Pamela Corey expects her $20,000 back.
That was money that Corey — one of nearly 500 friends and investors snookered in Gina Champion-Cain’s $400 million Ponzi scheme — inherited from her late father.
In a revealing moment, the next episode of CNBC’s “American Greed” series shows how a still-starstruck Corey says she’s in touch with Champion-Cain, her former boss serving a 15-year prison term in a liquor-license scam.
“She didn’t directly say I’m sorry,” Corey tells the camera. “She just said: I promise you’ll get all your money back, you know?”
Corey idolized Champion-Cain and went to work in one of her Luv Surf shops. Now she considers her former mentor a “sociopath.”
“She was intimidating and in a good way to me, I guess,” Corey says in the show airing at 7 p.m. Tuesday in San Diego. “I looked up to her because … she’s as powerful woman entrepreneur… How do I become that someday?”
Also appearing in the hourlong episode, titled “California Schemin,’” are San Diego Union-Tribune business writer Lori Weisberg and U-T columnist and venture capitalist Neil Senturia, who with his wife, Barbara Bry, wrote the “as told to” book “I Did It.”
Senturia interviewed Champion-Cain for about 50 hours, says the “American Greed” show narrated by Stacy Keach. (Senturia told Times of San Diego it was 40 hours.)
“American Greed has been doing these kinds of programs for more than 15 years – and they…
