Son charged with murder of NYC hedge fund founder Gilbert

NEW YORK - Authorities say the 30-year-old son of a hedge fund founder who was found shot dead in his Manhattan apartment has been arrested and charged with killing him.

Thomas Gilbert Sr., 70, was shot in the head at his Beekman Place residence on the East Side on Sunday, police said. Police responded to the home after reports of shots fired, and found Gilbert in the bedroom, a handgun near his body.

Gilbert's son, Thomas, was arrested Monday morning and charged with homicide and possession of a criminal weapon, police said. It wasn't clear whether he had an attorney.

Gilbert Jr. was in debt and had argued with his father over his allowance, police said.

Authorities say Thomas Gilbert Jr. went to visit his father and mother at around 3:30 Sunday afternoon and at one point, asked his mother to leave so that he could speak to his father alone. Police say the mother obliged but within fifteen minutes after leaving the apartment, she had "a bad feeling" and returned to the home to find her husband dead.

According to authorities, a gun was found resting on the 70-year-old's chest with his left hand covering the weapon. When police responded to the scene they say they determined it to be "staged."

Authorities then went to the home of Thomas Gilbert Jr. to conduct surveillance until they were able to execute a search warrant at his apartment around 10:30 that evening.

"A substantial amount of physical evidence was found in the apartment," police say.

In 2011, the elder Gilbert founded Wainscott Capital Partners Fund, which has $200 million in assets. Industry publication Hedge Fund Alert said in an August 2013 article that the fund had a net return of nearly 25 percent in 2012.

He was a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School.

Gilbert Jr. also attended Princeton, graduating in 2009 with a degree in economics. It wasn't immediately clear whether the son worked with the father, but he was not listed on the company's website.

Gilbert Sr. worked on Wall Street for more than 40 years, according to his profile on Wainscott's website, and previously co-founded Syzygy Therapeutics, a biotech asset acquisition fund. He also was founder and CEO of an online teacher-education company called Knowledge Delivery Systems Inc.

Wainscott had no immediate comment Monday. The hedge fund invests in biotechnology and health care stocks, which typically make up about 70 to 80 percent of its investments, according to the firm's website. The fund focuses on stocks traded on large exchanges like the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange, with as many as 70 different investments at one time. The minimum amount for investors is $500,000.

"We're not cowboys," Gilbert said in a November interview with the publication FINalternatives. "People say, 'This guy can be up 40 percent but then he can be down 40 percent.' We would rather be up 20 percent and not have any down months or down years," he said.

Hedge funds are aggressively managed with the goal of producing higher returns than the stock market as a whole. Fund managers use a range of strategies, including some highly risky ones, in pursuit of outsize gains. Wainscott's website claims to offer the potential for returns of 20 to 30 percent. That's well above the 7 percent historical return on stock investments over the last half-century.

The shooting was a rare act of violence on Beekman Place, a wealthy enclave just north of the United Nations in the Sutton Place neighborhood.