A great article by James Sterngold is up at Bloomberg.com. The article, available here, entitled Wall Street Scion Lost in China Agritech as Shorts Cry ‘Scam’ discusses Jesse Glickenhaus, son of noted film-maker, and Ferrari fanatic, James Glickenhaus.

Jesse, as some might remember, is the author of a Ping Luo-like defense of China Agritech (CAGC) available here. In the Bloomberg article, it is revealed that Jesse invested over $4mm of presumably client money in CAGC, before he had visited the company. It seems that Glickenhouse made its disastrous investment in CAGC before Jesse bothered to type “Gene Michael Bennett”  or “Gareth Yau Sing Tang” into any search engines, too. And he most certainly did not check out the British Journal of Criminology, Vol 50, Issue 5, pp 851-872 (see here). If he had, he would have learned all about Gareth‘s ties to Chinese organized crime.

Glickenhaus said he didn’t check how China Agritech obtained its U.S. listing and focused instead on the fundamentals of the company, its new drought-resistant products and the role of Carlyle, the Washington-based private-equity firm that bought a stake in 2009. His confidence in China Agritech remains unshaken, he said, even though it has fired two auditors in four months, is late in filing 2010 financial data and announced on April 18 that Nasdaq was planning to delist it.

Of course, Carlyle’s representative on the board, Anne Wang Zheng, has resigned, but Jesse is still confident! He may also be stupid, maybe quite stubborn, or perhaps he’s just lucky. Lucky to be born into a wealthy family, and luckier still that his daddy thinks this is a wonderful learning experience for young Jesse:

For James Glickenhaus, China Agritech is the start of a long tutorial for his son, “like sending him to business school,” he said. For Jesse Glickenhaus, who has since bought 300,000 shares in another agriculture company, CVR Partners LP, a Sugar Land, Texas-based maker of nitrogen fertilizers that had an IPO April 7, China Agritech has already paid off. “I went into this with an open mind,” Glickenhaus said. “I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I have.”

If your author was a client of Glickenhaus , I would be so glad to see that losing my funds in such a junk company, with virtually no due dilligence performed, is fun for Jesse. And I would be absolutely thrilled that my money would be financing his on-the-job “business school”.

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