A Reporter at Large – Trust Issues

A disgruntled wealth manager exposes her clients' tax secrets.

- By Evan Osnos

For the very rich, private wealth managers are in a separate class from other retainers, even from the trusted pilots, chefs, and attendants who maintain their lifestyles. Guarding the capital—the “corpus,” as it’s known in the business—puts you in contact with a family’s most closely held secrets. Managers handle delicate tasks; one professional in the Cayman Islands described the sensitivity of making a financial plan for an out-of-wedlock child that “has to be kept totally private from the wife.” Others specialize in keeping clients out of the news by minimizing public transactions. The most devoted liken themselves to clergy or consiglieri, and tend to get prime seats at the kids’ weddings and the patriarch’s deathbed.

Marlena Sonn entered the wealth management industry in 2010, and found a niche working with what she called “progressive, ultra-high-net-worth millennials, women, inheritors, and family offices.” She sought to create a refuge from jargon and bro culture. “Women and young people are talked down to,” she told me. “A level of respect for people is refreshing.”