The Secrets He Kept

Tim Botos: JACKSON TWP. — If Timothy Welland Hyde is good at one thing, it's selling. With slick, tightly cropped black hair and round dark eyes, a voice for radio and a warm smile, he welcomed clients to his financial advising business in Jackson Township. For a variety of fees and commissions, he and employees arranged client investments in stocks and securities. By all appearances, Hyde Financial was a success. It was located in Suite 302 on the third floor of one of the area's premier office buildings, known as the Belden Village glass tower.

At work, Hyde is regarded as a financial genius and brilliant mathematician. He not only handled his own clients, but he also served as a guru to a handful of his other brokers, who together managed at least $63 million in client assets.

"He made money for me," said 66-year-old Joan Kinsley of Lake Township, a client and retiree from R.C.A. Rubber Co. "He was always bragging about having Internet access to trading information that only he and the Timken Co. had."

A married father of two, Hyde and his family lived in a half-million dollar home in Jackson's Carrington Estates. He drives a 2008 black Cadillac Escalade and wears Rolex watches, fancy suits and shoes on his 6-foot, 195-pound frame. Image, he told people, matters. Look successful and clients will invest with you, he'd say.

His safe and seemingly well-to-do world, though, was merely a mask. In the past four months, pieces of his disguise slowly eroded, exposing bits of his true identity.

There's much more to Hyde.