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player ready...A former Chicago police officer who saw financial riches in foreign banking was convicted Tuesday of bilking hundreds of investors of more than $14 million by selling fraudulent certificates of deposit from a nonexistent bank.
Following a two-week trial, a federal jury deliberated only two hours before convicting Michael Randy, 52, formerly of Richton Park, on all 13 counts of mail fraud and money laundering.
The jury will return Wednesday as the government seeks the forfeiture of $1.6 million in assets from Randy, who has been in custody since December 1992 as a flight risk.
More than $2.5 million of Randy’s funds, including 39 American Impressionist oil paintings he bought for almost $1.5 million, have already been forfeited to the government.
Randy had kept the paintings in his God Is Real Church, which he ran out of his south suburban home. At the trial, his lawyer conceded that Randy doesn’t believe in the Internal Revenue Service and formed the church to circumvent tax laws.
The prosecution team-Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jacqueline Stern and David Glockner, FBI Special Agent Sherry Coon and Postal Inspector Phillip Headen-said that from 1989 to 1992 Randy sold more than $14 million in certificates of deposit in a bank in the Caribbean that didn’t exist.
Randy enticed investors, many of them pensioners and widows, by promising 14 percent returns, then double the going rate, on what he claimed to be safe, insured investments.
Instead, he “gambled” millions of dollars on highly speculative investments, including in a floundering company, spent $1.5 million on the artwork and lost $500,000 on a down payment on a $3.5 million mansion in Lake Geneva, prosecutors said.
Among the victims were the widow and three children of a 28-year-old man who was killed in an car crash; they lost $300,000 they received from the crash settlement. Another woman whose husband was killed in a fire lost $70,000 in insurance proceeds.
Authorities have recovered less than $5 million from Randy, so investors will likely get only a small fraction of the money back, prosecutors said.
In closing arguments Tuesday, Joseph Lopez, Randy’s lawyer, said Randy never intended “to burn investors” and argued the investors shared in the blame for being “about as greedy as they come.”
Randy worked undercover as a Chicago police officer on the “red squad” for eight years in the 1960s before he earned three doctorates, sold life insurance and became a stockbroker, Lopez said.