The Paul Manafort verdict highlights the wisdom of a folksy bit of financial advice: Know when to fold ‘em.

On Aug. 21, a federal jury found Manafort, President Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, guilty of eight counts of tax evasion, bank fraud and failing to register a foreign bank account. On 10 other charges, the jury deadlocked, which could lead to a new trial. But the eight charges alone could put Manafort in jail for the rest of his life – a reminder that even the high and mighty make stupid, self-destructive decisions.

From 2006 through 2014, Manafort earned as much as $65 million working for foreign politicians, much of it for the former president of Ukraine, a Russia-backed ally of Vladimir Putin. Manafort ran most of that money through a variety of foreign accounts, allowing him to avoid paying U.S. income tax on it. Prosecutors say he avoided taxes on at least $15 million in income.

Manafort used those untaxed, overseas funds to buy at least four properties worth millions of dollars, including a 5,500-square-foot beach house in the Hamptons, a $3 million Brooklyn brownstone and a $2.9 million Manhattan condo. Since Manafort paid for the properties in cash, he didn’t need loans to cover basic mortgage costs. But his Ukraine work began to dry up in 2014, and by late 2015 Manafort was growing desperate for money. He was house-rich and cash-poor, like many others have been—except on a scale ordinary folks might find hard to contemplate.

If you owned four expensive houses and suddenly needed cash, what might you do? Right—sell one. Or two. Or even three, which would still leave you one house to live in. But Manafort didn’t sell anything. Instead, he applied for a series of seven-figure bank loans, supplying bogus financial information and using various ill-gotten properties as collateral. Those loans left Manafort drowning in debt and gave prosecutors key insights into his overall criminal enterprise.

Lying about his debt

Here’s one example of a Manafort real-estate scheme. In 2012, he paid $3 million for a three-story townhouse in the trendy Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn. The money came from an account in Cyprus that Manafort used to evade U.S. taxes. In early 2015, with money suddenly tight, Manafort sought and received a $5 million loan against the property from Genesis Capital, a California lender, claiming he’d use $1.4 million of that money for renovations that would raise the value of the property to $8 million. That allowed him to qualify for a “construction loan” larger than the value of the property at the time. But instead of using the money to improve the property, prosecutors say, Manafort used it to pay off another loan and make purchases having nothing to do with the Brooklyn brownstone.