By the fall of 2002, Sandy Bentley had parted ways with Hefner and was dating Tardio, friends said. According to Bub, she persuaded Tardio to quietly sell off a valuable trove of her jewelry. Tardio made an appointment to sell the jewelry to an unknown party, Bub said.
Monson, Tardio's friend and motorcycle-racing buddy, agreed to join him on the mission, though he had misgivings about the plan, Bub said.
Monson had good reason to be apprehensive. Bub said both men knew that a federally appointed court receiver had made a claim on most, if not all, of the jewelry because Sandy Bentley received it as gifts from another former boyfriend, a disgraced Wall Street trader named Mark Yagalla.
Bub said the jewelry that Yagalla had given Bentley had been purchased with money from the trader's headline-making hedge-fund scam.
In the heady days of the late 1990s, Yagalla had earned a reputation as an investment whiz kid. A dropout from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, he had begun trading securities as a teenager and eventually founded a number of trading companies on the East Coast. From 1994 to 2000, those companies collected $40 million from investors, promising returns of as much as 80% from short-term equity trades and other investments, according to court documents.
But federal prosecutors said that, from the beginning of his career, Yagalla invested little of the money entrusted to him. Instead, he spent it on his lavish lifestyle. Yagalla used a portion of investors' money to pay off what he said were distributions, and he covered his tracks with falsified statements.
In effect, prosecutors said, he was operating a giant Ponzi scheme.
He was also deeply smitten with Sandy Bentley, whom he met in Las Vegas in August 1999. They were introduced to each other by another Playboy model, Tishara Lee Cousino, that year's Miss May, federal court records show.
From the time they met until October 2000, Yagalla lavished more than $6 million worth of gifts on Sandy Bentley, court documents show. He gave her a $1.7-million home in Las Vegas, luxury cars and numerous pieces of fine jewelry, including three Rolex watches and a Chopard watch worth $500,000. One ruby and diamond platinum necklace he gave her was similar in style to a necklace featured in the film "Pretty Woman."
