Daughter Pleads In New City Father-Daughter Investment Fraud

NEW CITY, NY — The daughter who helped run a crooked New City-based family investment firm that bilked clients of around $11 million pleaded guilty Wednesday, said Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

She had been indicted in 2019, the day after her father, an Orangeburg resident, was sentenced to 13 years in prison for defrauding clients out of more than $11 million in a Ponzi scheme that prosecutors said was marked by extreme cunning and ruthlessness.

"As Vania May Bell admitted, for years, she and her father, Hector May, violated the trust of ECP’s clients by taking their money intended for investments and instead spending it for personal and business expenses as part of an illegal Ponzi scheme," Williams said in the announcement. "In total, Bell and May stole more than $11 million from over 15 victims that included a pension plan, and vulnerable and elderly individuals. Now, she has confessed to her crime and faces significant time in prison."

Beginning in 1982, May was the president of Executive Compensation Planners Inc., providing financial advisory services to numerous clients. In 1993, BELL joined ECP, where she held various titles including comptroller and chief compliance officer.

ECP worked with a broker-dealer, of which May became a registered representative in 1994. The broker-dealer handled the buying and selling of securities for clients of its registered representatives, including May's.

The broker-dealer and associated clearing firms maintained securities accounts for ECP’s clients and, through those accounts, held ECP’s clients’ money, executed their securities trades, produced account statements reflecting activity in the clients’ accounts, and forwarded these account statements to ECP’s clients.

To steal their money, May advised several clients that they should use funds from those accounts to have ECP, rather than the broker-dealer, purchase bonds on their behalf.

He told them that by purchasing bonds through ECP directly, they could avoid transaction fees.

Because May lacked the authority to withdraw funds directly from his clients’ accounts with the broker-dealer, he persuaded his victims to withdraw the money themselves and forward it to an ECP “custodial” account saying that he would use it to purchase bonds on their behalf.

At times, May falsely represented that the funds they were withdrawing were the proceeds of prior bond purchases May had made.

With Bell’s assistance, May guided the victims to make the withdrawals and send the money to the ECP Custodial Account by wire transfer or check. After the victims sent their money to the ECP Custodial Account, May and Bell transferred it to ECP’s “operating” account and spent it on business expenses, personal expenses — and to make payments to certain victims in order to perpetuate the scheme and conceal the fraud.

In some cases Bell and May used victims’ funds to pay other victims, pretending they were bond interest payments. In other cases, May used victims’ funds to cover when other victims wished to withdraw funds from their accounts.

Bell and May also created phony “consolidated” account statements that they issued through ECP and sent to the victims. These “consolidated” account statements purported to reflect the victims’ total portfolio balances and included the names of bonds May falsely represented that he purchased for them and the amounts of interest they were supposedly earning.

In order to create the phony consolidated account statements, May provided Bell with bond names and false interest earnings, and Bell created ECP computerized account statements and had them distributed to the victims.

Bell processed the victims’ payments for the purported bonds, entered them in a computerized accounting program, and, through that program, kept track of how she and her father received and spent the stolen money.

In this way, from the late 1990s through March 9, 2018, Bell and May induced victims to forward them more than $11,400,000, prosecutors said.

May, now 80, pleaded guilty in a separate case in December 2018, to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and investment advisor fraud. SEE: Rockland Financial Planner Pleads In $11 Million Theft

He was sentenced on July 31, 2019, to 13 years in prison. He was also ordered to serve three years of supervised release, pay $8,041,233 in restitution and forfeit $11,452,185.

Bell, 57, of Montvale, New Jersey, pleaded guilty Wednesday to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000 or twice the gross gain or loss from the offense. Sentencing before Judge Nelson S. Román has been scheduled for July 7.

The maximum potential sentence in this case is prescribed by Congress and is provided here for informational purposes only, as any sentencing of the defendant will be determined by the judge.

Williams praised the outstanding investigative work of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, Special Agents of the United States Attorney’s Office, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The criminal case is being prosecuted by the Office’s White Plains Division. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Vladislav Vainberg, Margery Feinzig, and Derek Wikstrom are in charge of the prosecution.