I have to say that I get a certain amount of personal satisfaction from the following story. It’s about a woman, Patricia Jacoby, who owned an antiques business in the Raleigh, N.C. area called Posh! (now closed), who just received a jail sentence of 10 years for conducting an elaborate Ponzi scheme. It involved unsuspecting people who invested in antiques to the tune of more than $2 million over a period of a few years. It was a classic “invest a little, get a lot” scam where people gave money in good faith, were told they’d have quadruple their money in a week, and never got a cent more out of it.

Why would I get personal satisfaction out of it, other than liking to see criminals get their due? One year ago, almost to the day, I came across a breaking story out of Raleigh about a woman who went to a local TV station with the story about being scammed by Jacoby and wanting restitution for her $20,000. The woman’s name is Lorraine Buccelllato, and she’s a transplanted New Yorker, a deeply religious lady and a total spitfire. I found her email address via some nifty e-researching, and called her the next day. She talked my ear off for two solid hours nonstop. I wrote the story for an antiques paper I was working for at the time, and broke it to the antiques community at large – hence the satisfaction.

Buccellato faced tremendous resistance from her community and her church, where she was approached by Jacoby. She stayed on top of her own lawyers and the Fed, and was one of the driving forces in getting Jacoby convicted. She found out the woman had been part of other pyramid schemes, and had served two different brief jail terms before. She only lost $20,000 – I say “only” because some people lost hundreds of thousands of dollars – but refused to be cowed. One way scammers get away with this type of thing is because their victims are too embarrassed at being taken in such a way, so they never come forward.

Not so for Buccellato, as evidenced by her statements at the sentencing, documented in the online article from WRAL-TV, he affiliate she went to initially for help. Was Buccellato embarrassed by what happened to her? Sure. Was that going to stop her? No way. She stuck with it, took an obvious criminal out of the game and witnessed that crook being taken away to serve a jail term. I’m sure she took great personal satisfaction in seeing it all come to an end.

I say congratulations to Lorraine, and urge you to read the story, linked to here at WRAL-TV, to see what can and should happen to all scammers, not just those who do it in the antiques business.

-Noah Fleisher, Aug. 14, 2008