Andy Beal

This guy is a total badass. He has bought distressed assets at the the bottom of nearly every major event over the past decade and sold it off at a killing. He also won millions of dollars against professional poker players, built rockets, and formed a conjecture for fermat's last theorem. My personal favorite:

It was 1981, and Beal, then a 29-year-old vulture investor, was scoping out two 16-story apartment buildings owned by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The bricks were chipped and bulging off the exterior of the buildings. Tenants had pried open the elevator doors and thrown furniture down the shafts. Beal liked what he saw. He and a partner bought the towers for $25,000 and a promise, backed by a $2.5 million letter of credit, to fix the bricks. They did the repairs -- employing armed guards for protection when visiting the apartments -- and never tapped the credit line before selling the buildings two years later to a New York doctor for $3.2 million

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-29/beal-bec…