Under RICO law federal prosecutors had the power to seize the assets of Princeton Newport Partners. So after the raid the firm was dissolved and several of the traders who had not been charged created their own hedge firm, which to this day operates in the former Princeton Newport space at 33 Witherspoon, with a computer operation based in California.
That firm is called TGS, named after partners C. Frederick Taylor, a Haverford alumnus; David Gelbaum, a mathematics major from the University of California-Irvine and one of Ed Thorp’s earliest hires; and Andrew Shechtel, who had been a trader in the Princeton office when the federal raid occurred.
A Johns Hopkins alumnus who earned his degree in math and political economy at the age of 19, Shechtel had attended Harvard Business School and worked on Wall Street before joining Princeton Newport Partners in the mid 1980s.
TGS made national news in 2014, when Bloomberg BusinessWeek tracked down the source of hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to researchers investigating the cause and possible cures for Huntington’s disease.
The secretive donor was Andrew Shechtel. One Princeton link: CHDI, a research organization that was originally called the “Cure Huntington’s Disease Initiative,” is based at Princeton Forrestal Village and headed by Robi Blumenstein, identified by Bloomberg as the man Shechtel hired to oversee what had become a $100 million a year research effort.
Shechtel can afford it. His net worth has been estimated in the billions, but with an asterisk — how much has he given away?
