The Woman Who Sank Galleon

By Anthony Effinger, Katherine Burton and Ian King

Danielle Chiesi spent a lot of time in hotel ballrooms and bars during the past decade.

As an analyst at New Castle Funds LLC, a New York hedge fund firm that manages about $1 billion, she was a regular at conferences on technology stocks, where she could get face time with executives and press them on how many microprocessors and how much software they were shipping that quarter.

Chiesi wore short skirts and low-cut tops, according to people who saw her over the years. One ploy was to go barhopping with a group, and then peel someone off to talk to on the dance floor, says a person who attended conferences with her.

A blond, blue-eyed former teenage beauty queen, Chiesi used her sexuality to build sources at male-dominated tech companies, says Deborah Stapleton, president of Stapleton Communications Inc., an investor relations company in Palo Alto, California.

“It amazes me that grown, wealthy, successful, hardworking men fell for that,” Stapleton says. Chiesi was proud of her network, too. “She bragged about her contacts in public,” Stapleton says. “She was like a teenager who wanted everyone to know she knew some rock star.”

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