Russell Wasendorf
American fraudster and financier
Russell Ralph Wasendorf Sr. (born 1948) is the former chairman and chief executive officer of Peregrine Financial Group, also known as PFGBEST, a futures commission merchant (commonly known as a commodity broker) that filed for bankruptcy protection in Chicago in July 2012.
He was arrested in July 2012 following a suicide attempt. In September 2012 he pleaded guilty to embezzling $215.5 million from more than 13,000 customers over the course of 20 years, among other charges. On January 31, 2013, he received a 50-year sentence for fraud.
Early life
Russell Ralph Wasendorf was born in 1948 to Arthur and Ida Wasendorf.
Arthur Wasendorf was born April 18, 1903 in Elma, Iowa. He married Ida Wheeler in 1931. Arthur worked as a meat packer. Russell Ralph was named after a pastor and son who had offered the Wasendorf's a place to stay when money was tight.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Russell Wasendorf” is american fraudster and financier. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Russell, Wasendorf and American, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7381857. VIAF identifies the subject as 21104743. The Library of Congress control number is n85045113. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1948, 2012, 2013 and 1903.
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This entry incorporates text from “Russell Wasendorf” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.