Facing jail, banker leaps to death

BestBank's ex-owner plummets 27 stories hours before hearing

David Milstead And Tillie Fong, Rocky Mountain News

Published November 3, 2007 at midnight

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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 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.

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 where a 2-inch-wide branch was severed.

The banker's 2 p.m. hearing in U.S. District Court in Denver was canceled, and prosecutors eventually will dismiss the charges.

"Suicide is a terrible thing, whenever it happens," Assistant U.S. Attorney John Haried said. "That's all you can say about it."

Mattar was not married. A former colleague recalls that Mattar had a brother and sister in his hometown of Buffalo, N.Y. A message left with the brother's answering service Friday evening was not returned.

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. Boyd and Grace were sentenced to 90 months and 72 months, respectively, in August. Each man received a $15,000 fine, and the two forfeited $4.74 million and $92,643, respectively.

Two other men, Douglas Baetz and Glenn Gallant, also were convicted in the case. They were the co-owners of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Century Financial, which partnered with BestBank. Baetz and Gallant were each sentenced to 10 years in prison in August.

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.

Defense attorneys were "asking the court to exercise its sound judgment as to what it thought was the proper sentence," defense attorney Peter Bornstein said. He declined further comment.

Daniel Sears, who represented Grace, said the letters Mattar and Boyd wrote to the judge before his client's sentencing showed another side of them.

Mattar "certainly had a tendency to be gruff. He was blunt, and he had a tendency to be obstinate, and I can see how these things resulted in the difficulties he faced," he said. "I saw another side of him he did not readily expose to others. I saw a man who was warm, generous and compassionate. I am devastated."

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 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.

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.

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.

Harrison Greene worked for Mattar at Central New England College for more than three years as director of admissions and then dean of institutional relations. 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," once giving him an illustration of a dying apple tree with just one piece of fruit left. The caption was "the tree with the best apples gets the worst beating."

He expressed surprise Friday that Mattar killed himself.

"He had a tremendous fear of death."

Staff writer Hector Gutierrez contributed to this report. -Finance Editor David Milstead can be reached at -milstead@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2648.

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