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The childhood prodigy and Wall Street wunderkind, Mark Yagalla, who allegedly struggled with s*x addiction became the center of legal issues concerning his hedge fund scam and the unsolved double murder of Michael Tardio and Chris Monson in 2002.
Yagalla had been going out with Hugh Hefner's girlfriend and Playmate, Sandy Bentley, on whom he spent millions of dollars of his client money. As Mark Yagalla faced charges of criminal securities fraud and was approximately $50 million in debt, Bentley left him for Tardio and tried to sell off $1 million worth of jewelry gifted to her by Yagalla.
The Playboy Murders episode Double Trouble aired on Investigation Discovery on January 22, 2024, at 10 p.m. EST and showcased the unsolved murder of Sandy Bentley's boyfriend Michael Tardio. The synopsis reads,
"In the late '90s, Playboy twins Sandy and Mandy Bentley's fame soars until an affair with a Vegas High Roller leads to a fall from fame, stolen jewels, a shadowy buyer and a brutal double murder in the Hollywood hills."
Who is Mark Yagalla? Details explored
Mark Yagalla was born in 1977 and he grew up in Weatherly, Pennsylvania on his father's Dolinsky conifer farm. He was interested in the stock market from a young age. At the age of 13, Mark Yagalla started to spend time in the library flipping through the pages of the Wall Street Journal, ordering annual reports of financial firms, reading S&P reports and delving deeper into the stock market.
Yagalla spoke to CBS News saying that he made $100,000 trading stocks in high school. He further states,
"I had developed sort of this fairy tale from movies that if you get money, you become successful, you get the girl. And that was my drive. I wanted to be Gordon Gecko."
His cousin funded his passion with $5,000 when he was 16 and he started trading in the futures of S&P and tech stocks. Within a few more years, Yagalla had made his first $1 million by 19 and eventually dropped out of Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Wall Street Rise and Hedge Fund Ventures
Yagalla went on to work at Wall Street and raised $50 million for his hedge funds firm Ashbury Capital Partners LP and Apex Investments. By the age of 22, he was making $10 million per year but soon his dream came crashing as he spun into s*x addiction.
Yagalla's lawyer, Brian Bieber, confesses to CBS News,
"It was a compulsion! Mark Yagalla's conduct makes what Tiger Woods did now look like a junior high school student going through puberty."
Mark Yagalla had started spending "anywhere between $5,000 a night to $50,000 a night" to hire women for s*x and he bought them expensive furs, jewelry, and cars costing millions of dollars in total. He was Wall Street's 'Teflon kid' with hordes of women around him at the Crazy Horse Too in Las Vegas.
The Affair with Sandy Bentley
However, his fate turned after he met Hugh Hefner's girlfriend, Sandy Bentley, and the two started seeing each other for 13 months. Yagalla showered her with gifts that were not only rare but on average cost him over half a million. The money he used was his client money which was supposed to be invested in stocks. Mark Yagalla acknowledged that he was running "one big Ponzi scheme" scamming his clients.
Mark Yagalla had gifted Sandy Bentley a replica of the ruby and diamond necklace from her favorite movie, Pretty Woman. This was in addition to two Rolexes, diamond rings, and a $3 million house on the Spanish Trail, Las Vegas among other gifts. He took Bentley on private jets for overseas holidays along with models and Playmates Brande Roderick and Tishara Lee Cousino, per Daily Mail. The same report listed gifts to Bentley which included "a red Ferrari Spyder, a Range Rover, a Cadillac, designer clothes, fur coats including a mink and a chinchilla, and platinum and diamond bracelets and necklaces."
Mark Yagalla's arrest came on October 2000, for embezzling his clients which is also the time Sandy Bentley left him for Michael Tardio. The endeavor to sell jewelry gifted by Yaled to the execution-style killing of Bentley's new boyfriend Michael Tardio and his friend, Chris Monson, on September 2, 2002.
