When I met former Phish keyboardist Page McConnell last May in the JFK airport on my way to San Francisco, my first thought was to thank him for all the times his band awed me silly. My next inkling was to ask him to buy me some magazines and a Snickers with almonds at the terminal’s Hudson News, the least he could do for taking so much of my disposable income lo these many years.

Phish

But just last week a little birdie told me to pick up a fairly new book by Emily White called You Will Make Money In Your Sleep: The Story of Dana Giacchetto, and that quasi-biography shed some new light on where all my ticket and merchandise money had gone.

Giacchetto, a hip money manager for Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Cameron Diaz and the popular rock band Phish, became known as Scammer to the Stars when he pled guilty to fraud charges, spent years in jail and was banned for life from working in finance. And as it turns out, Phish was the biggest loser:

In December 1999, the accountant for Phish notified Dana that he’d discovered a $3 million discrepancy in their account, and he was preparing to sue. He had an urgent meeting with the band and warned them that they had been robbed. In the story of Dana as a thief — a story Dana still denies — Phish was the extreme loser; their account was mercilessly ransacked…

And here I thought Phish fans were the extreme losers…turns out it’s the band. I keed, I keed. Anyway, I’m making my way slowly through White’s book, and it’s an interesting read even without the Vermont foursome (and, in truth, they only show up on four or five pages). Phish eventually re-claimed their pilfered millions in surprising fashion, but read on after the jump for full excerpts of the band’s plight.

Here are some excerpts from the book…remember, buy the book, see the movie:

Phish had been talking to Dana and investing money with him for about a year. They showed up at parties; they stayed at Andre’s hotels. By 1996 Phish’s money was pouring in. They’d struck oil when the Deadheads lost Jerry and needed somewhere else to go…It was harder and harder to find places to park all the Phish money. They were his richest clients, and soon he controlled $4 million of their money, under the client name Dionysian Productions.

White then introduces us to the pretty wookettes behind the scenes:

Like Andre, Phish was often surrounded by pretty girls. Hippie girls who didn’t mind crashing on the floor, who never started fights the way the punk girls did. Phish money came from a completely different subculture than Nirvana money. The Phish millions came from the pockets of fans who were looking for a positive experience, something like the sixties, some vague reenactment of free love and up-with-people.

Jeez, listen to this newb…hold your shit together, lady:

I was at one of those Phish parties. The pot people were smoking was the kind that made you think you’d said something when you hadn’t said anything.

I like to think my hallucinations were worth at least a million bucks:

Dana talked [George] Condo up to Phish, and for a while afterward the band projected Condo paintings onto screens at their concerts — the antipods, floating above ten thousand hippies, $950,000 hallucinations.

The shit began to hit the fan and Dana started to cover his ass. But the real interesting part of this paragraph is clearly “tens of millions.” That’s not exactly news, but to hear it confirmed in a biographical work of non-fiction is pretty sweet:

When Dana talks about the money taken out of Phish’s account, he talks about the enormity of their fortune: 3 million out of tens of millions. He says they were in on some private deals that went south, and he hadn’t accounted for them yet.

Here’s some financial jibba jabba with a nice total at the end:

Dana admitted to “misappropriating client funds” in the case of Phish, and he signed what is called a “Confession of Judgment.” According to SEC documents: “The Confessions provided the Phish clients and their manager with enforceable judgments for the total amount of $4.7 million.”

Now the moral: Don’t fuck with The Phish…they’ll take your shit and sell it:

To repay Phish’s vanished money, Dana signed over his art collection. For as long as I knew him, he never stopped grieving over the art collection: the Frank Stella, the George Condo, the little Calder sculpture. These beautiful things that had belonged to him. The Phish lawyers held an auction, and the band was repaid. But Dana thinks many of the items sold for much less than they were actually worth.

Hey, anyone know what show this is from? +20 Heady Points if you do:

At one show in the middle of a jam, one of the Phish singers yelled, “Dana could you please pass the soup?” It was a reference to his upcoming life in prison.

So apparently the boys re-gained their lost treasure and lived happily ever after (well, not so much). Either way, they probably learned a valuable lesson in the process: Giacchetto is not a Jewish surname, and therefore he should not have handled their money. Oh, sorry, just wanted to see if anyone was still reading…