Adviser who faked death eyed movie and book deals

An Indiana money manager facing prison for trying to fake his death by parachuting out of a plane and crashing it after a fraud scheme began to unravel testified this month that he has no money to pay child support.

But a lawyer questioned Marcus Schrenker’s truthfulness as she pressed him about financial claims that he had made in letters to his estranged wife, Michelle, including one that he had dived out of the plane carrying a 90-pound bag of gold.

Mr. Schrenker, who was sentenced this month to 10 years in prison on securities fraud charges, took the stand in shackles.

As attorney Mary Schmid handed him the letters and asked him to read them aloud, he had trouble turning the pages. He also faces a four-year federal sentence for crashing the plane in Florida.

“It was a simple economic decision,” Mr. Schrenker said about the plane crash, which he repeatedly referred to as “the incident.” He said his family stood to gain millions of dollars in life insurance, while he would be unable to provide for them if he were in prison and burdened with judgments.

Mr. Schrenker said that he bid a tearful goodbye to his wife and three children on the night of his flight.

Mr. Schrenker pleaded guilty last month to charges that he conned friends and relatives, including his own aunt, into investing a total of about $1.5 million in a nonexistent foreign-currency fund. He used the money to finance his own highflying lifestyle.

Facing mounting legal problems, Mr. Schrenker in January 2009 put his small plane on autopilot and jumped out with a parachute. He said that he pointed the plane toward the Gulf of Mexico, but the plane ran out of fuel and crashed in the Florida Panhandle.

Mr. Schrenker, 39, parachuted into Alabama and was found two days later at a Florida campground, bleeding from a self-inflicted wrist slash.

He testified this month that his assets have been seized and he has had no source of income since going to jail. Mr. Schrenker also faces millions of dollars in court-ordered judgments after his release.

But Ms. Schmid pointed out passages in the letters in which he told his wife about more than $1 million in offshore bank accounts and potentially lucrative book and movie deals.

Michelle Schrenker, however, previously denied knowledge of her husband’s business dealings, and he later acknowledged that while he wasn’t writing a book, another author was. Mr. Schrenker said that the money from the book was to be placed in a trust fund for the couple’s children.

Mr. Schrenker said that his wife must have been aware of the offshore money because she was chief financial officer for one of his companies.

Ms. Schmid also questioned Mr. Schrenker about perhaps his strangest claim: that there was a bag containing 1,440 ounces of gold at the bottom of the river in Alabama where he had landed.

She asked him if he had made any effort to recover the gold, and Mr. Schrenker said that he hadn’t, but he imagined that some people would be trying to recover it.

Such an amount of gold would be worth more than $1.9 million at recent rates on New York exchanges.