Stephan Jay Lawrence thought he had the perfect solution to his legal problems. When the market crashed in October 1987, Lawrence, a stock options trader, received a $20 million margin call from his clearing firm, Bear Stearns. He disputed the amount, which bought him 42 months of leeway, but an arbiter and then a federal court eventually ordered him to pay the investment bank the full amount.
 Undaunted, Lawrence decided to move most of his liquid assets, estimated at more than $7 million, into a foreign asset protection trust on the Isle of Jersey. Bear Stearns pursued his assets for several more years, but when the firm got close, Lawrence moved them again, this time to the tiny island nation of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. There he appointed a new trustee to oversee the money—someone he claimed was a complete stranger—and told Bear Stearns that he had relinquished control of the trust entirely.
Lawrence then filed for personal bankruptcy. He was certain this would leave Bear Stearns with no recourse to his assets. He claimed, during 11 hours of depositions held as part of the bankruptcy proceedings, that he had no idea what had happened to the trust, nor who was in charge of it. He said he could not recall whether he had received any disbursements from it, and claimed that he was no longer in communication with the trustee. At one point he even claimed that the trust had been set up as a charity.
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