Russ Wasendorf Sr. spent 32 years building his futures firm, Peregrine Financial Group. It took only hours for it to come crashing down.
On Sunday afternoon, Wasendorf granted regulators permission to access the firm’s financial records via a new electronic system, The Post has learned.
The change meant that the National Futures Association could directly retrieve the firm’s financial records, making it difficult — if not impossible — for Wasendorf to continue mailing allegedly phony paper documents.
The following morning, the same day the NFA was initiating its first electronic confirmation of Peregrine’s bank accounts, Wasendorf was discovered unconscious in his car after running a hose to the tailpipe.
The NFA had begun rolling out the electronic system, Confirmation.com, in March, around the same time of Peregrine’s annual audit last year.
Wasendorf delayed signing on, however, because he had been doctoring his financial statements for at least two years, according to a lawsuit brought by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Wasendorf used a post-office box he had tricked auditors into believing was the bank’s, sources said.
The alleged scam unraveled when the NFA discovered that Peregrine had a mere $5 million in customer funds at US Bank — well short of the $225 million it had claimed just days earlier.
There were signs that Wasendorf, 64, knew Peregrine’s downfall was at hand.
A week before he tried to commit suicide in the company’s parking lot in Cedar Falls, Iowa, he gave his son, Russ Wasendorf Jr., who is Peregrine’s president and COO, power of attorney on July 3.
Just a few days earlier on June 30, Wasendorf also quietly married his fiancée Nancy Paldino, 48, in Las Vegas. Invitations to their Cedar Falls wedding had a date of Aug. 4.
Yesterday, rumors traveled through Cedar Falls that Wasendorf had emerged from his coma. The University of Iowa Hospitals declined to comment.
White SUVs lined the driveway leading to Wasendorf’s home, which he bought when he decided to move most of Peregrine’s operations from Chicago to his home state of Iowa.
With Anelia Dimitrova