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Reviewed by Elliot V. Kotek
(June 2011, screening at the 2011 Los Angeles Film Festival)

Directed by: Marc H. Simon
Featuring: Mark S. Dreier, Gerald L. Shargel and Ross M. Kramer

While the media were busy dissecting the biggest Ponzi scheme in U.S. corporate history courtesy of Bernie Madoff, others around the country were also flouting (and allegedly flouting) the system and breaching (and allegedly breaching) their duties to their clients.

“Unraveled” reveals the lesser-known case against Mark Dreier, an attorney and “philanthropist” charged with wire fraud, money laundering and other charges. In what amounts to a fascinating study of greed and motivation told from within an intimate series of exchanges, director Marc Simon allows Dreier to share his account of the events that transpired.

Slick graphic-novel style animations introduce us to Dreier as a man in a position to deal in hundreds of millions of dollars, a man confident in his ability to deliver what would otherwise be life-changing sums of money from one hand to another and back again, and to question what we would do if we sat in a place that wielded and yielded that level of power and responsibility.

Accusing Dreier of masterminding a fraud involving hundreds of million of dollars by selling fake securities, prosecutors requested a sentence of 145 years in prison. Following his guilty plea, Simon filmed Dreier during the 60-day house-arrest period in which he awaited sentencing, offering indelible insight into the life and mind of this once-wealthy and seemingly successful individual.

Listening to Dreier’s admissions as he sits in an incredible loft apartment overlooking the city and seeing footage of his celebrating excess in a life alongside professional footballers while building a law firm with his name only on the door, the viewer is brought along on Dreier’s illicit, illegally fueled ride that ended in disaster.

Despite the inherent isolation of his house arrest, any empathy is decimated by the insight that his former employees might be without jobs still, that his son is still living large and able to rent a summer house in the Hamptons, and that his concerns extend to what he can and cannot eat in prison, whether his potential fellow inmates snore and to showing off his competence at “Jeopardy.”

While Dreier tries to explain the need he felt to perpetrate his actions, he also seems to suggest that he has done this thing to himself and, by omission, not to others — remorse for his actions doesn’t appear to be on the criminal’s agenda.

Madoff’s sentence of 150 years in prison is delivered during Dreier’s waiting game, and we are confronted with a sense of whether this individual is or was ever as bad. One thing we know for sure is that it won’t be Dreier’s name with which “Ponzi” will be forever associated.

That Simon provides a singular focus on the story without integrating interviews with any of the victims, case lawyers, employees or charities with whom Dreier had dealt, and without any input from Dreier’s family other than a son who feigns a lack of knowledge of the details of his father’s wrongdoings, the documentary must be considered one-dimensional. Still, the footage captured enables the viewer to listen to Dreier’s reasoning, to see him in a light other than side-by-side with the statistics for which he’s known, and to exact judgment and apportion opinion, all of which creates a compelling viewing experience.

Photo courtesy of Los Angeles Film Festival