Who fleeced J.R.?

But as much as Hagman’s career brought him fame and fortune, and as much as his death came quietly, peacefully and with his closest friends and colleagues at his side, one news story that emerged soon after Hagman died was the lawsuit he and his wife Maj filed against Citigroup for their treatment by broker Lisa Detanna. The Hagmans asked Detanna to invest their funds conservatively, and apparently, Detanna did just the opposite, crafting an aggressive portfolio of mostly stocks, and selling the Hagmans a life insurance policy they really did not need for the princely premium of $168,000 a year. Not surprisingly, when the markets crashed soon after and the Hagmans paid a large surrender fee on their life insurance, their total losses were huge. Ultimately, they settled with Citigroup.

Detanna, who was not named specifically in the suit, has since become a senior vice president at Raymond James & Associates. Along the way, she became a featured blogger for Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, dispending advice on pursuing a career as a broker. She was also named to Barron’s “Top 100 Women Financial Advisors” list. And yet, to some, she ends up looking like another Glenn Neasham: a financial advisor whose treatment of elderly clients has raised serious and persistent questions as to how this part of the industry should be regulated.

The notion of a federal fiduciary standard persists as a possibility, much to the displeasure of many in the financial services industry. The standard would cause as many problems as it solved, at least initially. But as long as the notion persists that financial advisors who service the elderly are probably at least as rapacious as J.R. Ewing himself, so too will persist calls that financial advisors of all stripes be held to ever stricter standards to put their clients first and their commissions second. The vast majority of advisors already do this. Too bad the general public tends to think otherwise. If even a bad guy like J.R. Ewing can sustain major financial damage from an advisor, so the thinking goes, what hope do the rest of us have? What hope, indeed.