Ex-trader takes suicide pill after guilty verdict
FACED 16 YEARS
NEW YORK • A former Wall Street trader who faced 16 years in jail for burning down his mansion in a mortgage fraud, collapsed and died after his conviction after appearing to take a suicide pill.
Michael Marin, 53, had just been found guilty Thursday by a court in Phoenix, Ariz., of torching his US$3.5-million house. He buried his head in his hands, then seemed to put something in his mouth and swallow.
As court proceedings continued, he appeared to swallow a second unknown object before taking a drink.
Minutes later, he turned to talk to someone behind him before convulsing and falling to the floor.
Lawyers and court staff rushed to his aid. Marin was taken to hospital, where he later died.
The man, who owned several original Picasso etchings, could no longer afford to pay his mortgage. The Yale Law School graduate set fire to the house in July 2009 two months after trying to sell it in a raffle. He had hoped 176,000 people would pay US$25 each for a ticket.
Marin was found outside the house wearing scuba diving gear. He claimed he had fled the fire by using a rope ladder to climb from a secondfloor window, an escape method that seems to have aroused the police’s suspicion.
Investigators said they had found four points of origin for the fire, both upstairs and downstairs, and had discovered phone books, cardboard boxes and newspapers covered in gasoline
Prosecutors told the court Marin, a former Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch employee who once published a book about Wall Street, was a successful banker whose world and finances had collapsed during the economic downturn. At the time of the fire he was a month away from having to make a US$2.3-million mortgage payment he could not afford.
Marin, a qualified pilot who had climbed Everest, had denied the charge.
Before his arrest, he told a local newspaper, “One, you don’t set fire to something that you’re in and then go trap yourself upstairs to make a more dramatic exit,” he said.
“The second thing, if you bore into my finances, this was the worst thing that could have happened to me. Not only did I not have any incentive personally, I totally had a counter-incentive. The Phoenix fire department people will figure out what they figure out.”
Marin, who has four children with a former wife, was in the house alone on the night of the fire. His girlfriend was at their other more modest home with his pet parrot and cat, and the Picasso artworks.
The results of toxicology tests are awaited.