F or fashion executive Simon Feldman the fall from grace is complete. The once high-flying head of property at the retail giant Specialty Fashion Group has admitted stealing $16.7 million from his employer and was last week jailed for six years and four months.
With parole, and time already served, the father of three could be free in 2015.
But it will take much longer to heal his psychological wounds and rehabilitate his reputation as the poster boy for white-collar crime and object of shame and embarrassment within Sydney's tight-knit Jewish community.
As his sentence was read by Judge Helen Murrell, Feldman's wife of 10 years, Camilla, shook her head and pressed her clenched fist against her closed eyes. Feldman stood emotionless with his chin held high.
Eighteen months earlier the 43-year-old was confronted by his boss - the SFG chief executive, Gary Perlstein - and confessed to siphoning funds from the company over five years.
"I've been sprung … I'm not proud of what I've done," Feldman said calmly.
He had doctored invoices so they looked like they were for work done on SFG's empire of 840 stores, including Katies.
He was able to cover the financial hole for so long by setting the budgets high enough to include his false invoices. No alarm bells sounded because spending was within budget.
It's not as if Feldman squirrelled the money away in a Swiss bank account; it appears to have been frittered on propping up his private businesses and keeping up with the Joneses in his highly competitive eastern suburbs social circle.
He even admitted spending $30,000 a year on donations to charity. Some of it also went to Feldman's alleged accomplice, Richard Bamford, who has fled overseas and is an international fugitive.
None of the stolen funds have been recovered - except for $50,000 recouped from the sale of his Vaucluse mansion. But some still think he has money, with Feldman alleging bikies tried to extort money from him during the 22 days he spent in jail on remand, when he was in protective custody and in his cell for 23½ hours a day.
Camilla, 38, who has been a full-time mother, is set to return to work to support the family while her husband is in jail.
The prosecutor said Feldman's crime was motivated by ''greed and envy'', but Feldman's lawyers argued that behind the embezzlement was a tragic story of ambition and unattainable expectations.
Judge Murrell said it was important to denounce his ''large-scale fraud that occurred over a long period of time and involved frequent illegal activities''.
Before his sentencing in the NSW District Court, it was known that Feldman felt the urge to steal because he was trying to emulate someone.
The mentor's identity was kept a mystery until the end.
"I have been under pressure to emulate someone who is more successful than I am and I wasn't able to do it,'' Feldman confessed in May 2009. ''I tried to be a hero. The only way to do that was to steal. I stole. I was lost, I dug a hole so deep I didn't know how to stop."
During his sentencing it emerged that the man Feldman was trying to emulate was his maternal grandfather, who died three years ago aged 93.
His grandfather was the founder of the Katies chain in the 1950s, Feldman's barrister, Charles Waterstreet, said.
SFG has refused to comment on the identity of Feldman's grandfather, but it is understood Feldman is neither the grandson of Sam Moss nor of Joseph Brender - the two men who are credited as the founders of Katies and who are both pillars of the Jewish community and very much alive.
"Simon perceived an overwhelming demand to succeed and to live up to the successes of his grandfather," Mr Waterstreet told the court.
"It was Simon's fantasy to live up to the idealised image he held of his grandfather whom he revered as larger than life.''
Feldman told doctors that during the five years he was siphoning off money he would often wake at night "frozen with fear" of being caught. When he was found out, it was an "enormous relief".
But there was more.
Days before he was due to be sentenced in November last year Feldman rose before 6am and went walkabout from the Turramurra home he shared with his wife and three children - two daughters, 9 and 6, and a son, 2.
His wife reported him missing, and feared for his life as he had stopped taking his antidepressants.
Police found him early the next day, wet and delirious, wandering in a laneway behind his house. An ambulance took him to Hornsby hospital where he was diagnosed with a "dissociative fugue".
Ten days later he told a Macquarie Street psychoanalyst, George Lianos, he could not remember leaving the house, but only "waking up in the gutter and feeling wet".
Dr Lianos diagnosed Feldman with a dissociative disorder that meant he remained unemotional even when discussing emotional subjects. It was rooted in Feldman's unhappy childhood, having lost his father to a brain tumour when he was 10 years old, Dr Lianos said.
The great irony is that Feldman will leave his three children fatherless for at least the next four years.
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