Italian Hedge Fund Owner Invests in-a-Spicy-Meat-A-Balls

Treasure seekers have trekked into Arizona’s Superstition Mountains in search of a lost gold mine for more than a century. Three years ago, Italian economics professor Alberto Micalizzi, whose hedge fund was on the verge of collapse, looked to the nearby town of Apache Junction to shore up his own fortune.
After his fund lost investors hundreds of millions of dollars in the credit crunch, Micalizzi quietly moved most of its assets into bonds in late 2008.
These were no ordinary bonds.
They were $500 million of highly illiquid paper purportedly issued by a company in a trailer-park suburb of Phoenix, on behalf of a small Australian commodities firm — and backed by the proceeds from $10 billion of diesel from the tiny autonomous Russian republic of Bashkortostan.
The bonds proved to be impossible to sell, and the professor’s Cayman Island-based fund, DD Growth Premium, went into liquidation in the spring of 2009. The fund’s implosion left behind a band of irate investors and an enduring riddle as to what exactly happened.
Reuters has followed a paper trail from the fund’s offices in the upmarket London neighborhood of Kensington to the dusty American southwest, from the fund’s registered home in a Caribbean tax haven to a suburban house in Canberra, Australia.
The story’s cast includes an Arizona businessman on the run from U.S. authorities, a Russian allegedly convicted for fraud, and the Italian at the center of it all: a 42-year-old specialist in options pricing who teaches economics at the respected Bocconi University in Milan.

FULL STORY HERE