survivors’ stories
ads in elementary-school directories.
Total start-up cost: about $1,000.
The kids ate it up. Black grossed only
$6,000 her first year (charging $250 a
party) but, gradually, happy customers spread the word. By 2006 she was
charging $400 and grossed $25,000.
Her retirement savings rose slowly
from the $50,000 after Enron folded
to $80,000 a year ago. The crash wiped
away most of that gain, and the recession has cut her business by 30 percent.
She’s still saving, though, and isn’t too
worried. Debt-free and living well at
69, Black says her $260,000 home is
her nest egg, then quickly adds, “I’m
not retiring. I love what I do. I’d be
happy doing it forever.” —Lani Luciano
Gregg a friend, and I trusted him.”
Left with about $40,000 in savings,
Jckowski has squirreled away another
$110,000 in the years since Simper’s
death—“I’m a saver,” she says—at first
putting everything in CDs, one of the
safest investment options. But recently
prison. Vivien became the lead plain-
tiff in a landmark class-action suit
against WorldCom that established
employees with 401(k) company stock
as shareholders (before that, the plan,
not the workers, was deemed to hold
the stock). “Representing my fellow
“Even more than the money,
the evilness of what our adviser did
was the hardest thing to deal with.
I considered him a friend.” —CORA LEE JCKOWSKI
she entrusted her money to a financial
adviser, being careful this time to lay
out certain conditions.
“I told him the story,” she recounts.
“I said, ‘Okay, here is the deal: If I think
for one minute you’re messing with
my mind and my money, I will see to it
that you’re hung on a nail.’
“He walks lightly around me,” she
adds. “I get lots of paperwork from
him, and I call whenever I damn well
want to.” —Jim Zarroli
DUPED BY A “FRIEND”
ON AN APRIL DA Y eight years ago,
Cora Lee Jckowski’s husband, Sonny,
called her at the Sandy, Utah, middle
school where she worked as assis-
tant principal. He had some shocking
news. Their friend and financial
adviser, Gregg Simper, had died in a
shooting accident.
employees helped me see I was not
alone in my investing mistake,” he says.
The plaintiffs—comprising the com-
pany’s 103,000 workers and retirees,
who lost $1.1 billion—eventually shared
a $50 million settlement, restitution of
only about 4 cents on the dollar. So to-
day, at 51, Vivien—an account manager
for Verizon, which absorbed World-
Com—has grown used to clipping
coupons, buying in bulk, and investing
completely differently. Many people
still load up their 401(k) accounts
with their employer’s stock, but not
Vivien, whose account is back to about
$220,000. “I’ve been diversifying in
cash and bonds, so I didn’t get hurt
as much last year,” he says. “I really
learned a lesson.” —Richard Eisenberg
CONNED BY WORLDCOM
MON THS AFTER WorldCom’scol- lapse had snatched 80 percent of his
retirement savings—a loss of about
$250,000—Stephen Vivien was still
fuming. He had marveled at his em-
ployer’s growth into the nation’s
second-largest long-distance phone
company, and he proudly used most of
his 401(k) plan to buy the firm’s shares.
“Many WorldCom employees, like
me, were in love with our company’s
stock,” says Vivien, who lives in San
Carlos, California. “Working there, you
got caught up in it.”
Devotion turned to outrage when
a massive accounting fraud master-
minded by WorldCom’s executives
was discovered in 2002. CEO Bernard
Ebbers was sentenced to 25 years in
IT’S HARD TO RESIST the Next Big Thing. In 2000, Stuart Millner, an auctioneer of industrial equipment, sold
his business to Zone Trader, a Minneapolis dot-com that figured auctions
were a natural for the Web.
“These guys had raised $65 million
in financing, and I thought they knew
what they were doing,” Millner, 69,
recalls. “And they wanted me.”
ZoneTrader paid him $2.5 million
in cash and more than $4 million in
CRUSHED IN TECH’S FALL
