March 23, 2025

Martin Sumichrast’s “Getting Sheared” Book Announcement

An investigative account of one of the most extensive and enduring Ponzi schemes in North Carolina history — co-authored with Don Yaeger and Jason Cole.

Getting Sheared is co-authored by Martin Sumichrast, 13-time bestselling author Don Yaeger, and award-winning investigative journalist Jason Cole. It is not simply a recounting of financial malfeasance. It is an examination of the lives affected, the mechanisms of the deceit, and what the whole thing says about trust and accountability in the financial sector.

The book is the product of hundreds of interviews with victims and the analysis of tens of thousands of pages of previously unrevealed evidence. It sets out to do three things:

What the book sets out to do

Establish who benefited

Who profited from the scheme, who looked away, and who actively participated in covering it up. The record is more detailed — and implicates more people — than the public accounting to date suggests.

Account for the human cost

Financial fraud is usually told in dollar figures. Getting Sheared tells it through the people it hit, giving a human face to what is otherwise a column of numbers.

Examine the system that allowed it

How does a scheme of this size run undetected for this long? What does that say about regulatory oversight, and what would actually have to change for the answer to be different next time?

The architect

The narrative follows the opulent life of the scheme’s architect, Rick Siskey — from private jets courtesy of casinos to a lucrative life insurance business conducted with one of the world’s largest insurers. The book documents the spending, and then examines the legal, ethical, and moral dimensions of how the scheme was run and how it finally came apart.

Over years of research, Martin Sumichrast, Don Yaeger, and Jason Cole assembled a picture that covers not only the mechanics of the fraud but the psychological and social conditions that let it flourish. Through the voices of the people it destroyed, the book makes a case for vigilance and for reform.

It closes with something practical: how individuals and institutions can better protect themselves, and what an honest conversation about accountability in finance would actually sound like.

The story is the reason the book exists. It is also the reason the two essays below were written.

Related essays

Two pieces on what came after the fraud — on being debanked without explanation, and on what it actually costs to have your day in court.