He was a successful CEO of his own futures brokerage firm and a respected member of his community, creating jobs and supporting local charities.

Or so it seemed. For years, Russell Wasendorf, Sr.—as Acting U.S. Attorney Sean R. Berry of the Northern District of Iowa recently put it—was really a “con man who built a business on smoke and mirrors.”

It all fell apart in July 2012, when Wasendorf—after an unsuccessful suicide attempt—admitted stealing millions from more than 13,000 investors who had entrusted their hard-earned money to him and his company, the now-bankrupt Peregrine Financial Group (PFG), based in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Last month,Wasendorf was sentenced by a federal judge to 50 years in prison—the maximum term allowed by law—and ordered to pay restitution to his victims.

How it started. In the early 1990s, Wasendorf’s Peregrine partner pulled his money out of the operation, and Wasendorf didn’t have the funds to keep the company going. So he helped himself to at least $250,000 of Peregrine’s customer funds in accounts at an outside bank. To conceal the theft, he used a copy machine to fabricate a phony bank statement.

For the next 20 or so years, Wasendorf continued to steal from customer funds while his company incurred tens of millions of dollars in losses. He carried out this scheme through a series of complex actions designed to conceal his activities and the deteriorating state of the company. For instance: