So this has been a wild year in the world of finance.

There were Reddit users posting screenshots showing that they had made millions or tens of millions of dollars trading options on GameStop.

And there were some really odd corners of the crypto world.

There was a coin called Dogecoin, which is named after a dog meme and started as a joke that rose 24,000%.

There were artists who were selling these things called NFTs for tens of millions of dollars.

There was a sense that I felt, and I think a lot of people shared, that money had stopped being tethered to reality in any meaningful way.

But even amidst all of that, there was nothing as intriguing as a story that broke back in April.

About a deli in rural New Jersey that had practically no revenue, but had somehow attained a value of $113 million on the stock market.

My name is Jesse Barron, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times magazine, and I write about finance and crime.

Right after the story broke in mid-April, a lot of magazines and papers started sending reporters to do some version of the same story.

Business Insider and CNBC and the New Yorkers talk of the town, all sent reporters to the single story concrete building with red awnings and this town in New Jersey to eat the chicken parmesan sandwich or the cheese steak,

and make some version of the conclusion that this sandwich is not worth $113 million.

And other reporters were trying to figure out the financial side, and some people said it was a fraud or a scam.

So I started digging into the documents, the regulatory filings, and immediately things got bizarre.

Because one of the biggest shareholders in your hometown, deli, was a hedge fund, headquartered in Hong Kong.

Another shareholder was based in Macau, the only place in China where gambling is legal.

At first, no one was taking my calls. The finance people weren't talking to me, the deli people weren't talking to me, but eventually, I found the secret connection that I'd been looking for between the small town in rural New Jersey and the hedge fund in Hong Kong.

It was one character, a mysterious American financier named Peter Lee Coker, Jr.

So here's my story, the mystery of the $113 million deli, read by James Patrick Cronin.

This was recorded by Autumn. Autumn is an app you can download to listen to lots of audio stories from publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The Atlantic.

In a letter to his investors this April, David Einhorn, founder of the hedge fund Greenlight Capital and a well-known short seller, complained that the stock market was in a state of quasi-anarchy.

As one piece of evidence he pointed to Elon Musk, whose commentary on Twitter Einhorn said, amounted to market manipulation.

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