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Does crime pay?
Wall Street Crime and Punishment is a weekly series by Benzinga's Phil Hall that chronicles the bankers, brokers and financial ne’er-do-wells whose ambition and greed take them in the wrong direction.
Roughly six decades before Elon Musk joined the executive team at
Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA), another brash and self-confident innovator sought to shake up the automotive industry with bold new ideas.
But unlike everyone’s favorite dogecoin-touting entrepreneur, Preston Tucker never managed to complement his engineering genius with financial prowess. As a result, Tucker’s efforts were detoured due to quirky financial strategies resulting in a federal trial that destroyed his reputation and set the cause of independent automobile manufacturing back by nearly 60 years.