A former Texas bank president who issued millions in fake loans over almost a decade and set a fire to try and cover the fraud was sentenced to eight years in prison Tuesday, prosecutors said.
Anita Gail Moody, 57, pleaded guilty in June to conspiracy to commit bank fraud and arson.
She was ordered to pay more than $11 million in restitution, which is what the now-closed Enloe State Bank that she ran lost, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Texas said.
Moody was president of the bank in Cooper, around 80 miles northeast of Dallas, and the fraud she pleaded guilty to began in 2012.
In May 2019 — one day before the Texas Department of Banking was scheduled to conduct a review — Moody set a fire in the bank boardroom with files left on a table, all of which were burned, according to prosecutors.
She had created more than 100 fraudulent loans over the years, prosecutors said in court documents.
She used some of the money on her boyfriend’s and friends’ businesses, for family and for her own lifestyle, including a Jeep. Other federal investigators said some of the loans were taken out to pay the interest and principal on the others, so that nothing would seem amiss.
A request for comment from Moody’s attorney was not immediately returned Tuesday night.
Her attorney argued in court documents that Moody worked for the bank her whole adult life and described a life spiraling out of control, adding that she first lent the money out of sympathy, but in 2012 started began using the loans for herself.
“Criminal conduct that affects the financial health of a small, local lender can send a negative ripple effect throughout the entire community,” acting U.S. Attorney Nicholas J. Ganjei said in a statement.
The bank was closed by the Texas Department of Banking in 2019. It had been chartered in 1928. At the time, the department said it was forced to do so “due to insider abuse and fraud by former officers.”
A former bank vice president, Jeannie Swaim, last year pleaded guilty to a single count and was sentenced to two years in prison and ordered to pay more than $410,000 in restitution, according to the U.S. attorney’s office and court records.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insures deposits, was appointed as receiver after the bank failed. The loss to the agency’s deposit insurance fund was around $21 million, an inspector general’s report said.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
