Rask Meridian Advisors was a registered investment adviser in Milwaukee with about two hundred and forty clients and just under three hundred million under management, most of it from people within about a forty-mile radius, a great many of them retired and a number of them acquaintances.

Over roughly six years, Gerald Rask moved approximately fourteen and a half million dollars out of a pooled vehicle he had set up for a subset of those clients, through three entities he controlled, and used it for, among other things, a boat, a property in Door County, and — this is the part that always gets me — covering earlier withdrawals from the same vehicle.

It is the most ordinary financial crime there is.

There is no ingenuity in it.