UNJUSTLY ENRICHED: John Cusack and Sylvester Stallone

New York, Aug. 25: Sylvester Stallone and John Cusack are being forced to play an unwelcome role in a real-life sequel to the Hollywood movie Wall Street.

The film stars were amo- ng the investors in a hedge fund set up by Ken Lipper, the financier and former deputy Mayor of New York who served as an adviser on Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning film and later wrote a novel from the script.

It was Lipper who coached Michael Douglas to deliver his lines as Gorden Gekko, the Wall Street “Master of the Universe” whose maxim was “greed is good”.

The Lipper Convertibles hedge fund collapsed in 2002 because of fraud — but not before Stallone and Cusack had pulled out with a healthy profit.

Now clients who lost their money want Stallone and Cusack to pay their profits back. They are suing the actors, along with other fortunate investors, including Ed Koch, the former New York Mayor, for “unjust enrichment” totalling $100 million.

The Hollywood stars were among a host of celebrities — Julia Roberts said to be among them — who invested in Lipper’s hedge fund.

The son of a shoe salesman from the South Bronx in New York, Lipper went to Harvard Law School and married the daughter of the oil magnate Joseph Gruss, whose $500 mi-llion fortune made him one of the richest men in New York.

Known as “The Lip”, he was named deputy mayor by Koch in 1983. But he fell in love with Hollywood after working on Stone’s Wall Street, in which he appeared briefly as a dealmaker in a boardroom scene.

He co-wrote and produced the 1996 film City Hall starring Cusack and Al Pacino and won an Oscar in 1999 for co-producing the Holocaust documentary The Last Days with Steven Spielberg.

But Lipper's hedge fund collapsed in 2002 when an audit revealed that it had overstated its profits by $329.5 million — about 40 per cent.

Edward Strafaci, one of the fund managers, pleaded guilty to securities fraud in 2004 and was sentenced to six years in prison. Lipper was not charged with any wrongdoing.

Sylvester Stallone, the star of action movies such as Rocky and Rambo, and John Cusack, acclaimed for his roles in Being John Malkovich and High Fidelity, had already made large gains, court papers say.

Stallone invested $2.5 million in 1997 and pulled out four years later when his investment had grown to $3.8 million.

Cusack’s original investment of $300,000 had swelled to $537,705 by the time he left in 2000.

The government trustee overseeing the failed fund wants the actors to return their profits so that the money can be put into a single pool to be shared out among all investors.

The actors are not accused of any wrongdoing and deny that they are responsible for the losses of the other investors.

In court papers a lawyer for Cusack argues that “the damages alleged in the complaint were not caused by the alleged ‘excess’ payments to Cusack”.

The case reminds one of the claims made against celebrity investors in a fund managed by Dana Giacche- tto, the high-living investment adviser who counted actors and pop stars among his friends.

Cameron Diaz, Alanis Morissette, Tim Roth and Leonardo DiCaprio’s father were said to have agreed to repay money after Giachetto was convicted in 2001 of illegally diverting money to celebrity clients from ordinary investors in his failed Cassandra Group.