A dead stripper wife. A gambling habit. A made-up résumé. All Southern California financier Danny Pang needed to complete the picture was an SEC investigation of an alleged Ponzi scheme. Now he has that, too.

The SEC is charging Pang, a colorful Taiwanese immigrant who led a glittering L.A. lifestyle, with defrauding investors by falsifying his credentials and misrepresenting how his $4 billion money-management firm, PEMGroup, made money. A judge has frozen the firm's assets.

If even some of those accusations prove true, the picture that will inevitably emerge is that of a gambler and a liar -- one who bets his inventions will never catch up with him.

Pang has been under the microscope since the Wall Street Journal aired charges similar to the ones the SEC is now making two weeks ago: that he'd never earned an MBA and never worked at Morgan Stanley. An ex-employee, Nasar Aboubakare, told the newspaper that Pang had called his money-management business, PEMGroup, a "Ponzi scheme" and offered him $500,000 on the condition that he not talk to the Journal. According to Aboubakare, a scheme to purchase life-insurance policies at a discount and pay investors with the proceeds went sour, and Pang instead paid his investors their promised returns with new money raised to invest in time shares.

Pang has denied the charges. But it's telling who he's hired as his spokesman: Mike Sitrick, the crisis PR guy whom Paris Hilton has on speed-dial.

New York has a complete timeline of Pang's career. He's had his share of financial shenanigans before the current ones. But three anecdotes seem to tell the story of his life:

Education. School records show Pang only attended one summer term at the University of California at Irvine, in 1986. Yet in the 1988-1989 term, he got elected chairman of the university's Asian Pacific Student & Staff Association. A university spokeswoman explained that anyone could have walked up and won the post.