Before he enlisted in the Army, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, notorious now as the face of the March 11 "Kandahar Massacre," had what Bloomberg's Michael C. Bender and Mark Niquette termed a "broken career."
Bloomberg reported that following 9/11 Bales had worked for five different companies in as many years selling community-bank stock.
Bales' reputation fell when he was accused of swindling more than $600,000 from a couple's retirement account, Bloomberg reported.
The Chicago Tribune quotes Cincinnati lawyer Joseph Dehner saying that Hamilton-Shea,a firm where Bales worked, was "the kind of place where you learn to cold call, to 'pump and dump.'"
The Tribune elaborated that what Dehner is referring to is a "practice in which firms artificially raise the prices of stocks they hold by aggressively selling shares to clients and then selling their own shares."
Attempts to set up a small investment business of his own with his brother and his high school friend, NFL player Marc Edwards, also went wrong. Spartina Investments fell apart when the company failed to file its annual report on time.
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