In 1963, 51 financial institutions discovered that $180 million in loans, nearly $2 billion in modern terms, rested on vegetable oil that did not exist. Anthony De Angelis, known as Tino, had already run the meatpacker Gobel into bankruptcy amid suits from Yugoslavia, Germany, and the United States, and the SEC had accused him of borrowing against fictitious inventory. He simply started again with Allied Crude Vegetable Oil Refining Corporation in Bayonne, New Jersey, and the fees he generated made lenders look away from a federal suspension and rumors of mafia backing.

This episode explains how the trick worked. American Express Warehousing certified his tanks but kept his own workers on site, and inspectors dipped measuring sticks into a thin layer of oil floating on seawater. When pumping the same oil from tank to tank grew too tiring, he forged the warehouse receipts outright, then tried to corner the futures market to keep prices high. It all collapsed in a single week of November 1963.

• Allied posted 900,000 tons of oil as collateral, but an audit found about 55,000 tons, roughly 6 percent of the claim.
• On November 14, 1963, Allied held 90 percent of all cottonseed oil contracts on the New York Produce Exchange, and four days later it filed for bankruptcy.
• American Express Warehousing went under with $130,000 in assets against $210 million in claims, and the parent company offered a $60 million settlement.
• The brokerage Ira Haupt failed in the week of President Kennedy’s assassination, and the New York Stock Exchange put up $36 million to protect its 20,000 customers.
• De Angelis pleaded guilty to four counts, was sentenced to 20 years in 1965, and walked free in 1972 after serving seven.