Anthony "Tino" De Angelis (November 3, 1915 – September 26, 2009) was a Bayonne, New Jersey, commodities trader who dealt in vegetable oil futures worldwide. In 1962 De Angelis' company, Allied Crude Vegetable Oil Refining Corporation, bilked 51 banks out of over $180 million ($ billion today) in what became known as the Salad Oil scandal after he failed to corner the soybean oil market. (Soybean oil is used in salad dressing.) Biography De Angelis was born to Italian immigrant parents in the Bronx. While still a teenager he managed about 200 employees in a meat and fish market. When he found out that the new National School Lunch Act program would buy practically any food items (given certain price requirements) he took over the Adolph Gobel Company in North Bergen, New Jersey and was awarded a large contract, whence he promptly overcharged the government by $31,000. He also delivered over 2 million pounds of uninspected meat. Gobel would eventually go bankrupt. In 1955, he formed Allied Crude Vegetable Oil Refining Corporation and other related companies to participate in the U.S. government's Food for Peace program to sell subsidized surplus food ingredients to Europe to shore up their weak post-war economies. He formed Allied in a dilapidated "tank farm" in Bayonne, New Jersey and, with the patronage of several major grain exporters, began shipping massive quantities of substandard shortening and other vegetable oil products to Europe. De Angelis gradually became a major player in Europe and the commodities markets, later expanding into cotton and soybeans. In 1962, De Angelis began to accumulate massive quantities of soybean oil to attempt to corner the soybean oil market. With his huge inventory as collateral, he borrowed from various Wall Street banks and companies, and used the proceeds to buy as many oil futures as possible. Soon he would be long a large quantity hoping for soon-to-be expensive oil and oil futures, as prices rose due to the market corner. Fraud with warehouse receipts In the early 1960s American Express (Amex) was a respected name in traveler's checks and credit cards. The company created a new division to specialize in "Field Warehousing" to finance businesses using their inventory of goods and commodities as collateral. Tino De Angelis was a new customer and Amex wrote warehouse receipts for many millions of pounds of vegetable oil with him as beneficiary. The receipts would then be presented