Now, if hundreds of investors such as George Grabek are lucky, they might get back pennies on the dollar through eBay auctions and other sales of property that belonged to Wise or his seized and shuttered bank.

The sales are being set up by a court-appointed receiver who says that more than 30 items of jewelry, each worth more than $10,000, could attract "sophisticated buyers" through initial private sales, while the lesser loot would sell better on eBay.

The receiver, Richard Roper of Dallas, asked in recently filed court papers to sell other assets of the bank: a $5.8 million business jet; a small squadron of vehicles that include two 2009 Cadillac Escalades; the trove of jewelry; and caches of deteriorating high-end wine. It's dismaying news to Grabek, 48, of Tallahassee, Fla., who said he amassed the $300,000 he invested in Millennium Bank through years of buying small houses, fixing them up, and flipping or renting them.

"This Wise guy took all our hard-earned money that we worked for all these years and he's out there having a big party," Grabek said Wednesday. "Here he is just flagrantly throwing it to the winds."

Wise, a Canadian lawyer who has lived in Raleigh for the past 10 years, is named in Securities and Exchange Commission litigation as a mastermind of an elaborate, Caribbean-based Ponzi scheme that took in hundreds of investors by offering fraudulent certificates of deposit with much higher interest rates than anything available in the United States.

Instead of investing the money, the SEC says in court filings, Wise and associates spent most of the money while using only a fraction to repay older investors with new investors' deposits. Starting in March, a court-ordered seizure of Millennium-related assets has been designed to protect what's left of the bank for eventual partial paybacks to investors.

In light of general requirements that receivers dispose of court-seized assets at public sales in county courthouses, Roper petitioned the court to allow sales of:

_ Wise's private jet by Sovereign Bank, which is owed $4.3 million on the plane. Roper asks that he be allowed to sell it for as little as $3.7 million, if no higher offer emerges, to keep the value of the 1993 Challenger jet from deteriorating. Commercial tracking sites spotted the plane in locations from Caracas, Venezuela, to Moscow.