Chip Skowron may be out of prison, but he's not out of the woods

The wages of sin

His mansion at 16 Doubling Road just took a million-dollar price cut today, and is now asking a mere $10.7 million. Skowron, you may recall, was convicted of insider trading and spent a little under five years before being released in 2016. 

I feel sorry for his wife and children, but not for "Chip".. He had a very respectable medical practice  as an orthopedic surgeon (degrees from both Yale and Harvard) before  heading to the hedge fund world, to make  even more money, but even that wasn't enough to support his 10-vintage car collection, his mansion, his children and his wife (who by all accounts is a wonderful woman). Greed will cause some people to do despicable things, and Skowron is an example of that.

Skowron's arrest brought down Greenwich's FrontPoint Capital and with it, his completely innocent partners and everyone else who worked at the firm. I won't lose sleep over the financial firms who suffered losses (Raj Rajaratnam, former resident of Rogues Hill Road, now residing in prison himself) was one of them, Morgan Stanley, FrontPoint's parent another), but 100-or-so people lost their jobs as the result of Frontline's demise, and that's unforgivable.

As I recall, Skowron was supposed to be worth $30 million at his peak, but at his conviction he was ordered to pay $6 million in restitution, a $5 million fine, $3.6 million in legal fees to Morgan Stanley, and a $2.7 penalty imposed by the SEC. A few years later, Morgan Stanly obtained a $35 million judgment against him, and there are doubtless other judgments out there, so whatever he sells this house for, he's unlikely to walk away with anything (the feds hold a lien of $16,354,000 on the property). In fact, I wonder that he just doesn't turn the place over to his creditors and walk away.