A former Vernon Hills village trustee who was a onetime rising star in Lake County politics was sentenced to 5 months in federal prison for bank fraud Thursday.
Bradley Berman pleaded guilty in January to charges that he orchestrated an elaborate check-kiting scheme involving two banks that defrauded one of the banks of more than $700,000 in 1988. Berman admitted to using two checking accounts registered in the name of his company, Berman International Transportation Inc., according to court documents.
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Marvin Aspen also sentenced Berman to two years of probation, including five months in a work-release program after he gets out of federal prison.
The prison sentence represents the low point of a once-promising career for Berman, a fixture in Lake County political lore. In a town where municipal politics have taken on a businesslike, solidly pro-growth agenda, he was a throwback to a more raucous time.
Once, when he was a village trustee, Berman tried unsuccessfully to oust the mayor and declare himself chief executive officer of the Village Board.
He was angry at then-Mayor Phil Ellis and his ally for boycotting a spate of Village Board meetings. One night Berman declared himself mayor and appointed two of his friends trustees. The coup was short-lived, however. Village attorneys overturned the decision.
After the sentence was handed down Thursday, even Berman’s former political enemies expressed sadness at the end of what once seemed to be a bright career.
“I think it’s terribly sad,” said Mary Ellis, wife of the former mayor and a member of the circle of Vernon Hills political insiders of the 1980s. “Nobody wishes that kind of problem on anybody, even your political enemies.”
In the early 1980s, Berman led a majority on the Village Board at a time when Vernon Hills was grappling with the issues of growth and development that were knocking on the door of central Lake County.
One of the board’s most frequent fights was about how village finances should be handled and, in particular, who should control municipal investments. Berman, the leader of an anti-Ellis majority on the board, wanted to be more active in managing finances, political activists recalled.
Ellis exercised what few powers he had as the chief executive and leader of a minority faction on the board, blocking Berman’s bid to get hold of the village purse.
“We’re being armchair quarterbacks here, looking at it after the fact,” Phil Ellis said Thursday. “But you wonder what might have happened. You don’t know, but you wonder.”
Berman’s political ascent was aborted by a nasty 1985 electoral loss to Ellis. After he was ushered out of local politics, Berman considered running for higher office.
He talked about running as a Democrat for Lake County treasurer, but he never filed for candidacy. Instead, local residents said, Berman in the late 1980s turned his attention to his business.
Berman’s indictment late last year thrust him back into the headlines. In January, Berman cut a deal with prosecutors. In his plea agreement, Berman admitted to an elaborate check-kiting scheme.
Berman admitted he had kept two checking accounts, one in the Affiliated Bank of Franklin Park and the other in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp. in Chicago.
Berman admitted that under the scheme, he wrote bad checks from one bank account and deposited them into the other to create large fictitious balances. Co-defendant Charles Patterson, an executive at the Hong Kong and Shanghai bank, helped devise and run the scheme, court documents show.
Berman and Patterson acknowledged they knew the checks transferred between the two accounts were drawn on insufficient funds, court records show.
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On June 30, 1988, when both accounts were closed, Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking lost $710,000 because of overdrafts in the checking account, according to court documents. Affiliated Bank of Franklin Park suffered no loss.
Patterson is scheduled to be sentenced by Aspen on Aug. 18.