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She launched into a complicated explication of a financial matter. Then, just as swiftly, she pumped the brakes. John Bender was brilliance descended from brilliance—the oldest of two sons born to Paul and Margie Bender. Then he started speaking in complete sentences. He never did anything until he was absolutely sure he could do it perfectly.
John won math competitions but lost his temper, typically with teachers or students who failed to question everything. He was a gifted percussionist who refused to audition and an A student who rejected Harvard because he hated the interview. He was on track to a physics career until the summer of , which he spent working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory , a government-sponsored facility in Northern California that works with high-tech weapons.
His future was decided the day he visited a friend at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, where he discovered options trading—a numbers game he could win or lose based solely on his talents.
Bender places trades that will profit if his model's estimates of price probabilities are more accurate than those implied by prevailing option prices, which more. Do very trade at many commodities. Some agendas have adopted market resistance behavior checks, but not for result atom yields within their inconsistencies.
Almost immediately, he began buying options with his own money. He did well enough that friends staked him with funds to make a go of it. He had massive shoulders and thighs the size of armadillos; his face, with its strong cheekbones and wide-set features, projected a quiet intensity that could play as aloofness or arrogance. Another ex-trader, Jonathan Kaplan, pegged John as a wallflower with dark shadings. They both thought he was brilliant, and in time John came clean about the scrubs. Ever the contrarian, he found anomalies in the probability theories most traders viewed as gospel.
He used his predictive advantage to successfully bet against the conventional wisdom. So it was only a matter of time before his hedge fund, Amber Arbitrage, attracted some big whales, among them the famed mogul George Soros.
By the time John turned 32, in , he was on pace to become a billionaire by age They met in March , at a place called Golden Mountain Farm. The acre spread was located in the lush countryside west of Charlottesville, Virginia. Ann, then 28, was a new and exotic addition to rural Virginia. Her looks and style seemed more in keeping with her birthplace, Rio de Janeiro, where she was the second of two children born to Kenneth Patton III, an executive at Chase Manhattan who worked in Rio, and his wife, Gigi. Her youth was marked by private schools, parties, and white-sand beaches.
She earned a degree from Ithaca College, did a stint working at a fine-arts college in Baltimore, and experienced a kind of epiphany. Ann arrived in Virginia scared, isolated, and frail. She made friends—including one who invited Ann over to meet her live-in ex-boyfriend, John Bender. Or both. John, when he first met Ann, noticed her trembling hands right away.
John, equally unfiltered, volunteered that manic depression had colored his life, too, though to somewhat different effect. He also suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, so it was no wonder he happily put in hour workdays. Virtually overnight, the preserve turned into a summer camp for monkeys, sloths, and parrots; every morning, in the foggy darkness before dawn, the Benders woke to the impatient squawks and stares of macaws dangling upside down from the ledge of their roof.
Ann and John, during that first day, found too many commonalities between them to count. John, as a child, had always preferred the company of nonhumans. As an adult, he kept dozens of stray cats on his farm. John, who was treated for a mild aneurysm in , told Ann that once he racked up enough money, he would get out of trading, sinking much of his fortune into a bigger, better version of the green idyll he enjoyed in Virginia.
Prior to , many of the or so people who lived there lacked electricity; most residents lived in weather-beaten farmhouses or tiny cabinas accessible only by narrow dirt roads that turned to slop during the rainy season. To live there was to submit to the primacy of the rainforest: an area so vast hundreds of square miles , so wild deadly pit vipers, warring monkey tribes , and so damned out there that it remained impervious to the gringo land grabbers buying up the northern parts of the country.
Nobody bought into this corner of Costa Rica. Not even Costa Ricans.
The land was composed of separate farms that produced a meager coffee crop and a few grazing areas for cattle. The main issue was accessibility, or lack thereof, thanks to the combination of rugged mountains and a massive escarpment that cut the place off from the world. Construction took four years, with an army of odd workers completing a vast compound that included four separate houses, a moat, and a helipad. The Benders gave it a name that they mistakenly thought was a species of local plant: Boracayan. Teams of armed rangers were hired to chase off poachers, who previously had used the land as a hunting ground for birds and animals whose meat fetched top dollar at local markets.
Ann hired six full-time caretakers and brought in vets when needed. The interior structure took up 8, square feet. The total living area—the porches, sculpture garden, waterfall, reflecting pool stocked with tilapia, and more—approached , square feet. The only thing standing between the Benders and the elements was a series of roll-up storm doors.
Whenever they were inside—cooking, taking a bath—they were outside. And whatever was outside came in, unabated: birds and lizards and insects, wind and fog.
To lie in bed was to sleep in the clouds. The master bedroom took up the entire top floor.
If you have friends or family members who have financial questions or could use a second set of eyes, please let them know about my practice. We will only use the information you are providing to send offers we believe are relevant to you and, if you become a client, to send you information about your accounts. She displayed only one marker of ill health: an adhesive bandage, located just above her right clavicle, discreetly concealing a catheter that dripped small doses of morphine into her veins, to keep her pain and moods in check. John Hughes recommended all three for their roles. They'd always been a bit eccentric -- and Ann says they'd been madly in love since the moment a friend introduced them in Virginia in
Below, on the third floor, was an office space furnished with a large desk, a few chairs, and a computer. A satellite dish linked him to the outside world. But every evening, just before sunset, John and Ann had a thing. From there they could sometimes see all the way to Panama on the left and Nicaragua to the right. And on the best nights, as they peered out over the Pacific, they would see an endless blue sea dotted by whales. The troubles began in late April , on a sleepy country road just outside La Florida.
John and Ann were in their Ford F, on their way to buy seeds, when a car boxed them in. Ann screamed. Suddenly, the assailants identified themselves as plainclothes police and arrested John. The summons was related to an ugly legal battle John was engaged in at the time. It involved a New York financial manager named Joel Silverman, who had invested seed money in Amber Arbitrage in the mid-nineties. Silverman tried to paint John as a tax mercenary who used foreign tax shelters to hide his money from both Silverman and the U.
John hated the IRS so much that he renounced his U. Meanwhile, the Benders became unpopular among the Costa Rican locals. This triggered a cycle of manic depression, a physical breakdown, and an emergency hysterectomy a few months after the incident with the gunmen.
A second crisis materialized one night in , when guards exchanged gunshots with an armed intruder who was seen heading toward the house. After the intruder fled into the night, Ann spiraled downward. And when she crashed, John did, too. He got very manic, very out there.
Paranoia took hold. At one point, they again fled the country, this time to New Zealand for three and a half months. Again they were advised to cut their losses and move somewhere else. But no. Their commitment was rewarded in , when they sponsored and hosted a research team made up of botanists from the U. In one week, the team discovered three new species of orchid on the preserve.
One belonged to a particular genus Gongora known to be uniquely difficult to classify or understand. The team named this species Gongora boracayanensis.