How One Man With a Hose Nearly Destroyed Wall Street

He Fooled Wall Street With Fake Oil — It Was Just Water

Picture this: You convince the biggest banks in America to lend you millions using ships full of "salad oil" as collateral. Except there's no oil — just seawater with a thin layer of vegetable oil on top. It sounds like a rejected comedy script, but it's exactly what Anthony "Tino" De Angelis pulled off in the 1960s.

This is the story of the Great Salad Oil Swindle — a fraud so simple, so audacious, it nearly brought down Wall Street. We're talking $180 million in losses (nearly $2 billion today) that exposed how greed and willful ignorance can make even the smartest financial minds fall for a scam a child could have spotted.

What you'll discover:

🛢️ How Tino fooled inspectors with a few feet of real oil over seawater
🏦 Why American Express and 50+ banks never bothered to look deeper
💰 How the same oil got moved between tanks to multiply its "value"
📉 The market crash that exposed 94% of Allied's "oil" was fake
🎯 How Warren Buffett turned the disaster into his fortune

The most infuriating part? While Tino was a butcher from the Bronx running a scheme with garden hoses and dinner parties, Wall Street's finest got completely played. They were so blinded by easy profits, they forgot to ask the most basic question: "Is this oil actually there?"

This scandal forced real changes in financial auditing, but honestly — how many modern "assets" are built on equally shaky ground?
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