Swarthy Crook Embezzles, Gets Caught and Takes a Dive, Literally
by Ian Mosley
In the 1929 crash, ruined bankers and stockbrokers traditionally hurled themselves out of their high-rise office windows to splatter on the Wall Street asphalt below. A life-long crook looking at some hard time in Denver recently decided to follow this old tradition.
According to the [Denver] Rocky Mountain News: “Edward Mattar, owner of the failed BestBank, was to be sentenced Friday afternoon on fraud-related charges. He was convicted with two other men in February. Hours before his sentencing, Mattar killed himself … Mattar, facing 14 years in prison and the forfeiture of millions of dollars at his fraud sentencing Friday, chose instead to leap from a 27th-story window. The Denver coroner’s office identified Mattar’s body through fingerprints and ruled the death a suicide late Friday. At 3:40 a.m, Mattar, 68, smashed a window with a hammer at his home at the Apartments at Denver Place, 1880 Arapahoe St. He then jumped, landing in the courtyard in front of the building.”
The article goes on: “Janus McSwain, 28, of San Bernardino, Calif., was at the Greyhound Bus Terminal, waiting for a bus, when he heard a crash and went outside. McSwain said he saw a man lying face- down in the dirt. ‘He broke a tree,’ McSwain said Friday afternoon, pointing to a small tree…”
Back to RMN: “Boulder-based BestBank collapsed in 1998 under the strain of a $200 million portfolio of high-risk credit-card accounts. The bank, once labeled as one of America’s most profitable small banks, paid high rates of interest to attract deposits, then turned around and issued more than 500,000 credit cards to credit-challenged borrowers.” This clown was taking people’s money and using it to issue CREDIT CARDS to every Tyrone, Lateisha and Pedro? Why didn’t he just drop the money in the shredder and save all the paperwork? I’m no banker and even I can tell you that’s a great way to fail. Does Colorado not have any banking regulations at all?
RMN notes “As losses mounted, Mattar and fellow defendants hid the numbers from regulators while receiving performance bonuses…. In early August, Mattar pleaded guilty to not paying taxes. Prosecutors were asking for a sentence of 14 years, forfeiture of $4.7 million in ill-gotten gains and restitution of $134 million stemming from the bank’s collapse. Haried acknowledged that Mattar did not have that kind of money.”
The article notes “Mattar was born March 15, 1939, in Buffalo, the son of a Lebanese peddler. He earned a law degree from the University of Baltimore, worked for New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican in upstate New York.”
Mattar had a long history of embezzlement before he was mysteriously allowed to set up a bank in Colorado. After a stint working for Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, Mattar was hired as a consultant for Worcester College in Massachusetts, renamed the institution Central New England College, and according to RMN was “forced to resign in 1988 after an audit uncovered financial irregularities in the school’s books. That was one incident in a string of lawsuits and judgments that started with a 1983 health club failure in which customers got stiffed and continued through the 1990s with several foreclosures on a home and businesses. Mattar bought BestBank in 1989 at a time when Colorado was coping with numerous failed banks and savings and loans because of the real estate bust. While the state’s Division of Banking would have conducted a criminal check on Mattar, it wouldn’t have found the civil actions over the failed health club. Ralph Mires, Colorado’s banking commissioner when Mattar applied for his charter, told the Rocky in 1998 that the health club problems would have been enough to deny his application to buy the bank.”
Well, let’s hope that the depositors who lost their money in Mattar’s bank fraud are understanding about this since the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) does NOT cover ALL losses in a bank failure. The top limit is 100k which many retirement nest eggs easily exceed.
Hopefully your grandparents didn’t get cheated out of much of their retirement because someone let in a swarthy family of Mid East peddlers in the 1930s, the sort of people the Founding Fathers didn’t want coming to America.