"No dud trades", claims Bond
nypost.com
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Feds do Bond case by numbers
by Frances A. McMorris
Updated 08:52 AM EST, Jun-5-2002
Federal prosecutors said that the case against the former money manager Alan Bond, accused of taking winning trades for his own accounts and dumping losers onto his clients, was all in the numbers.
"These numbers are devastating," Assistant U.S. Attorney George S. Canellos said during closing arguments Tuesday, June 4, in the six-count fraud trial against Bond. Bond was once a regular on television's Louis Rukeyser's "Wall Street Week" and one of the few blacks to gain prominence for offering investment advice.
Now he is on trial in Manhattan federal court, facing charges that he ran a "cherry-picking" scheme.
Prosecutors contend that from March 2000 to July 2001 Bond kept the best trades for himself and netted a return of 5,000%, while pushing losers onto his clients, devastating the value of their accounts by two-thirds.
This trial is the latest chapter in Bond's fall from financial grace. Rising from a middle-class Queens, N.Y., neighborhood to attend Dartmouth College and Harvard Business School, Bond eventually formed his own company, becoming president of Albriond Capital Management.
But he was arrested in December 1999 on separate and unrelated federal charges of allocating investment business to brokerages in exchange for $6.9 million kickbacks.
Then, when he was out on bail, he was arrested again in August and charged in the cherry-picking scheme for which he is now on trial.
Prosecutors in this case contend that a trio of funds took a financial beating: Old Dominion Transit Employees, which lost $6 million; Birmingham Amalgamated Transit Authority, which lost $8 million; and a third fund client, which lost $40 million.
At the same time, Bond made more than $5.5 million for himself, federal prosecutors assert.
"Nobody can hit snake-eyes 97 times out of 100," Cannellos said, describing the defendant as a mediocre money manager and a novice day-trader.
The other prosecutor in the case, Marc C. Mukasey, noted that out of 1,186 losing trades, 96% went to Bond's clients. In contrast, of 605 winning trades, Bond benefitted from 562 of them.
"He's practically printing money in his office and hardly ever losing," Mukasey said. "It's like going to the race track and knowing who is going to win. It's absolutely unprecedented in the history of Wall Street, especially in a down market."
During the trial, Bond's lawyers took the risky strategy of putting him on the witness stand. There, Bond denied that he improperly allocated millions of dollars from clients into his own account.
The defense lawyer Mark Gombiner said Tuesday: "Mr. Bond got on the witness stand and told you he didn't cheat his clients. He told you he made some mistakes, and he told you he doesn't feel very good about what happened to those accounts."
Gombiner also attacked the government's figures, accusing prosecutors of distorting the evidence. But Gombiner also conceded to the jury that Bond's trading tickets "weren't perfect." He noted that "at times a lot of them don't match up." But he waved that off as insignificant.
Gombiner also told the jury to ignore Bond's past firing from Goldman, Sachs & Co. for inflating expense reports.
Bond, 40, of Upper Montclair, N.J., sat silently beside his lawyers in the 15th-floor courtroom while his family listened from the rows behind him.
If convicted, Bond faces 10 years in prison on each of the three counts of investment advisory fraud and five years for each of three mail fraud counts.
The jury will begin deliberations June 10.
And Bond will be tried on the kickback charges after this current case ends. Prosecutors contend that the motive for creating the cherry-picking scheme arose out of his need to pay $1 million in legal fees related to the initial kickback charges. |
