Throughout the 1990s and 2000s the Montgomery family had been a symbol of the American Dream—a hardworking family who had reached the upper echelons of society through grit and determination. Garth Montgomery founded Montgomery Investment Services in 1986, a New York–based hedge fund that offered security brokerage and investment advisory services to banks, financial institutions, and high net worth individuals. After three decades of managing the portfolios of some of the country’s wealthiest people, advising some of the world’s largest corporations, overseeing retirement funds for America’s biggest unions, and controlling the endowments of influential universities, the firm had $50 billion in assets under management. It looked like a well-managed global fund making millions for its clients. In reality, it was a massive Ponzi scheme that paid long-term investors outrageous returns generated from new investors’ deposits. A house of cards waiting to fall, it finally did, and in stunning fashion.

Forensic accountants determined that more than $30 billion had been fraudulently obtained and squandered on Garth Montgomery’s jet-setting lifestyle. The rest of the company’s “assets” were make believe—the books were so cooked they nearly incinerated when the feds finally got their hands on them. The federal indictments came the summer after Claire Montgomery graduated law school, and she still held vivid memories of federal agents crashing through the front door of her family’s Manhattan penthouse, pulling her father from bed in his pajamas, and walking him in handcuffs to the waiting squad car parked in front of the building. The perp walk had been seen the world over. Photos of it were splashed on the front page of every newspaper, and video footage led every news program. Type the name Garth Montgomery into any search engine and the first image that popped up was her father, pajama-clad with hands cuffed behind his back and a score of federal agents leading him from the building.

Despite that she had been warned of the details, she was still shocked by the enormity of the situation when the specifics of House of Cards—the FBI’s name for the operation that brought down Montgomery Investment Services—became public. It was like watching a horror movie that starred her father as the villain. If the allegations were true, and she knew they were, it meant that her father had defrauded thousands of people out of their life savings, many blue-collar workers out of their retirements, and universities out of decades of endowment contributions. The allegations meant the Montgomery family was a mirage, both morally and materially. Everything they owned was contaminated by greed and deceit—the penthouse, the Hamptons mansion, the Aspen villa, the beachfront condo on St. Barts, the cars, the jet, her trust fund. Even the Claire-Voyance, her majestic sailboat that had sunk the previous summer, had come from ill-gotten money. But it wasn’t just the things that were an illusion, it was the lie that they were ever a happy family.