In 35 years of handling bankruptcy cases, Stephen Darr has seen plenty of ugly. He has doled out funds to creditors of an asbestos company and a machine gun maker and to victims of several Ponzi schemes.
But nothing comes close to the scale of the TelexFree Inc. bankruptcy. Never in history has a trustee been responsible for divvying up the assets of a company that prosecutors say defrauded 2.1 million people, from Boston to Uganda.
Darr, an accountant by trade and senior managing director at Mesirow Financial Consulting in Boston, is the court-appointed trustee charged with paying out claims to victims who believe they are owed more than $1 billion in the case. TelexFree was purportedly a long-distance phone company, but in reality generated most of its money by luring a stream of small investors from 2012 until it was shut down earlier this year, according to prosecutors.
Many Brazilian immigrants risked — and lost — large portions of their savings, in hopes of reaping the generous returns that were promised.
“I feel very sympathetic toward these people,’’ Darr said. “They lost a lot of money. They deserve to get it back, and it’s my job to get it back to them as