The American Dream, a Ponzi Scheme, and the Lies That Led to Forty Years in Federal Prison
Complete manuscript · Seeking representation
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.
A fraud is not an aberration. It is a thing that happens next door, and it happens because it must.
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. Professionally edited by Duncan Murrell, formerly of Algonquin Books.
Neal McTighe holds a BA from Dickinson, an MA from Middlebury, and a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is co-host of The Ponzi Playbook podcast with Javier Leiva, and since 2020 has held director roles at the N.C. SBTDC, an SBA-funded business advisory organization, advising hundreds of clients on every aspect of business.
In 2010 he founded Nello's, a premium pasta sauce brand that grew to more than 1,500 retailers. Then things got dark. In 2016 he discovered that an investor in his own business had been concealing serious financial frauds spanning two decades. He could not let go of the question of how he had come so close to it. That question became this book.
A former assistant managing editor at Duke University Press and one-time poet laureate of Carrboro, North Carolina, he lives in Raleigh with his wife and son.
Big Time is complete at approximately 92,000 words and seeking representation. A full proposal, sample chapters, and the manuscript are available on request.
Neal is also available to discuss the platform behind the book: The Ponzi Playbook has published twenty-five 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.
Email Neal McTighe
neal@ponziplaybook.com
It is a narrative nonfiction account of Stephen Condon Peters, a Marine Corps veteran who became an investment adviser and defrauded clients of more than $15 million through his Raleigh firm, VisionQuest. He was sentenced to forty years in federal prison. The book traces how he was made, not just what he did.
Neal McTighe, co-host and lead researcher of The Ponzi Playbook podcast. He holds a PhD from UNC Chapel Hill, founded and ran a food brand for a decade, and began the book after discovering that an investor in his own business had concealed two decades of financial fraud.
Not yet. The manuscript is complete at approximately 92,000 words and the book is seeking representation. Agents and publishers can request the full proposal and manuscript at neal@ponziplaybook.com.
Yes. The Ponzi Playbook's standalone Vision Quest episode is drawn directly from the book's research. It's in the episode archive.
It sits alongside Bad Blood, The Devil at His Elbow, and Patrick Radden Keefe's Rogues — narrative financial true crime — but works at closer range. Where most of those books take readers into inaccessible worlds of wealth and power, Big Time stays at street level, where fraud actually happens.
From five years of primary research: court filings, trial transcripts, investor communications, more than fifty interviews, and non-public material including undercover FBI audio recordings. All dialogue is drawn from the record; where no written record exists, it has been reconstructed from available evidence.
