With No Body, Cops Doubt NY Banker's Suicide

An international manhunt is now under way for a former hedge-fund manager who disappeared the day he was to begin serving a prison sentence for defrauding investors. A car belonging to Samuel Israel III was found Monday at a bridge over New York's Hudson River, the Wall Street Journal reports; though bodies of suicide jumpers are normally found quickly, there's no sign of Israel.

"No witnesses saw anybody jump from the bridge, and there's no evidence that he did," a police investigator said of Israel, 48, who was to begin serving a 20-year sentence for scamming investors out of $400 million. "He's dead as far as I can throw him," said one investor burned by the 2005 collapse of Bayou Management—a seemingly common sentiment. (More Samuel Israel stories.)