 automobile accident in Cambridge, Mass., where he was attending Harvard University. The crash toppled the father`s hopes that his eldest son would follow his footsteps into the legal profession.
With his brother gone, Serhant began to feel pressure to become an attorney, family friends say, and in 1964 earned a law degree from
Northwestern University. His father had earned his law degree there in 1931.
”He felt very cowed by his father, found his father very dominating,”
attorney Wright recalled recently. ”Bob told me he had wanted to be an actor, but his father put great pressure on him to be a lawyer.
”He would have been a terrific actor.”
