Skip to main content
CRAIG BERKMAN
AGE: 82
BEST KNOWN FOR: Selling fraudulent securities to some of Portland’s wealthiest people and using the money to buy nice suits and take Austrian ski vacations with former models.
Old habits die hard for Craig Berkman.
Reached at his home in Florida, the 82-year-old entrepreneur and Ponzi schemer pitched an idea for a “smart tank” that would let cars run on natural gas. Electric cars are unsafe because the batteries catch fire, he says.
He’s working on a car company called Graviton Motorworks to tap the technology and hopes to get Intel Corp. and Applied Materials involved.
“Maybe someday people will be proud to drive a GMW rather than a BMW,” Berkman says.
The pitch is classic Berkman.
After growing up poor in the Roseway neighborhood, Berkman went to Wheaton College in Illinois and then to the University of California, Berkeley. He hung around the Bay Area and helped friends raise money for a small chemical maker called Applied Materials that opened in 1967.
That company grew quickly because its chemicals were used to make computer chips. Applied Materials sold shares to the public in 1972 and later became the biggest maker of the high-dollar, almost magical machines that create semiconductors.
Berkman kept at the venture game, started medical device companies that made him a fortune. He donated thousands to Republican candidates, chaired Gerald Ford’s 1976 presidential campaign in Oregon, and ran for governor in 1994. He also lived large, buying bespoke suits on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles. He and one of his wives, a former Miss New York, skied in Kitzbühel, Austria.
All along, Berkman sold investors “convertible promissory notes” that promised a healthy yield at the very least and a huge windfall if one of his companies took off like Applied Materials had. Investors handed over cash for more than a decade, but none of Berkman’s companies succeeded, and he used much of the money to pay off previous investors and fund his lifestyle.
Years later, Berkman stayed high on the hog by raising $13.2 million from investors looking for shares of Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon and Zynga before the companies sold them in initial public offerings. Such pre-IPO shares become gold if companies succeed.
But Berkman never bought any shares. He used the money to settle old debts and pay personal expenses. He pleaded guilty to securities fraud in 2013 and went to prison for almost five years—at age 73.
Behind bars, a fellow inmate slipped him a Bible. He had been Christian all his life, but now the word of God left its mark. Since getting out of prison, Berkman has been hard at work on the Free at Last Coalition, a nonprofit that seeks to drop 14 words from the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, so that slavery is completely prohibited and not allowed as punishment for a crime.
“It’s not an academic discussion for me because for a period of my life I was incarcerated and was a slave myself,” Berkman says.
Amending the Constitution is tough. It takes a two-thirds majority vote in both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states. But Berkman says he’s undaunted. He hopes to raise $30 million this year to lobby for the change. “There are some large donors who have expressed interest,” he says.
Berkman visited Oregon last year. His two daughters here won’t speak to him because of his crimes, but the trip was “mixed,” he says. “Thankfully, there are some people who haven’t painted a permanent scarlet letter on me.”