This is the American Greed podcast presented by CNBC.

I'm Stacey Keach.

In this episode of American Greed, in Alaska, Mark Avery is blowing through a fortune in record speed.

How often do you see somebody spending $53 million in six months?

He is grabbing up expensive toys, motor homes, a yacht, even snowmobiles. That's what everybody in Alaska wants to have, but not all of it at once.

And while Alaskans like their guns, Avery appears to be outfitting his own private army. It was wall-to-wall guns and hand grenades and everything you could think of.

And then suddenly his army becomes an Air Force.

He buys six helicopters, eight former Soviet fighter jets, and the fleet of World War II fighters. It was a rodeo every day.

We'd come to work and say, what'd they buy today?

Avery seems lost in a paramilitary fantasy.

He said it was for secret agents between missions, and that was like, whoa, whoa.

I'm not believing this.

And who is paying for Avery's wild spending?

That's where his fantasy turned into fraud. Of all the great American bombers in aviation history, one of the most beloved is a plane named the Corsair,

a famously fierce fighter during World War II.

The Japanese called it whistling death.

But from that illustrious past in combat,

one classic Corsair takes a flight of fancy in October 2005.

Here at a small airport in California,

the feared fighter is reduced to a toy

given as a birthday surprise.

Oh, ha ha, look at this!

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