Gina Champion-Cain hasn’t read her own book.
The former toast-of-the-town businesswoman, whose San Diego career became toast, is the speaker in “I Did It: The Largest Woman-Run Ponzi Scheme in American History.”
In reality, La Jolla couple Barbara Bry and Neil Senturia did it — write the 285-page work (Waterside Productions, $27.95, with pre-orders on Amazon).
Based on 40 hours of interviews over four months before her March 2021 sentencing, and later email exchanges from her East Bay prison camp, the “as told to” book is almost completely in Champion-Cain’s voice.
Senturia said he would send Champion-Cain a signed copy “if the prison will let a hardback in. … I suspect it will make good reading for the other 90 inmates.”
“I Did It” won’t be released until Sept. 13, but Bry shared a review copy in PDF. Right after finishing it, I emailed the authors: “Mega mazel tov on this masterpiece!”
No apologies. The book is a master class in airing one’s own dirty laundry.
Champion-Cain tells how beginning at 11 p.m. one rainy Saturday in January 2013 — her husband asleep in their Mission Hills home — she “pounded the keyboard” looking for numbers of expired or inactive Northern California liquor…
