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Suicide provokes dismissal of criminal case
Former BestBank owner Edward 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 banker's 2 p.m. hearing in U.S. District Court in Denver was canceled, and prosecutors eventually will dismiss the charges.
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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. As losses mounted, Mattar and fellow defendants hid the numbers from regulators while receiving performance bonuses.
Mattar and two former executives, Thomas Alan Boyd and Jack O. Grace Jr., were convicted in February on 15 of the 90 counts they faced. ... 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.
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Richard Fulkerson, the Colorado bank commissioner who closed BestBank, said, "Nobody wants to see anything like this happen; this is just a tragedy." Fulkerson testified in the trials and attended previous sentencings. "The whole BestBank fraud was a tragedy. He's gone from being the perpetrator to another victim of the fraud."
Mattar ... 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.
He eventually started a management-consulting firm with a focus on educational institutions. In 1977, he was hired as a management consultant to help close Worcester College in Massachusetts. Instead, he became president, renamed it Central New England College and attempted a turnaround. In 1988, he was forced to resign 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.
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Harrison Greene worked for Mattar at Central New England College for more than three years ...He then worked at Mattar's for-profit Nasson College.
"He was one of those guys, 20 percent of the things he taught me were lifelong business lessons I've continued to use," Greene said Friday. "The other 80 percent, I wish I'd never heard."
Greene said Mattar "managed people through intimidation,"
Comment: Here is a story entirely different from that of James Hahn, the Houston chemist who committed suicide as he was being evicted from the house he had lost in foreclosure.
By all accounts in the above story, Mr. Mattar was a first-rate SOB; a bully who had made millions of dollars by cheating others and skirting the rules. Now, as a consequence of his cowardly suicide, the U.S. prosecutor is said to be ready to drop the charges, apparently out of some misguided notion of sympathy. Thus, the people who may have been made whole financially by the restitution Mattar was to have paid will just have to pound sand.