By 2017, Marvel movies were dominating the box office. Multiple films in the global top ten, billions in revenue, a cinematic universe shaping pop culture like we’d never seen before. At the center of it all, at least symbolically, was Stan Lee. But that same year, his wife Joan passed away after nearly 70 years together, and suddenly decisions they’d been navigating as a team were landing entirely on him.
That same year, NBA legend Tim Duncan discovered his financial advisor of 20 years had been stealing from him for the last decade. Between these two cases, the damage exceeded $50 million, and not a single dollar was stolen by a stranger.
In the latest episode of Oh My Fraud, host Caleb Newquist revives the podcast’s popular “Defrauded Famous” series to examine how trusted insiders extracted tens of millions from two of America’s most recognizable figures. As Caleb puts it, these cautionary tales are reminders that “fraud usually comes from the inside.”
The Big Fundamental’s Big Loss
Tim Duncan wasn’t your typical NBA superstar. Five-time champion, two-time MVP, 15-time All-Star, and nicknamed “The Big Fundamental” for his unglamorous but devastatingly effective style. As Shaquille O’Neal wrote in his autobiography, “I could talk trash to Patrick Ewing. Get in David Robinson’s face. Get a rise out of Alonzo Mourning. But when I went at Tim, he’d look at me like he was bored.”
This wasn’t a guy with a garage full of Ferraris and a Bengal tiger in the backyard. Tim grew up in the U.S. Virgin Islands and planned to be a competitive swimmer until Hurricane Hugo destroyed his training pool. Basketball came later, but success came fast. He was the number one pick in the 1997 draft and won his first championship in his second season.
By the time he retired, Tim had earned well over $200 million in NBA contracts alone. And from day one, he’d been working with financial advisor Charles Banks IV.
Charles came from money. His father was president of Ferguson Enterprises, a major plumbing and HVAC distributor. Charles became president of CSI Capital Management, managing around $400 million for about 150 professional athletes. He was tall, bookish, a wine enthusiast who even co-owned Screaming Eagle Winery with billionaire Stan Kroenke. He positioned himself as someone who could connect clients with sophisticated opportunities beyond basic retirement planning.
For a pro athlete, that kind of help matters. As Caleb explains, NBA players face the “jock tax,” meaning they owe state income taxes in every state they play. A game in California? Taxed there. New York road trip? Taxed there too. With 80-plus games a season, sitting down to personally vet investment deals isn’t exactly practical.
The Trust That Turned Toxic
The turning point came in 2007 when Charles left CSI Capital Management. He never told Tim. Their formal advisory relationship had ended, but Charles kept approaching Tim with investments. And after 2007, Charles had an undisclosed ownership interest in each of them.
Take Le Metier de Beaute, a cosmetics company. Charles pitched it as profitable with $8 million in sales, claiming Kevin Garnett would also invest. Tim put in $1.1 million. In January 2013, an audit uncovered “accounting irregularities and possible fraud.” But Charles texted Tim a month later, “Need to update on a deal. All good news.” The company went bankrupt that September. Tim’s money was gone.
The biggest fraud involved Gameday Entertainment, a struggling sports merchandising company where Charles was chairman and held a controlling interest (facts he never disclosed to Tim). Charles convinced Tim to take out a $10 million line of credit, then loan $7.5 million to Gameday at 12% annual interest. He claimed another investor was putting in the same amount. That investor didn’t exist. Charles pocketed $225,000 in fees and skimmed $15,000 from each monthly payment for two years.
The most brazen move came during the 2013 NBA Finals. While Tim was playing Miami, Charles faxed him signature pages (not the full agreement) for what he described as an amendment that would “remove $1.5 million of risk for you.” He texted: “All great news. No downside.” In reality, Tim had just taken on $6 million in new liability while giving up his priority position as a creditor. Charles paid himself over $1.5 million from the proceeds.
Gameday’s own controller later testified it felt like Charles was using the company as “his personal piggy bank.”
Justice, Sort Of
Tim’s 2013 divorce led to the discovery. A new financial consultant found discrepancies everywhere, including unclear loans, missing documentation and undisclosed conflicts. The final tally showed Tim had invested $24.1 million with Charles and gotten back about $7 million, all from interest payments, not actual returns.
In September 2016, a federal grand jury indicted Charles on four counts of wire fraud. He pleaded guilty to one count and was sentenced to four years in federal prison plus $7.5 million in restitution. Federal investigators calculated Tim’s actual loss at $13.5 million. Tim himself estimated it closer to $25 million.
At sentencing, Tim told Charles directly, “I just wanted you to own up, pay up, and we’d move on. You wouldn’t. So now we’re here.” He also wrote to the judge, “You may not understand how difficult it is for me to be in the public light in this horrible way, as the poster child for a dumb athlete whose financial advisor took his money.”
Judge Fred Berry wasn’t sympathetic to Charles, comparing him to a drug dealer he’d sentenced earlier that day. “People like you ought to be held to a higher standard because you know better,” he said.
Making matters worse, Kevin Garnett was sitting in that courtroom during Charles’s sentencing, across from Tim, with Charles’s family. At the time, Kevin didn’t think he was a victim. Tim’s attorney later said, “We tried to save Kevin. We tried to tell him.” By 2018, Kevin had filed his own lawsuit alleging Charles stole $77 million through a partnership called Hammer Holdings LLC. Combined, Charles allegedly extracted roughly $100 million from these two NBA stars.
When the Gatekeeper Dies
Stan Lee’s story is different but equally troubling. Despite being the face of characters worth billions, including Spider-Man, X-Men, Iron Man, and The Hulk, he didn’t own them. Early comic deals weren’t creator-friendly. But convention appearances, licensing deals, and media projects still generated significant income, and Stan needed help managing it.
For decades, that manager was his wife, Joan. She handled schedules, controlled access, and served as the gatekeeper. When she died in 2017 after nearly 70 years of marriage, that protective layer vanished overnight. What followed was three overlapping fraud cases totaling over $26 million in alleged losses.
Gerardo “Jerry” Olivares, a former florist turned publicist, had worked his way into Stan’s life starting in 2010. After Joan’s death, he allegedly moved fast, convincing the grieving Stan to sign over power of attorney within days, then firing Stan’s banker of 26 years and his longtime attorneys. A lawsuit alleged Jerry transferred $4.6 million from Stan’s account without authorization, including $1.4 million traced directly to Jerry and $850,000 for a West Hollywood condo.
Then there’s the detail that sounds like something out of a horror movie. Jerry allegedly had a nurse extract vials of Stan Lee’s blood to stamp on Black Panther comics that sold for up to $500 each. Stan never authorized it. The lawsuit called it a “diabolical and ghoulish scheme.”
Max Anderson, Stan’s road manager since 2006, allegedly stole over $21 million, including $11 million in autograph revenue and $10 million in appearance fees. At one 2017 New York Comic Con, Max allegedly collected over $800,000, paid himself $700,000 as a “management fee,” and gave Stan just $50,000. He also allegedly got Stan, whose vision had deteriorated so badly he couldn’t read what he was signing, to grant him a worldwide license to Stan’s name and likeness in perpetuity for one dollar.
Keya Morgan, a memorabilia dealer who took control of Stan’s business affairs in early 2018, faced criminal charges, including false imprisonment of an elder and elder abuse. He allegedly moved the 95-year-old Stan from his home late at night and called 911 on social workers who came for welfare checks, trying to convince Stan he was in danger.
Limited Justice for Stan
The outcomes were frustratingly incomplete. Jerry Olivares settled for an undisclosed amount without admitting wrongdoing. Background checks later revealed he had 45 tax liens and 15 court judgments, none of which Stan had verified before handing over his finances.
Max Anderson’s civil case settled a week before trial. He pled guilty to federal tax charges for not reporting $1.25 million in income and got 12 months and a day in federal prison.
Keya Morgan’s criminal trial ended in a mistrial with the jury deadlocked 11 to 1 in favor of acquittal. The judge dismissed all remaining charges “in the interests of justice.”
The total alleged harm was over $26 million. But total proven misconduct was just Anderson’s $1.25 million in unreported income. That’s it.
Stan Lee died in 2018 before most of these disputes were resolved.
What We Can Learn
As Caleb frames it, “Nobody manages this level of complexity completely alone.” Tim wasn’t reckless. Stan wasn’t naive. They worked with people they had good reasons to trust. “That is normal. But trust without oversight is basically the equivalent of keeping your fingers crossed.”
The lessons for accounting professionals are:
- Trust needs verification. Independent review and periodic check-ins aren’t signs of distrust. They’re good governance. Charles operated unchecked for 20 years. That’s a single point of failure.
- Scale changes everything. Once you reach a certain income level, you’re basically a small business. Multiple revenue streams, complex taxes, and licensing deals demand real internal controls and separation of duties.
- Fraud comes from inside. It’s not hackers or strangers. It’s people who know “where the documentation is thin or non-existent, where no one’s double checking anything.”
- Life transitions create vulnerability. Joan Lee’s death removed Stan’s only real oversight. Tim’s fraud was discovered during his divorce. Powers of attorney and defined processes are easier to establish in advance than during a crisis.
- Documentation matters. Charles faxed Tim the signature pages during the NBA Finals rather than the full agreement. Insist on complete documentation every time.
As Tim said after everything came to light, “I was coached early on in my career about preparing for something like this. I thought I was prepared the right way. I thought I did the right things and it still happened. So obviously it can happen to anyone.”
The full Oh My Fraud episode digs deeper into both cases, including more courtroom details and that wild story about Stan Lee’s blood. These stories are reminders that the principles of internal controls exist for exactly these situations. Every client who says “I trust my advisor completely” might be describing a perfectly healthy relationship. Or they might be involved in exactly the kind of setup that enabled Charles Banks IV to steal for two decades without detection.