NOT YOUR TYPICAL COMPLIANCE STORY: THE DAY MY BOSS WAS MURDERED

No, this isn't from my experience back in the day as a money launderer for European and American narcotics traffickers, but from my compliance officer experience. The investment company where I was conducting enhanced due diligence for new clients was taken over by a court-appointed receiver due to issues which included making a determination regarding whether a certain investment product constituted a security, and was therefore required registration with the Securities & Exchange Commission.

We were all discharged, and I was thereafter engaged by one of the company's best (million dollar sales revenue annually) executives to be his private compliance officer, to vet his foreign clients in his new independent solo business focusing upon high net worth customers.

When traveling abroad, my boss typically took with him certain ladies he had a relationship with at the old company, a fact which he concealed from his longtime fiance'. She discovered his dark secret in an email, and thereafter asked him to purchase a very large handgun for her protection when he was away on trips to see clients which she promptly used to kill him in the waterfront home they shared in Fort Lauderdale. His attorney called me, shocked to learn about the murder but I wasn't. Call it karma, but arrogant and powerful executives sometimes find themselves on the blunt end of payback from an unexpected quarter.

I would go on the become World-Check's Financial Crime Consultant, landing on my feet, which is the takeaway I wish to impart. Expect the unexpected, compliance officers, even though you perceive yourselves to be working in a low-risk profession; Things happen.