Could you — yes, you — the young Jewish wastrel living in a basement apartment and eating ramen every night, actually be the sole legitimate heir for a secret Swiss fund worth hundreds of millions of dollars?
Don’t trade in your ramen for rondelle of salmon just yet. But according to a veteran American banker who’s been living and working in Switzerland for two decades, hundreds or perhaps thousands of Jews may be blissfully ignorant of massive accounts waiting for them overseas in “trustee accounts.”
“The question is, who does this money belong to? If the trustee dies, you’ve got big accounts, hundreds of millions of dollars, and it’s sitting there with no one claiming it,” said Charles Epping, a banker and consultant turned novelist who is scheduled to speak on San Francisco radio stations and make a bookstore appearance Friday, July 14 through Sunday, July 16.
“For me, it’s a great breeding ground for a story. That amount of money with no one really watching it — the possibilities are endless.”
J. readers have had many opportunities to learn about the dormant Swiss accounts that many Jewish families recovered in bits and pieces during the 1990s. And while authorities discovered many accounts, very few had significant amounts of money in them; many did not appreciate in the 60 years since World War II and some actually lost money to custodial fees.
Yet the manner of account Epping describes in his debut novel, “Trust,” is far different — orders of magnitude different, in fact.
At around the time Hitler marched into Austria and began asking banks for account holders with Jewish names, a number of well-off Jewish families throughout Europe decided to protect their life savings — and to do that you needed someone with a non-Jewish name.
So they started trustee accounts (in German, treuhand accounts) via non-Jewish bankers or lawyers in Switzerland. Those accounts were significant; Epping estimates that values of $100,000 or more, a fortune at the time, are not unreasonable.
While many Americans and American Jews would assume the trustees pocketed the money in those accounts, Epping doesn’t believe that to be so. If the trustee was honest, many of the accounts could still be gathering value. And, if $100,000 were invested conservatively in the S & P 500 60 years ago, it would be worth about $100 million today. And that buys a lot of ramen.
Epping, a non-Jewish banker and consultant originally from Portland, Ore., has written several books about finance. But for his first novel, he decided to incorporate the more fascinating aspects of his unusual day job.
Over a six-year period concluding in 2004, he served as something of a private detective for a Jewish family, amassing government and familial records proving his clients were the rightful owners of four East Berlin buildings. The tangled financial webs left over from World War II fascinated him enough that he was compelled to put pen to paper.
And, noted Epping, vast riches could be waiting for you — yet, unlike with the Publisher’s Clearinghouse, no Ed McMahon is going to come to your door and hand you a check the size of a diving board. You’d have to hire a lawyer or Epping-like investigator and track down the elderly Swiss trustees or their successors (assuming they were honest and didn’t pocket the funds).
Epping, however, feels it’s not a ridiculous idea that many, if not most, of the trustees were honest men. And, he adds, it would fit in with old-time Swiss businessmen’s behavioral patterns to honor the clandestine agreements for the long haul and wait for a claimant to come to the trustee, not vice-versa.
“That’s a very typical Swiss response — ‘I will wait for someone to come and ask me if I have the money,'” explained Epping.
“There is no documentation [of the trustee account] other than an agreement signed by the trustee and the person who opened the account. That’s normally not kept in the hands of the person opening the account; if you were a Jew living in Poland, Czechoslovakia or Hungary you knew the Nazis could come at any time, and you didn’t want that kind of thing floating around.”
So, the difference between an apartment in the basement or the penthouse comes down to one thing.
“The question is, did [account holders] tell their children?”
“Trust” by Charles Epping (Greenleaf Book Group Press, 292 pages, $23.95).
Charles Epping will appear from noon to 3 p.m. on Saturday, July 15 at Borders Books, 316 W. El Camino Real, Sunnyvale. Information: (408) 730-5050. At 1 p.m. Sunday, July 16, Epping will speak at Dayenu, 3220 California St., S.F. Information: (415) 563-6563.