Blood brothers

For a banker looking to score, Hong Kong was the place to be in 1997.  Southeast Asia’s currencies were in freefall and cash-strapped industries were eager to sell off assets for nickels on the dollar. 

Rob Kissel’s bosses at Goldman Sachs, the investment banker, wanted him there to pick up the fallen fruit. 

Roz Lichter, Kissels' New York neighbor: Rob was just excited. This was an opportunity.  So it was like he was just excited to be getting the offer.

Rob, Nancy and their two children, a three-year-old and an infant, packed up their stuff, said goodbye to friends and family. The ardent New Yorkers were about to become American ex-patriates and wealthy ones at that.

It was goodbye New York, hello Hong Kong. Their new home was a sprawling $20,000 a-month apartment in the luxurious Parkview towers.  The two of them fit right into the ex-pat lifestyle here where the banker husbands like Rob earned millions of dollars a year, but worked 16 hours-a-day.  And the banker wives, like Nancy, filled their hours with children and charity work.  The Kissels had begun their great life adventure.

There was so much Hong Kong to explore, a clamorous city of 6.9 million people with business on its mind. But it was also Asia, culturally alien for some Westerners.

After a long day, the Kissels could retreat to the Parkview towers which was like America under glass.

Joss Gistren, fellow Hong Kong ex-pat: It really is like Disney world. It’s kept green areas, pools, waterfalls—restaurants, tennis, driving range.

Dennis Murphy, Dateline correspondent: So it has all the resort amenities?

Gistren: It does. The tragedy is you can actually live at Parkview and not have to leave...

American Joss Gistren has lived at the Parkview for years.  She never met the Kissels there... but understands the initial giddiness they would have felt in this shiny new world of limos—world-class shopping and endless pampering.  She also knows the darker side of the adventure.

Gistren: What you find is that the husbands are never at home, even the ones that don’t travel. They leave early in the morning and come home very late at night.

Murphy: So, the woman is isolated in many cases?

Gistren: Yes. The woman and the children are isolated.

But friends say Nancy Kissel seemed to make the best of it. 

Hillary Richard, Nancy Kissel's close friend: She played tennis. She started a business. She had friends. She enjoyed it.

Close friend Hillary Richard vacationed with Nancy and Rob during those years.  If the move half-way around the world had put stress on the Kissel marriage, she says, Nancy didn’t let on—quite the opposite.

Richard: She would speak on at great length about how wonderful and passionate her relationship with Rob remained. I mean I...

Murphy: She talked about life in bed sometimes, right?

Richard: She did absolutely.

Murphy: And things were okay?

Richard: Things were great according to her.

Murphy: She and Rob were a hot ticket, huh?

Richard: That’s the way she portrayed it, yeah.

But every now and then, the veneer would slip, just a bit.  Former neighbor Roz Lichter saw the Kissels on a home leave visit in 2000-- little more than two years into their time in Hong Kong and sensed something had changed.

Lichter:  I couldn’t connect to Rob — he was working really hard, that he was tired. That would be the best thing.  I didn’t get a sense of joy when I saw him.

No wonder she saw fatigue.  That two to three year Hong Kong stint was turning into a multi-year slog of meetings, deals and travel. Along the way, in 2000, Merrill Lynch wooed Rob away from Goldman Sachs, making him its top man in Southeast Asia.  Rob, the golden son, was doing the Kissel family proud.

And he wasn’t the only one. Brother Andrew was on a roll with his investment firm, buying and managing commercial properties around New York.

Andrew, now married to wife Hayley, a former ski champion and stock analyst, had bought a co-op apartment on New York’s Upper East side and made it the showplace of the building.

Peter Chamberlain, Andrew Kissel's fellow apartment owner: I just knew him to be somebody who was involved in real estate transactions.

Fellow apartment owner Peter Chamberlain says neighbors were so taken by young Mr. Kissel with the golden touch that they tapped him to be their building’s treasurer.  He could break into their mutual piggy bank—with no questions asked.

Murphy: Is that unusual?

Chamberlain: Yes, that is highly improper.

As a fellow boardmember, though, Chamberlain could eyeball some of the books.  And a little quick math told him the numbers there weren’t adding up.  He says he confronted the other board members and Andrew Kissel, a face off he lost.

Murphy: What did you think? At the end of that little bit of accounting, what did you think was going on?

Chamberlain:To be honest with you, frankly, I couldn’t imagine that someone in our building would steal from us.

But someone was stealing—with both hands. Eventually, the rest of the board caught on and demanded answers from their treasurer.   But if Kissel was a financial whiz, it seems he was also a master of the con.

Murphy: How much did he sting the building for?

Chamberlain: The number that gets floated around on paper is $4.7 million.

You might think that explosive discovery would land treasurer Kissel in a New York City jail.  But that didn’t happen.  Somehow, from somewhere, he came up with the cash and paid back those missing millions. In return, he was allowed to leave unpunished.

Chamberlain: There are stories that people witnessed him on the cameras sliding out of the service elevator down to the basement and running down 71^st street and 2^nd avenue when the whole building became aware of the problems.

Murphy: Skulking away, huh?

Chamberlain: Yeah.

And where does a disgraced millionaire skulk off to?  Why Greenwich... Connecticut of course? It was home to big money. 

But instead of contemplating his misdeeds, in 2003, Andrew Kissel was dreaming up more schemes and playing more dirty monopoly with other people’s money.  He wasn’t the only Kissel in crisis mode, either.  Half way around the world in Hong Kong, his younger brother was worrying about a killer pandemic and his family’s safety.  Sadly, it seems Rob Kissel was sweating over the wrong assassin.

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