“This is not unusual, historically or otherwise,” says James. In this respect, they were like many other immigrant communities. The bank’s customers, many of them recent immigrants, came from a repressive society where financial dealings were based on trust, not paperwork, cash was favored over credit, and there was a blurry line between a gift and a loan. Whether or not racism was involved in the Abacus case, it is obvious that a certain amount of cultural insensitivity and misunderstanding definitely was. But it’s hard to look at that and not see the profound insensitivity.” “Racism like that is rarely intentionally meant, that someone in that position would set out in an overly racist way to treat these people the way they were treated. “There are certainly plenty of people who felt there was a racist aspect” to the perp walk, says James.

And I thought ‘this is how far they are taking things.’ They were willing to take things to the extreme.” “As much as I had worked in that office, I felt there was nothing I could do to stop this from happening.

The perp walk is a common practice in New York criminal justice circles, but the sight of over a dozen Asian men handcuffed and chained together seemed a deliberate attempt to humiliate them in the most hurtful, and in some eyes most racist, way. Sung is not engaging in hyperbole when she talks about “a show.” The most gasp-inducing sequence in James’ film is the “perp walk” of those indicted, with former Abacus employees marched through the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse in front of the New York media.

He wanted to have the first word out to the media, that’s why I felt they didn’t give us advance notice.” “ was going to be the first prosecutor to indict a bank. “I realized this was political, this was going to be a show,” she says. Sung alleges that the DA told the family of the indictment “literally one day before the indictment and the arraignment,” which meant the Sungs had no time to offer any kind of response. “I knew this was not how they normally go about things, this was not how cases were supposed to go,” says Chanterelle Sung, a lawyer who at one time worked for the same DA’s office which indicted her family. The only deal the DA offered the Sung family was to plead guilty to a felony and pay a large fine, which would have effectively meant the end of Abacus. Several of the defendants pled guilty, and agreed to testify for the prosecution. The district attorney’s office soon became involved, and in 2012 brought charges against the bank and 19 former employees, alleging they had inflated the income of mortgage applicants and falsified documents in order to obtain mortgages through the Federal National Mortgage Association, otherwise known as Fannie Mae. He was fired, as were two other crooked loan officers the bank discovered. “In his indictment he talks about how this is the first bank to be indicted, and he links it to the mortgage crisis, which is ridiculous, because Abacus refused to get into all the credit default swaps that were going on.”Ībacus’ troubles began in 2009, when a loan officer with the bank was accused of stealing money from a mortgage closing. and his office “saw this as a major PR move kind of case,” says filmmaker James. “ took a heavy-handed approach from the beginning, and refused to change their opinion.”ĭistrict Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. The case was “about this community, comprised of Chinese immigrants, and a lack of willingness to understand the community,” says Jiayang Fan, who wrote about Abacus for The New Yorker.

Abacus bank racism