New City Investment Advisor To Fed Prison In Multimillion-Dollar Fraud

NEW CITY, NY — A New City investment advisor cheated elderly clients out of millions; now she will pay with years of her life.

Vania May Bell, the former comptroller of Executive Compensation Planners, Inc. (“ECP”), a registered investment advisor and financial planning firm located in New City, was sentenced to 80 months in prison for participating in a conspiracy with her father, Hector May, the former president of ECP, to defraud clients out of more than $11 million, Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced.

"Over two decades, Bell and her father Hector May ruthlessly orchestrated a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme," Williams said. "They pilfered the retirement savings of over 15 victims, including vulnerable aging couples, close friends, relatives, and an employment pension plan of a construction company. Bell now joins her father in prison to be held accountable for this devastating crime."

According to court documents, beginning in 1982, Hector May was the president of ECP and provided financial advisory services to numerous clients. In 1993, Bell joined her father at ECP, where she held various titles, including comptroller and chief compliance officer. ECP worked with a broker dealer, for which May became a registered representative in 1994.

In order to obtain money from the victims’ securities accounts with the broker, May advised the victims to use money from those accounts to have ECP, rather than the broker she represented, purchase bonds on their behalf.

With Bell’s assistance, May guided the victims to withdraw money from their broker accounts and then send that money to the ECP Custodial Account by wire transfer or check.

SEE ALSO:

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• Financial Advisor, Daughter Defrauded Investors Of $11M: USAG

During times when ECP was running out of cash and needed to make supposed bond interest payments to avoid exposing the Ponzi scheme, Bell reached out to victims directly. After the victims sent money to the ECP Custodial Account, May and Bell did not use the money to purchase bonds. They instead transferred the money 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 Ponzi scheme and conceal the fraud. Using these methods, from the late 1990s through March 9, 2018, Bell and May induced victims to forward them more than $11,400,000.

To help perpetuate the fraud, they created fake "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 the victims and the amounts of interest the victims were supposedly earning on the bonds.

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

As part of the scheme, May drove to the home of a stroke victim he and Bell had been defrauding of millions of dollars in order to retrieve the legitimate statements being sent by the broker and later replaced them with Bell’s phony consolidated statements purporting to show the victim’s investments had been growing.

Bell played a key role in the scheme. She processed and spent client money from ECP’s custodial and operating accounts, watching the money dwindle and helping her father achieve more thefts over several years. Bell faked account statements that made people believe that they held millions, even when she knew that their money was gone. She also used her role as chief compliance officer and comptroller to help conceal the fraud from the broker.

In an audio recording made in 2016, after more than 16 years in the scheme, Bell said the following about her father: "I am his daughter, I am his confidante, I am the backbone that saves his butt in every promise he makes out of there. . . . The virtue of my knowledge is just by the presence of time here. There is nothing in this office that I don’t know, haven’t touched, haven’t seen, haven’t done, haven’t taught. Everyone is always intimidated by the time I come in or the things I get to do personally that I’ve earned over time based on my life circumstances. It’s what we call the perk of being the boss’s daughter."

At the end of 2016, May thanked Bell in a handwritten note: “My Dearest Vania: you have always been there for me. You always watch my back. I couldn’t do it without you[.] Love, Daddy.”

In addition to prison, the 57-year-old was ordered to serve three years of supervised release, pay $8,041,233 in restitution and forfeit $589,942.

May, who pled guilty in a separately in December of 2018 to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and investment advisor fraud, was sentenced in July of 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.

Williams praised the investigative work of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, Special Agents of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI.