Belmont's Own Mini-Madoff Now Hounded by Victims

In terms of how much was stolen, the amount Concord Avenue's Jack Cranney  allegedly bilked from his son, relatives, colleagues and just about everyone else is fairly small potatoes.

Compared to the $65 billion Bernie Madoff robbed, the $10.4 million Cranney is alleged to have taken from people he knew barely registers on the radar of Ponzi schemes hatched in the past 20 years.

Unless you were scammed by the 71-year-old life-long Belmont resident.

And the pressure from his arrest in the summer and a lawsuit filed in the fall to retrieve the money has resulted in the one-time Belmont big-wig to file last month for bankruptcy, with the real chance of the Belmont Hill grad to lose his house at 885 Concord, where he lives with his ill wife.

Despite being wealthy on his own by selling vitamins and nutritional supplements for California-based Shaklee Corp., Cranney set up a pyramid scam using millions in savings from people he knew, according to a report in the Boston Globe.

But rather than invest the money to help produce a financially secure retirement, Cranney allegedly kept the contributions. While he has refused to tell prosecutors what he did with the money, he recently filed for bankruptcy protection reporting to be $12 million in debt.

In that filing, he said he transferred money he was responsible for to accounts which paid for expenses and travel related to his business.