June 11, 2018. charged De Angelis with contempt after he found De Angelis had funneled over $500,000 from Allied into his personal account at a Swiss bank. Amex was forced to make good on their warehouse contracts and took a massive loss. The two trading firms were eventually bought by larger players. De Angelis was sentenced to a seven-year jail term. In the wake of the scandal, keen observer and investor Warren Buffett took advantage of the plunge in the price of American Express shares and bought 5% of the company for only $20 million. In 1972, De Angelis was released. By 1975 he was involved in another scam, this time a Ponzi scheme involving livestock in the Midwest. De Angelis used two slaughter houses, Rex Pork and Mister Pork, to swindle livestock dealers in Indianapolis out of $7 million (approximately $31M in 2016 dollars) worth of hogs. Two of the top livestock dealers facing losses were M&R Livestock (owned by Theodore C. McAninch) and Farrow and Co. (owned by Allan S. Farrow). De Angelis continued trading with these livestock dealers via fraudulent letters promising payment. The biggest loser, M&R Livestock, was owed $3.5 million ($21 million in 2016 dollars). The swindle was documented in detail by Norman C. Miller in The Great Salad Oil Swindle (Baltimore, MD: Coward McCann Books, 1965). The book is based on Miller's coverage of the story in the Wall Street Journal, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964. References External links A web page about the mafia in New Jersey contains an excerpt from Norman Miller's article. Life "The Mob: Gallagher continued" "The Congressman and the Salad Oil Swindler", Life Magazine'', October 25, 1968 (reprint), pp. 70–71. 1915 births 2009 deaths American commodities traders American confidence tricksters American Express people American people convicted of fraud American people of Italian descent People from the Bronx