In this week’s episode of The Dark Side of Finance, Darryl Lyons dives into the murky world of independent film investments and the devastating consequences of financial misconduct within the industry. Centered on the story of Helen Grace Caldwell, a former Citigroup advisor turned horror film producer, this episode unravels how Caldwell exploited her position to manipulate elderly clients into funding low-budget, niche movies.
Darryl explores how Caldwell’s unchecked access to client accounts enabled her to misappropriate millions of dollars. Through vivid storytelling and expert insights, Darryl uncovers the systemic gaps that allowed Caldwell to operate for nearly a decade before her eventual downfall.
Key show highlights include:
- The intersection of banking and investment advisory roles – and the systemic risks they can create.
- How Caldwell misused client trust to fund bizarre and graphic horror films.
- The critical warning signs of financial exploitation, particularly among vulnerable seniors.
- Lessons on safeguarding your loved ones from manipulative advisors.
Join Darryl as he paints a vivid picture of how an advisor’s outside business activities can lead to financial devastation. With actionable tips to protect yourself and your family, this episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking to stay vigilant in today’s financial landscape. As always, keep your head on a swivel as we explore The Dark Side of Finance.
Transcript:
Hey, this is Darryl Lyons, Co-Founder of PAX Financial Group, and you’re listening to The Dark Side of Finance. This information is general in nature only. It’s not intended to provide specific investment, tax, or legal advice. Visit PAXFinancialGroup.com for more information. So, let’s talk about investing in movies like cinema. We have at PAX Financial Group, and I’ve had clients over the years.
Some of you guys may or may not know. I provide leadership to PAX Financial Group. I used to do a lot of investment advisory work, so a lot of clients over the years had some wonderful relationships and wonderful experiences. Now I’m more in a strategy role and leadership role of the organization, but I reflect oftentimes on those relationships and some of the relationships I had with clients involved investing in movies.
So, clients typically would come to me, and it wasn’t really even a request about investing in a movie. They were going to invest it, and they just wanted me to make sure that I knew. Now, my community is a lot of Christians, and so many of the productions that I saw investments in were Christian movies, generally low budget, generally family members, and generally the clients had no expectation of a return on investment.
So, as long as those expectations were met and, and everyone was on the same page and it wouldn’t have a material impact on somebody’s life if the movie didn’t work out, there was no issue at all. Oftentimes I found it interesting, and I was rooting for the company to have a successful production because many times they were just good people, with a passion.
And they were artists. So, it was a really fun experience to just see these investments in movies and some of them materialize. So that was I enjoyed that part of the journey. Walking with clients. Investing in movies is very hit or miss. And, let me give you an example of a movie. That’s an interesting one.
It’s called Hunter. And it is not a blockbuster movie. This is one of those artists’ love of film. And the script writer was Jason Kellerman. Now the script is this. It’s a former martial artist, an MMA fighter. Used to cage fight and very aggressive. He is going to, in this dark movie, is going to battle the undead.
So, zombies, right. Or, you know, the undead to avenge his murdered family. It’s called the Hunter. Or Hunter, not the hunter. Hunter. You can see the trailer online. Lots of blood, lots of knives. In fact, there’s hands full of blood. Slashers. Again, dark, dark cinematography in the streets of Chicago. And not to be too grotesque, but just to give you an idea.
Like a guy is licking blood on his hands like a kid licking chocolate cake off his fingers. So pretty dark movie, as you would imagine. And so, Jason, to produce a movie like this, you know, you just got to bootstrap this thing. So, he would get equipment from the local universities and the equipment you can’t use, during the week because students need it.
So, you can only use it on the weekends. So, you got to be very efficient with your time. And then in terms of casting it, you’re, I mean, you’re getting you’re trying to get volunteers, students, young artists. You’re the screenwriter, you’re the producer, you’re also the actor. And of course, fundraising. This whole thing is the biggest challenge.
And they were working on a $15,000 budget. So, Jason was like, in bars and trying to convince people to invest. There’s Kickstarter campaigns. There’s this thing called Indiegogo to raise money online fundraising. And so Jason, of course, is going to need a job while he’s doing this. So, he’s doing personal training work.
And one of his clients said, hey, I know someone in Chicago who’s helping fund independent films. And so, you know, he’s desperate. He’s working 12-hour days, like two hours of sleep. I mean, he’s going to need to do editing. That takes about a year. Post-production stuff can actually take a couple of years, and then you finally try to distribute it.
That takes money. Like, how do you get in film festivals? How do you get on iTunes? Like all of that stuff takes money. So he finally hooks up with this lady named Helen Grace Caldwell. And so, Helen was a, a wealth advisor and vice president in the Michigan Avenue office of Citigroup or often, often called Citibank or many times called Citi, one of the largest investment banks, banks in general in the world.
She’s 58 now. She might be a little younger at the time. But if you haven’t, I mean, I don’t know if you’ve been in Chicago in a while. I used to go a little bit more often than I have lately. This Michigan Avenue is really beautiful. And a lot of ways. I mean, it’s clean Chicago.
It’s the home of the Chicago Water tower, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Millennium Park. There’s this shopping strip called the Magnificent Mile. A lot of tourists go there. And so, it’s very beautiful, as you would imagine. And, you know, just one of the, if you want to go to Chicago, we here are often times about the violence in Chicago.
This would be a place where it just be one of those touristy places where you’re going to find great food and, a lot of activity. Just an interesting place. And, for those that haven’t been to Chicago in a long time, whenever you, when it’s real windy and real cold that you turn a corner and there’s no wind, and then all of a sudden you turn another corner and there’s, like, wind coming at you with needles, but beautiful area and it worth visiting.
Like I said, Citibank is huge. They do investments and banking and a lot of stuff. Now, keep in mind, I think it’s important just to know that investments in banking used to not be married to each other. The problem with having an investment firm and a banking firm is that if your investments fail, then your bank could fail.
And whenever banks fail, it causes a lot of other problems. For small businesses around the country. We saw a little bit of that with Silicon Valley Bank recently. And so, prior to 1933, the investments and the banking firms did business at under one entity. And then in 1933, obviously, the depression happened, and they created something called a Glass-Steagall act that said, if you’re if you’re in the finance business, you can’t have both banking and investments because it creates too much risk for the whole system.
In 1999, that was revisited and so the Glass-Steagall act, was repealed and allowed a lot of these banks to get back into the investment business. Of course, they have to follow specific rules and regulations. Now, the risk that is mostly concern, the concern of regulatory authorities is, again, too much risk being taken by the investment side of the House that would cause the whole bank to collapse.
But another risk that is introduced here in this story is when an investment advisor at a bank, can look I guess, and open a computer and look at the banking accounts of clients. And the reason that’s important is because if you’re an investment advisor like Helen Grace Caldwell, you have to notify the bank that you have an outside business activity.
All of us do I have it. Even if even if I’m on a board of a school, I have to notify the regulatory bodies that I have an outside business activity. So, Helen did that. So, she notified her regulatory body from the investment side that she had an outside business activity with film production. But the banking side, that she had access to, generally speaking, and knew about, had no idea she had this different side hustle.
And so therein lies, not a huge systemic risk, but a risk where investment people within an institution can access the banking clients information. So, what she did is she, for lack of a better word, hustled and manipulated her investment banking clients who had bank accounts at Citi. That really didn’t have any idea that she was in this production business.
And she convinced these clients to use their CDs and money markets and save money to invest in movies, and weird movies like knife slashing, vampire movies, electroshock, psychiatric patients. She had this film company called Candle Production, and she was the producer. She actually won best horror feature at some freak show horror film festival. I mean, some of the some of the titles were, Death is Beautiful and Love Em Dead.
She incorporated it in January 2014. 14 projects and films all together getting little old ladies to invest in horror films. Unbelievable. And none of the supervisors on her investment side. That’s the compliance office saw that on the banking side, these little old ladies were writing checks to Candle Productions.
Finally, in February of 2018, a Citi fraud analyst. I’m not 100% sure if he worked on the investment side or the banking side, maybe he worked for both. Asked about a $75,000 check that one of the Citibank clients and customers wrote to Caldwell’s film production companies. And that’s when it started to unwind. Now, it took a while, of course, investigations, denials.
And she wasn’t actually terminated until 2021. Now she actually if you look in there’s and I’ll put a link in the show notes. There’s this website called Brokercheck where you can see if somebody has a track record of kind of fibbing along the way, lying, fibbing. And she did in 1999 when she was 26, that was her first complaint.
And then in 2008, she settled another complaint for 300,000. Then, of course, 2018, it all started to unwind. She actually worked for Citi. She was hired in 2012. She was terminated in around 2021. So, 2018 she got caught. Lots of investigations. I’m sure it took a lot of time. What was interesting is that Citi in March, Citibank in March of 2022.
They reported Caldwell’s activity to the state Department of Illinois. It’s the State Department on aging adult Protective Services known as APS. After years of several complaints of various family members, they actually, Citi reported it to APS for months after Caldwell was already terminated. Now, Caldwell was not terminated from any industry. She went over to Wells Fargo, so she was still in the industry and Citi.
Credit to them. I’m not sure exactly. I mean, they had to report it somewhere, and I would imagine this is probably the best place, but for some reason, this department didn’t take any action. Why? Because it didn’t fall into the right category. The victim was not a family member of Caldwell. Not a roommate, not a caregiver.
And so, APS every state has adult protection services. And it’s really important to know, what they do is they just they take care of older adults, adults with disabilities, caregivers, they want to make sure that they provide the investigation services for abuse, neglect, exploitation. It’s very, very important for me, typically those adults with who are 60 or older or those between 18 and 59 with disabilities.
And so, there’s caseworkers that are trained to be able to understand how to navigate through these con artists. And it’s disgusting. The more you look into elder abuse, how prevalent it is. But this is an important agency. But it fell on deaf ears because it didn’t follow that construct, that Caldwell was actually a family member or a roommate.
So finally, I guess it just landed on the desk of somebody named Joyce Austin. Now Joyce Austin, she was a veteran in the business, so she obviously smelled something wrong. And the victim, her name was she was 77 years old. Her name was Priscilla Eddings. And there were multiple victims. I’ll talk a little bit more about the others, but Eddings is one that I think the profile makes sense.
In terms of, you know, how these con artists, slash financial advisors look for their victims, and Eddings fits that profile very likely. A sweet old lady who really wasn’t a sophisticated investment person and had money. And according to court records, Eddings wrote 13 checks to these movies, totaling $400,500 between 2018 and 2020.
And so, this investigator, Joyce, went to actually visit Eddings in her three story home in Marquette Park, which in and of itself is historical because this is an area that there were protests in 1966, and Martin Luther King was a part of these protests during the Chicago Freedom Movement. Martin Luther King Jr led a group of protesters into this housing area.
Typically, you know, I think it was an all-white housing area near Marquette Park in Chicago. And there’s 4000 people that gathered and watched, and they threw stuff like bottles and bricks and rocks at all these protesters. And one at one Rock actually hit, King right above the head, or excuse me, right above the right ear in his head.
And he was not severely hurt, but it was a very historical area. And Eddings being 77, I am sure she has stories about that. So thankfully Austin smelled something funny, and she ran with the investigation. She said, I will tell you this, this is her quote. I will tell you this. It’s really personal for me as a black woman.
I saw myself and it makes you a little angry where you have to do something because it’s such an injustice. So, she’s pursuing this. And a lawsuit was filed by the office of the Cook County Public Guardian. Caldwell denied any wrongdoing. Now, this lawsuit not only included Caldwell, but also Citi for failing to provide proper oversight, which I could see that, Citi is going to deny this until they’re blue in the face and they have a lot of money and a lot of attorneys, and I don’t know exactly what case they’re being made.
A Citi attorney said, my clients, which is namely the bank, don’t believe they have any claims against me, or against the client. So, they’re denying any wrongdoing. I’m sure they have some legal framework to make that claim, but, that information, I think as far as I know at the time of this production in November 2024 is still pending.
And in the Cook County judge Jesse Outlaw told Citi it has to turn over reports to under to and specific reports of timelines and communications and investigation to identify if in fact, there had not, if there had in fact been any neglect. And I think there’s some there’s going to be you know, obviously it’s a very it’s a big institution and a, you know, a widow or a client, a victim that’s, you know, really not a sophisticated investor.
And so, it’s going to be a tough battle for Citi to claim no wrongdoing. I mean, some of these victims hadn’t written checks on their accounts for two years. And then they met Caldwell, and they started writing checks, and they wrote so many checks, they actually overdrew their account in one situation. Caldwell actually was given, a responsible party authorization to pay monthly bills for someone who is in, senior living in North Lake Shore Drive.
So why didn’t Citi know about this authorization? And should they have and was their failure to supervise. But Caldwell was obviously very slippery. And the fact that there’s two parts of the bank allowed her to navigate that way. Another person, another victim gave Caldwell $18,000 for a 16% stake in a company, which is kind of peculiar.
The son of the victim found this peculiar. And so, he went and sat down with Caldwell. And really, it rubbed him wrong. And he said that using this manipulation really bothers me. She was taking Caldwell. She was taking advantage of my mom’s personality. And this son was actually a banking executive. So, he said, I want to see the term sheets because whenever you do it like a private investment deal, you need a term sheet.
So, what am I getting? How much equity am I getting? What’s my expected dividend or time horizon for return on investment? But there was no term sheet at all. And so, at that point, the son knew something was wrong. And he continues to pursue restitution. So here we are. Still pending litigation, still pending case. We’ll see how this shakes out.
Caldwell was with Citi for nine years from 2012 to 2021. And then she darted over to Wells Fargo, and then she was barred from being in the industry ever again. There’s pending criminal charges, wire fraud. It’s in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois. And I believe also the eastern District. You know, you have to double check me on that if that’s important to you.
Three clients that are currently identified, there could be more. One for 800,000, one for $355,000 and one for $325,500. The case that’s being made is that the defendant knew that she was making representations that were false. And she intended to misappropriate and did misappropriate those proceeds for personal purposes. And she knew that the victims were unlikely to receive any return on their investments.
Caldwell also failed to comply with an arbitration. She’s not responding to requests to provide information concerning the status of this issue. It’s very sad that our elders are taking advantage of, and it happens all the time. And even though she is no longer a financial advisor in the industry, she’s still probably getting royalties from her businesses. And she’s probably out there still trying to hustle money from people. She’s probably getting royalties from this one movie called Give Till It Hurts. It’s a dark comedy in the 80s about two brothers seeking a return on their investment from their deceased mother, who donated the wealth to a televangelist.
The irony a televangelist manipulating someone to steal their wealth. Or she’s probably getting royalties from this one movie, one flick. I don’t know if you call it movies or flicks or short films from a, it’s an immortal vampire suffering at the hands of its own creator seeks to fill an empty void of his soul within the arms, and an unlikely woman.
The irony of a vampire sucking blood like a financial advisor sucking money from their victims. So be careful, my friends. They’re out there. They’re hard to find. They’re hard to identify. They’re very, very, smooth talkers. And I hope this gives you awareness that our seniors are targets. So, keep your head on a swivel. Not only for your friends and your family, but those that are older, like elders.
Keep your head on a swivel, double check. And hopefully your family never falls victim to a financial advisor misappropriating funds to a horror flick. Have a great day.
Resources:
Inside an indie: Making a film from scratch without a Hollywood budget – CNET
Citi VP accused of exploiting older clients | Injustice Watch
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