Sentence

One misty morning in Manhattan last week a score of criminals plodded across the Bridge of Sighs from the Tombs to the Criminal Courts Building. At the head of the procession, handcuffed to a Porto Rican burglar, marched well-groomed Bernard K. Marcus, high-headed president of the defunct Bank of United States. Behind him with head bowed came Saul Singer, chairman of the executive committee, manacled to his 24-year-old son Herbert, bewildered dummy in the bank's subsidiaries. Week before all three had been convicted of wilfully misapplying $8,000,000 of Bank of United States' money before it crashed in the biggest failure in U. S. bank history (TIME, June 29).

A back elevator whisked them up to a small court room on the top floor. On the bench sat Judge George L. Donnellan who presided over their twelve-week trial. The three defendants lined up at the bar, their hands white where they clenched the rail. They had been convicted on a complicated bookkeeping evidence for juggling bank funds among subsidiaries. But their real offense, morally if not legally, was wrecking the Bank of United States. Declared Judge Donnellan:

"I believe it was greed on the part of Marcus and Singer that led them into their difficulties. ... I am going to sentence Marcus and Saul Singer to State's prison [Sing Sing] for from three to six years." He sentenced Son Herbert to the penitentiary, three months to three years.

As the three discredited bankers were marched back to their cells in the Tombs, impoverished depositors of the Bank of U. S. gathered in the hallways, booed and hissed them. Back in the Tombs they munched egg and cheese sandwiches from the prison commissary while outside most New York citizens felt justice had been done.

But the State was by no means done with the Bank of U. S. failure. Next day diminutive Isidor Jacob Kresel, the bank's counsel, pleaded not guilty to six indictments charging him with the same set of crimes which resulted in the Marcus-Singer conviction. Lawyer Kresel, under Referee Samuel Seabury, had been actively prosecuting the investigation of the Magistrates' Courts in Manhattan (see p. 12) when the Bank of U. S. failed, causing his retirement from public service. From a sick bed, with a fever of 104DEG, he appeared last winter before the Grand Jury, swore that there was "something suspiciously wrong" about the $8,000,000 deal, denied that he had anything to do with it. Later, as a defense witness at the Marcus-Singer trial, he swore that he knew all about the deal, repudiated his Grand Jury testimony. For this contradiction Lawyer Kresel was indicted again, this time for perjury, conviction for which carries a 20-year sentence. His attorney, John William Davis, Democratic contender for the Presidency in 1924, insisted that the charge was "wholly un-thinkable."

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