The American Dream, a Ponzi Scheme, and the Lies That Led to Forty Years in Federal Prison
Complete manuscript · Sneak peek
On the morning of July 12, 2017, thirty federal agents moved on a seventy-acre horse farm outside Raleigh, North Carolina.
Whispering Hope Stables looked like a postcard. Rolling pasture, longleaf pines, a stone barn restored with polished brass, a private bar hidden above the rafters, a zip line strung between the trees. It was the last visible asset of a Ponzi scheme.
Stephen Condon Peters was a Marine Corps veteran from working-class Pennsylvania who named his wealth management firm after his favorite movie. Through VisionQuest, he sold clients something more intimate than investment advice. He called himself their Personal CFO, and he meant it: entry into their marriages, their inheritances, their anxieties, their faith. He sold promissory notes at a guaranteed eight to nine percent. He invented an MBA from MIT. He took more than $15 million.
He was sentenced to forty years, among the longest white-collar sentences on record, and one of the highest years-per-million ratios in a federal prosecution in two decades. The judge told him plainly that greed had consumed him, then recommended he serve his time at Butner, the North Carolina prison where Bernie Madoff was serving his.
BIG TIME is not another story about an exceptional criminal. It is about proximity. The neighborhood adviser is not fundamentally different from Madoff, only operating at a different scale with different access. The mechanics are the same, the motivations overlap, and the harm lands just as hard. Drawing on five years of research, more than fifty interviews, undercover FBI recordings, and conversations with Peters himself, Neal McTighe follows a familiar American striver from a hospital room on the day of his birth to a federal courtroom, and asks what it says about us that we keep mistaking men like him for success.
While investigating economic crime for the FBI, I was always curious about what my subjects said to themselves to make it okay to steal other people's money. Because of the author's meticulous review of FBI reports, transcripts, and court documents, Big Time provides readers with a unique perspective into what Stephen Peters was thinking as he operated his Ponzi scheme. This well-researched and well-written true crime tale is a fascinating look into the mind of a greed-driven man, highlighting his willingness to cheat and lie to project the illusion of wealth and success.
Jerri Williams, retired FBI special agent, author, and host of FBI Retired Case File Review
This is narrative nonfiction bound to primary sources. Every line of dialogue is drawn from the record; where no written record exists, it has been carefully reconstructed from available evidence. If it made it onto the page, it happened.
Complete manuscript, approximately 92,000 words.
Neal McTighe, PhD, co-hosts The Ponzi Playbook podcast with Javier Leiva. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife and son.
Big Time is a complete manuscript at approximately 92,000 words. This page is an early look, not a finished listing, and Neal welcomes inquiries from agents, editors, authors, and journalists who want to know more.
Neal is also available to discuss the platform behind the book: The Ponzi Playbook has published twenty-three episodes since 2023 and reaches an audience across the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia through co-host Javier Leiva's Pretend, which draws over 500,000 downloads a month.
