Ex bank chief arrested on fraud charges, faces up to 30 years in prison

[anigbrowl]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703909804575123672347495854.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLETopStories#articleTabs%3Darticle

A lifelong banking-industry executive was arrested Monday on numerous charges, including allegations of defrauding regulators in connection with what prosecutors said was his desperate effort to save his New York bank from failing.

Charles J. Antonucci Sr., the former president and chief executive of the Park Avenue Bank of New York, made false statements to regulators in an effort to obtain about $11 million from the U.S. government's Troubled Asset Relief Program, prosecutors said. He is the first person to be charged criminally with attempting to defraud TARP, the bank bailout program passed as the nation teetered on the verge of an economic meltdown in 2008, prosecutors said.

Park Avenue Bank, a lender with more than $500 million in assets that specialized in commercial-real-estate loans, failed on Friday after piling up more than $27 million in net losses last year. Bad real-estate loans shrank the bank's capital to just $3.3 million at year's end, down 87% from two years earlier, according to filings the bank made with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

"The bank was broken, so, in October and November 2008, Antonucci methodically went about pretending to fix it," said Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, at a press conference.

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Full story at link, it's pretty detailed.

[anigbrowl]

1. FYI, he's been a donor to Chuck Schumer

http://www.opensecrets.org/usearch/index.php?q=antonucci&searchButt.x=0&searchButt.y=0&searchButt=Submit&cx=010677907462955562473:nlldkv0jvam&cof=FORID:11

Not that it seems to have done him much good.

[notesdev]

2. Little fish

Let's get some big fish here, eh?

[anigbrowl]

3. What are you, his defense lawyer?

It's not an either-or proposition, that if we spend some effort investigating and prosecuting this guy, we are prevented from doing anything else in the meantime. Fraud cases are complex and difficult to prosecute. even if you haven't heard of this guy before, I'm happy to see him being brought to justice. It might well be that what we learn from this case will make it easier to prosecute others.

I get really tired of these 'not dramatic enough, so I don't care' attitudes. The rule of law is not about dramatic gestures, it's about having proper evidence to back up charges and doing things by the book. If I wanted to live somewhere where politics trumped procedure, I'd move to Russia.

[notesdev]

5. There are much bigger fish with public slam-dunk evidence

The problem is not that they are going after a little fish here, but that they are only going after little fish.

I can name a couple of big ones who got caught red-handed, e.g. Joe Cassano (insurance fraud), Dick Fuld (accounting fraud, securities fraud). Even with the scandals at both companies (AIG and Lehman respectively) blown sky-high, nobody at either company is liable for anything? But they show up to arrest the head of some rinky-dink bank the day after it fails?

The two guys I named are responsible for something like a half-trillion dollars of economic damage, the guy whose prosecution you think is fantastic is responsible for what, 100 million? Doesn't anything strike you as perverse about the situation?

[provis99]

4. He'll plead to one count of a lesser charge and get 30 days.

There's one set of rules for poor folks, and another for the people that run society, like this guy.