Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty
“The fraudster is not usually in Beverly Hills.”
At least that’s what Kevin Edmundson, then a lawyer for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, thought in 2007 when he met Mark Roy Anderson at his office on Wilshire Boulevard. The office, inside a bank building, was not “grand,” Edmundson recalled, but it was blocks from Rodeo Drive in one of the most luxurious neighborhoods in Los Angeles County.
Edmundson said he went to California to interview Anderson after the SEC slapped him with a civil suit alleging he swindled $1 million from a Dallas real-estate broker and other investors by selling thousands of shares in an oil company. Despite a slew of enthusiastic emails about a “huge oil well” in Nevada, Anderson never delivered the promised economic returns to investors, the civil complaint states.