Meet Author Michael Kimelman

Although he was a suburban husband and father, living a far different life than the “Wolf of Wall Street,” Michael Kimelman had a good run as the cofounder of a successful hedge fund. But it all came crashing down in the wee hours of November 5, 2009, when the Feds came to his door—almost taking the door off its hinges.

On Sunday, May 7 at 4:00pm, join Michael Kimelman and hear a reading from his explosive new book, CONFESSIONS OF A WALL STREET INSIDER: A Cautionary Tale of Rats, Feds, and Banksters (Skyhorse Publishing, March 2017). Refreshments will be available at 3:30pm.

Kimelman had left a cushy yet suffocating job at a law firm to try his hand at the high-risk life of a proprietary trader — and he did pretty well for himself. But while his wife and children were sequestered to a bedroom, Kimelman was marched off in embarrassment in view of his neighbors and TV crews who had been alerted in advance. He was arrested as part of a huge insider trading case, and while he was offered a “sweetheart” no-jail probation plea, he refused, maintaining his innocence.

The lion’s share of Confessions of a Wall Street Insider was written while Kimelman was an inmate at Lewisburg Penitentiary, a high security Federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. For nearly two years behind bars, he reflected on his experiences before incarceration—rubbing elbows and throwing back far too many cocktails with financial titans and major figures in sports and entertainment (including Leonardo DiCaprio, Alex Rodriguez, Ben Bernanke, and Alan Greenspan, to drop a few names); making and losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in daily gambles on the Street; getting involved with the wrong people, who eventually turned on him, then realizing that none of that mattered in the end.

As he writes: “Stripped of family, friends, time, and humanity, if there’s ever a place to give one pause, it’s prison . . . Tomorrow is promised to no one.” In Confessions of a Wall Street Insider, he reveals the triumphs, pains, and struggles, and how, in the end, it just might have made him a better person.

Sponsored by the Friends of the Larchmont Public Library.