Jeffery P Beck Ching Tang 1964

Jeffery P Beck was born 1946 in Pittsburgh PA to Lou and Ida Beck.  His father made a good living as a wholesale paper salesman.  They moved to Coral Gables that same year. Jeff attended Coral Gables Sr. High, and pledged Ching Tang his sophomore year, in the fall of 1961. After the tenth grade, his parents packed him off to prep school in Pennsylvania. A few months after his first term, his father had a heart attack. By the time Jeff arrived home, his father was dead. Jeff’s relationship with his mother was rocky at best, so he had grown up idolizing his father. After Lou’s funeral, Jeff’s mother took him aside and told him that his father had done jail time in Pittsburgh. Jeff was devastated. A year after his fathers death, his mother remarried multimillionaire William D. Singer, the founder of the Royal Castle Hamburger Chain. Jeff was not happy that his mother had married so soon after his father’s death, and didn’t get along well with his stepfather.

Jeff’s mother wanted him to attend an Ivy League college, but Jeff instead enrolled in Florida State University, where he met and married his first wife Sylvia Pfotenhauer. This was the Vietnam War era, so Jeff enlisted in the National Guard to avoid the draft. It appears that his stepfather pulled some strings, because he enlisted in New York, but within days was transferred to a FL Guard Unit. After graduation from FSU, Jeff enrolled in Columbia Business School. It is about this time that Jeff started telling stories about serving in Vietnam, the Special Forces and the CIA. All of which was untrue. Sylva and Jeff finally separated.

After graduation from Columbia, Jeff went to work for a bank in NC where he met and married his second wife Rosemary Hicks. He then moved on to investment banking on Wall Street. In 1979 Oppenheimer & Company hired him to form a Merger and Acquisition department, which became known as the Jeff Beck Group. Jeff would engineer several of the largest leveraged buyouts in Wall Street history. Jeff and Rosemary divorced, and he married Margo Preston in 1983.

Jeff ran in some really influential social circles, and had become friends with actor Michael Douglas. Douglas introduced Jeff to director Oliver Stone. Stone was working on the Movie “Wall Street”, and hired Jeff as Technical Advisor for the film. He also was given a small part in the film.

On January 22^nd 1990, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about Jeff Beck, exposing his years of deception about Vietnam and his personal financial empire. Jeff ended his Wall Street career as an independent money manager. Jeff died of a heart attack, January 28, 1995 in New York City at the age of 49.

If you would like to read the whole story of Jeff Beck, look for a copy of the book “Rainmaker The Saga of Jeff Beck, Wall Street’s Mad Dog” by Anthony Bianco.