JPMorgan Bankers Arrested for Stealing $400K From Dead Elderly Customers

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]Sir, please.

[00:00:01]>> NYPD, step away from the desk. Hands where I can see them now.

[00:00:04]>> What Jonathan Francis and Dion Allison did would be described as one of the most calculated bank frauds in Brooklyn's recent history.

[00:00:14]These two personal bankers didn't rob strangers. They robbed their own elderly customers. And eight of those customers were already dead.

[00:00:24]>> Grant lost any conspiracy. $400,000.

[00:00:26]Dormant accounts of elderly and deceased clients. ATM cards issued from this branch.

[00:00:30]>> Please, anyone could have logged into those works.

[00:00:32]>> 48 hours from this moment, Jonathan Francis would be sitting across from two NYPD detectives in a Brooklyn precinct, listening to them recite the exact branch addresses, the exact ATM numbers, and the exact dates of more than 350 withdrawals. He had spent 14 months convincing himself nobody would ever connect to him.

[00:00:56]The investigation that put him there had been running for months inside the bank's own audit servers. $400,000, 15 accounts. Eight of the account holders already in the ground. And every single query had come from his workstation. Before we go any further, I have to ask, when was the last time anyone actually checked the bank account of an elderly relative who lives alone?

[00:01:24]Drop a comment and tell me. And if you're not subscribed yet, hit that button now.

[00:01:31]We cover the cases the mainstream financial press buries on page 9 every single week. Jonathan Francis was born in Brooklyn in the late 1980s. The only son of a Haitian American family that had landed in Flatbush when his parents were still in their 20s. His father drove a livery cab on the overnight shift out of a base on Nor Strand Avenue. His mother worked as a home health aid for a private agency that contracted with families in Crown Heights and Park Slope. There was never a lot of money in the apartment on Martin Street, but there was always a ledger. His mother kept a spiral notebook in a kitchen drawer where she logged every grocery receipt, every metro card refill, every utility bill, every dollar sent home to a cousin in Porto Prince.

[00:02:24]Jonathan watched her balance that notebook against the bank statement on the first Saturday of every month for 18 years. He understood before he understood almost anything else that money was something you counted twice.

[00:02:40]He went to public school through 8th grade, then tested into a specialized commercial high school in downtown Brooklyn where the curriculum tracked toward accounting, bookkeeping, and what the catalog called financial services.

[00:02:56]His teachers wrote that he was quote polite, attentive, and unusually comfortable around numbers for a student of his background.

[00:03:07]One handwritten note in his junior year file described him as quote, "The kind of young man you can imagine in a tie.

[00:03:17]He graduated in the spring of 2007 with a 91 average and a recommendation letter to a City University business program in Manhattan.

[00:03:28]He enrolled part-time and took a job stocking shelves at a Dwayne Reed on Empire Boulevard to pay for textbooks, $7.15 an hour.

[00:03:40]He worked the 400 p.m. to midnight shift four nights a week. Rode the number two train home, slept 5 hours, went to class, came back. He did that for almost 3 years.

[00:03:54]In the summer of 2010, a regional recruiter for JP Morgan Chase came to a job fair on the university's lower Manhattan campus, looking for what the recruiter called community-f facing talent for the bank's expansion into neighborhood anchor branches. Jonathan Francis sat across from her in a folding chair next to a pop-up banner, wearing the only suit he owned, a charcoal twobutton from a clearance rack on Fulton Mall. Three weeks later, an offer letter arrived in the mail. Personal banker trainee.

[00:04:30]Starting salary 38,400 a year, plus what the letter called referral incentive compensation.

[00:04:39]6 weeks of training at a Chase corporate facility in Westchester, then placement at a branch to be determined by district need. The letter was signed by a regional manager whose name Jonathan would later see appear in much smaller print on the bottom of an internal audit memo. He completed training in the late fall of 2010.

[00:05:04]The instructors at the Westchester facility marked him as quote detailoriented, calm under customer pressure and showing strong aptitude for the relationship management aspects of the personal banker role.

[00:05:19]His first placement was a branch in Midtown that the district considered a high volume training assignment. He spent eight months there opening checking accounts for parallegals and runners who came in on lunch breaks.

[00:05:32]In the summer of 2011, his district manager called him into a small office at the back of the branch and told him a position had opened up at the restoration plaza branch in Bedford Stent.

[00:05:45]It was, the manager said, a community branch, a neighborhood branch, the kind of branch where the customer base was older, more loyal, more rooted, and more dependent on the bank than anywhere else in the burrow.

[00:06:02]The manager said it would be a good fit.

[00:06:04]He said the bank needed someone the customers could look at and recognize.

[00:06:09]Jonathan Francis said yes before the manager finished the sentence. He was promoted to the Restoration Plaza branch in August of 2011. He was 23 years old.

[00:06:20]He wore a Navy tie everyday. His business cards read Jonathan Francis, personal banker. JP Morgan Chase, 1380 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, New York, 1112 hertz 16. He kept a stack of them in a small wooden tray on his desk and another stack in his jacket pocket. And on the night he received the first box of them, he sat on his mother's kitchen floor and showed her one. She held it under the light. She turned it over twice. She put it back in his hand and said, "In Haitian Creole, do not ever make me ashamed."

[00:07:01]For the first 8 months at Restoration Plaza, by every measurable account, Jonathan Francis was good at his job.

[00:07:10]His performance reviews from that period describe him as quote demonstrating initiative, building rapport with long tenured clients, and consistently exceeding referral targets for the branch.

[00:07:23]He learned the regulars. He learned the widows who came in on Wednesdays to deposit pension checks they did not trust to direct deposit.

[00:07:32]He learned the retired postal workers, the retired transit workers, the retired teachers, the church secretaries, the grandmothers who brought their grandchildren in and made the grandchildren shake his hand.

[00:07:47]He brought one of those grandmothers a chair from the back of the branch because the lobby chairs hurt her hip.

[00:07:55]He remembered her name. He remembered all of their names. That was the job.

[00:08:02]That was in fact the entire job.

[00:08:07]The restoration plaza branch at 1380 Fulton Street is not a normal Chase branch. It sits on the ground floor of the campus of the Bedford Stacent Restoration Corporation, the first community development corporation in the United States, founded in 1967 by a coalition that included Robert Kennedy and Jacob Javitz, built on the explicit premise that the financial system had spent decades extracting capital from black neighborhoods and that an institution had to be built brick by brick to keep capital inside one.

[00:08:45]The branch was in every literal sense the bank that was put there to undo what other banks had done. The customers who walked through the doors had been told their entire lives that this branch specifically was the branch that was on their side.

[00:09:02]The personal banker role at a branch like Restoration Plaza carried specific access. A personal banker could log into the bank's customer information system and pull up any account at the branch.

[00:09:16]The personal banker could see the full account history. The personal banker could see balances, transaction patterns, direct deposit sources, the dates of last in-person activity, the names of authorized signers, the listed beneficiaries, and the contact information on file.

[00:09:38]The personal banker could also issue ATM cards. The card issuing machine sat behind the teller line in a small back office room. A personal banker could emboss the card to any account at the branch, mail it to the address on file, or hand it over the counter to a customer who came in to claim a replacement.

[00:10:01]That access existed for a reason. It was the access required to do the legitimate job.

[00:10:08]A widow came in and said her husband had passed away and she needed a new card on the joint account. The personal banker could issue one. A grandmother came in and said she had lost her wallet. The personal banker could issue one. A retiree came in and said he never used his ATM card and wanted to cancel it.

[00:10:29]The personal banker could close it out.

[00:10:32]The bank's entire personal banker model was built on the assumption that the person sitting behind that desk was the one human being inside the institution who could be trusted to look at a customer's account and act in the customer's interest. The vulnerability inside that system was specific and known. The bank's internal logs recorded every database query, every card issuance, every workstation login, and every ATM transaction across the network. The logs existed. The logs were comprehensive. The logs were searchable, but the logs were not in the ordinary course of branch operations reviewed in real time. They were reviewed when something prompted a review. They were reviewed when a customer called. They were reviewed when a regulator asked.

[00:11:24]They were reviewed when an internal audit team flagged an anomaly. They were not reviewed on a Tuesday afternoon when a personal banker pulled up an account that did not belong to a customer he had ever met. They were not reviewed when that personal banker pulled up the same account a week later.

[00:11:44]They were not reviewed when an ATM card was embossed in the back office and walked out of the branch in the personal banker's jacket pocket. The logs caught everything. The logs caught it in the moment it happened. But the logs were silent until someone went looking. And there was one more thing the system did.

[00:12:07]The Social Security Administration by federal regulation deposits monthly benefits into the recipient's account on a fixed schedule based on the recipient's date of birth. The deposit hits the account whether the recipient is alive or not. It continues to hit the account until the Social Security Administration is notified of the death.

[00:12:30]The bank does not notify the Social Security Administration. The family is supposed to notify the Social Security Administration when the family does not because the family does not know because the account holder lived alone because the account holder had no immediate family because the funeral home filed the death certificate with the city, but no one ever filed it with anyone in Washington. When that happens, the checks keep coming month after month, year after year into an account no one is watching except the personal banker who knows exactly what to look for. The first query came out of Jonathan Francis's workstation at 3:41 p.m. on a Tuesday in early August of 2012.

[00:13:23]He pulled up an account belonging to an 83-year-old retired sanitation worker who lived on Decar Street, three blocks from the branch. The account had a balance of $41,200.

[00:13:38]The account had received a social security direct deposit on the third of every month for the previous 14 months.

[00:13:46]The account had not had a single other transaction in 9 months. The customer had not walked into the branch in over a year.

[00:13:54]Jonathan Francis ran that query, according to investigators, with another personal banker's workstation credentials.

[00:14:03]The other personal banker had walked away from her desk to get a cup of coffee.

[00:14:09]Jonathan logged her out of her own session, logged himself in under her name, and ran the search. The query was for accounts at the branch with balances above $25,000, no in-person activity in the previous 6 months, and a recurring monthly federal benefit deposit.

[00:14:28]The search returned a list. The list was not long. The list was specific. The list was the exact set of accounts the bank's own software had been designed to flag for relationship management outreach because those were the customers most at risk of moving their money to a competitor. Jonathan Francis was not looking at the list for the reason the software thought he was.

[00:14:54]He wrote names down on a small piece of yellow legal pad paper. He folded the paper into quarters.

[00:15:02]He put the paper in the inside pocket of his suit jacket. He hung the jacket on the back of his chair. He walked to the breakroom and got a glass of water and came back and helped the next customer in line with a checking account question. He went home that night on the number two train and did not say anything to his mother. Dion Allison was a personal banker at the same branch.

[00:15:29]Allison was 3 years older.

[00:15:32]Allison had been at Chase longer.

[00:15:35]Allison had a girlfriend in Georgia and was already talking about leaving New York.

[00:15:40]According to the indictment, Allison ran the same kind of queries from his own workstation.

[00:15:47]Allison and Francis compared lists. They picked the accounts they wanted. They focused on the accounts where the customer was elderly. The balance was high, the activity was non-existent except for the social security deposit, and there was no joint account holder.

[00:16:07]They focused in particular on the accounts where the customer had not been seen in person at the branch in over a year because the longer it had been, the more likely it was that the customer was not coming back. The more likely it was, in fact, that the customer could not come back. The first ATM card was embossed in the back office of the Restoration Plaza branch on a Friday afternoon in late August of 2012.

[00:16:36]The card was tied to the account of the 83-year-old retired sanitation worker on Decar Street.

[00:16:44]The card did not go to the account holder. The card did not go to any address on file with the bank.

[00:16:52]The card went into Jonathan Francis's jacket pocket and walked out of the branch at 5:00 p.m. and was handed off, the indictment alleged, to a 24year-old named Gregory Deso at a corner in Prospect Leffort's Gardens that same night. Desmo was not a Chase employee.

[00:17:12]Deso had never worked for the bank. Deso did not need to know how the system worked. He only needed to know how to use an ATM card. He went to a Chase ATM in Crown Heights at 11:40 p.m. that night, inserted the card, entered a four-digit PIN that had been set by Jonathan Francis at the issuance terminal, and withdrew $200.

[00:17:36]The transaction posted to the account at 11:41.

[00:17:41]The account belonged to a man who, the indictment would later note had been dead for 7 months.

[00:17:48]The withdrawals escalated through the fall of 2012. Francis and Allison issued more cards.

[00:17:57]The cards went to Dera Mo and to a 40-year-old named Carrie Phillips, also from Prospect Leffort's Gardens. The cards multiplied. At one point, the indictment alleged the crew was holding cards for at least eight different compromised accounts at the same time, rotating them between branch ATMs in Bedstey, Crown Heights, Flatbush, and East New York. The withdrawal pattern was always the same.

[00:18:27]$200, $500, a,000, 2,000, the maximum daily ATM limit. then move to the next card, then move to the next machine.

[00:18:41]Some nights, the indictment said, multiple cards from multiple compromised accounts ran at the same ATM within seconds of each other. By April of 2013, the operation had reached 42 withdrawals in a single month. 8 months in, three of the account holders whose money was being pulled from machines in Brooklyn were dead. By the end of the operation, the number was at least eight. Social security kept depositing. The bankers kept withdrawing.

[00:19:13]The families in the cases where there were families had no idea any of it was happening because the families had not known the accounts existed in the first place. The signs were there. They were not subtle.

[00:19:28]Jonathan Francis bought a new car in the spring of 2013.

[00:19:33]a used Infiniti sedan that he financed through a credit union that did not ask the same questions a Chase employee benefit might have asked.

[00:19:44]He started wearing better suits. He took his mother to a restaurant in Park Slope for her birthday in May and paid for the dinner in cash.

[00:19:55]He sent money home to a cousin in Haiti for the first time in his life. His co-workers noticed. One of them, a teller who had started at the branch a month after he did, would later tell investigators that she had wondered more than once where the money was coming from. She never said anything to a supervisor. The system was not built for tellers to say anything to supervisors.

[00:20:22]The system was built for personal bankers to be the people the tellers trusted.

[00:20:27]The internal audit system in theory should have caught the pattern within the first 60 days. A spike in dormant account queries from a single workstation followed by a spike in ATM card issuances from the same workstation followed by ATM activity on accounts that had previously had no ATM activity was the kind of pattern the bank's anomaly detection software was specifically designed to flag.

[00:20:56]But the software was tuned. The thresholds were set. The alerts ran on a monthly review cycle, not a daily one.

[00:21:05]And the alerts that did trigger in the early months of the operation were closed out by a regional risk officer who looked at the workstation logs saw that one of the queries had been run under another personal banker's credentials. the co-worker who had walked away from her desk to get coffee and concluded that the activity was either legitimate or was being committed by a different employee than the one investigators would eventually arrest.

[00:21:36]The audit trail, in other words, was pointing at the wrong person. For months, it kept pointing at the wrong person.

[00:21:45]In the late summer of 2013, a granddaughter in Atlanta got a phone call from a probate attorney in Brooklyn.

[00:21:53]The granddaughter's grandmother had died 11 months earlier in a nursing home in East New York. The grandmother had lived alone before the nursing home in a railroad apartment on Hollyy Street, and the granddaughter had been the only living relative.

[00:22:10]The probate attorney was calling because he was trying to close out the estate and had pulled records from three banks.

[00:22:17]And one of them, JP Morgan Chase, the Restoration Plaza branch, was showing an account with a balance that did not match what the granddaughter had reported on the inventory forms she had filed with the surrogate's court. The attorney asked the granddaughter to call the bank. The granddaughter called the 800 number on the back of an old statement.

[00:22:41]The customer service representative looked up the account. The representative said the balance was lower than the granddaughter expected because there had been quote regular ATM activity on the account over the previous year. The granddaughter said her grandmother had not made an ATM withdrawal in over a decade. Her grandmother had not used an ATM card in her life. The customer service representative put the call on hold. The call was transferred to a fraud unit.

[00:23:13]The fraud unit pulled the transaction history. The transaction history showed 350ome withdrawals across 14 months. The granddaughter on the phone in Atlanta said her grandmother had been dead for almost a year.

[00:23:30]The fraud unit opened a case. The case was assigned to an internal investigator named, and I am using a fictional name here because the case file does not appear in the public docket. Let us call her Iet Bremer.

[00:23:47]Bremer was a senior investigator in the bank's global security and investigations group. She had been at the bank for 19 years.

[00:23:57]She had worked check fraud, wire fraud, and what the bank internally called insider malfeasants cases. She pulled the workstation logs for every query run against the dead grandmother's account for the previous 18 months. She pulled the ATM card issuance records. She pulled the surveillance camera footage from the ATM machines where the withdrawals had been made.

[00:24:22]The queries traced back to two workstations at the Restoration Plaza branch. The ATM card had been issued from the same branch. The surveillance footage from the ATM machines showed a young man in his early 20s, not Jonathan Francis, not Dion Allison, repeatedly inserting the card, entering the PIN, and walking away with cash.

[00:24:46]The young man's face was clear in the footage.

[00:24:50]The young man's face was not in any of the bank's employee databases.

[00:24:56]Ivette Bremer ran the workstation logs sideways. She ran them against every other account at the Restoration Plaza branch. She started finding patterns.

[00:25:07]By the end of September 2013, Iet Bremer had a list. The list was 15 accounts.

[00:25:16]Eight of them belonged to people who were dead.

[00:25:19]The other seven belonged to people who were elderly, isolated, and had no idea their accounts had been emptied.

[00:25:27]The total stolen by Bremer's reconstruction was approximately $400,000.

[00:25:34]The withdrawals had been made over more than 350 separate ATM transactions.

[00:25:41]Every single one of them traced back through workstation logs and card issuance records to two personal bankers at the Restoration Plaza branch.

[00:25:51]Bremer escalated the case to the bank's corporate security division. The corporate security division contacted the New York Police Department. The NYPD assigned it to a financial crimes unit working in coordination with the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office.

[00:26:09]By October, an assistant district attorney named Adam Zion had been briefed. By November, a grand jury had been convened. By early December, the indictment was drafted. By the third week of December, the unsealing was scheduled. Jonathan Francis was at that point still showing up to work every morning at the Restoration Plaza branch.

[00:26:32]He had no idea any of it was happening.

[00:26:36]Dion Allison had already left the bank and moved to Marietta, Georgia, where he was working at an unrelated job and living in a rented condo. Allison had stopped issuing cards months earlier. He thought he was finished. He thought in the way every person inside a longunning fraud eventually thinks that the silence of the institution meant the institution had not noticed.

[00:27:03]The physical evidence in the case was almost entirely digital.

[00:27:07]The bank's own audit logs pulled across the 14 months of the operation documented every step, every workstation login, every dormant account query, every record of an ATM card being embossed and to which account it was tied. The ATM network's transaction logs cross-referenced against the surveillance footage from each individual machine showed the faces of the people physically making the withdrawals.

[00:27:38]The faces were Phillips and Desra Mo.

[00:27:41]The audit trail behind them was Francis and Allison. Stories like this one don't get the coverage they deserve. The mainstream business press covers Wall Street fraud when the numbers cross $und00 million.

[00:27:57]They do not cover what happens at a neighborhood branch when a personal banker decides that a dormant account belonging to a dead grandmother is just money sitting there waiting to be moved.

[00:28:09]If you want more coverage of cases like this one, subscribe and hit the notification bell.

[00:28:16]We cover the financial crimes that get buried in the back of the local section every single week. The digital evidence was supplemented by a small amount of physical evidence.

[00:28:28]Bremer's team pulled the call logs from the desk phones at the Restoration Plaza branch and found multiple calls between Jonathan Francis's desk phone and a cell phone number registered to Gregory Desrao. They pulled the bank's internal email and chat logs and found exchanges between Francis and Allison that, while careful, were not careful enough.

[00:28:52]One message sent from Francis to Allison on a Wednesday in March of 2013 read, "Did you see what came in this morning?"

[00:29:02]There was no context for what had come in. There was however a customer information system query log from Francis's workstation timestamped 7 minutes before the message showing him looking at the account of an 86year-old woman whose social security check had cleared at 6 a.m. that day.

[00:29:25]The assistant district attorney's office issued subpoenas to the cell phone carriers used by Francis, Allison, Phillips, and Desra Mo.

[00:29:35]The text messages came back over a period of weeks. Investigators reconstructed exchanges that escalated in incrimination across the 14 months of the operation.

[00:29:48]An exchange between Francis and Phillips dated October of 2012.

[00:29:54]Pick up at 5 by the train which won Udica. How much in it enough? An exchange between Allison and Daramo dated January of 2013.

[00:30:05]Don't run them all at the same machine, bro.

[00:30:09]Why? Come on, man. Think. Okay. Okay. An exchange between Francis and Allison dated April of 2013 after the month in which 42 withdrawals had been logged. April was crazy. I know we should slow down. They did not slow down.

[00:30:29]The operation continued through the spring and summer of 2013.

[00:30:34]The investigators watching it unfold in retrospect across the audit logs would note that the volume actually increased after Allison's text suggesting they slow down.

[00:30:47]There is a particular kind of momentum that an operation like this acquires.

[00:30:51]The longer it runs without consequence, the more the people inside it become convinced that there will not be a consequence.

[00:31:00]They are right in fact until the day they are wrong. The smoking gun in the end was not any single piece of evidence.

[00:31:09]The smoking gun was the pattern.

[00:31:12]Investigators built a timeline that showed hour by hour the choreography of the operation.

[00:31:19]A query from Francis's workstation at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. A card embossed at 3:15 p.m. the same day.

[00:31:29]A text message from Francis to Phillips at 5:02 p.m. saying, "Pick up." A surveillance still from a Chase ATM in East New York at 11:18 p.m. showing Phillips inserting the card. a withdrawal of $2,000 posting to the account at 11:19 p.m. The account holder, a 79year-old widow named in the indictment only as Jane Doe 6, had been dead for 4 months.

[00:31:59]Her social security check had cleared that morning. That timeline repeated 350ome times across 14 months was the case.

[00:32:11]The arrests were staggered.

[00:32:14]Gregory Desra Mo was picked up first in early December of 2015 on a corner in Prospect Leffort's Gardens, not far from the apartment building he lived in. He was arraigned in Brooklyn Supreme Court before Justice Danny Chun.

[00:32:32]Jonathan Francis was arrested at his mother's apartment on Martin Street about a week later in the early morning.

[00:32:40]He was not at work that day. He had called out sick. He was wearing sweatpants and a white undershirt when two detectives and a uniformed officer knocked on the door. His mother answered. She did not speak much English to police. She let them in. The detectives walked into the living room.

[00:33:01]Jonathan was sitting on the couch with a bowl of cereal. The senior detective said his full name. Jonathan put the bowl down on the coffee table without looking down at it. Jonathan Francis, we have a warrant for your arrest. The charges are conspiracy in the fourth degree, grand lararseny in the second degree, grand lararseny in the third degree, and falsifying business records in the first degree. Do you understand?

[00:33:28]My mother is here. I understand that, sir. We can step into the kitchen. We are going to need you to stand up and put your hands behind your back. Can I get dressed? One of our officers will go with you. This is about the bank. It is.

[00:33:43]I want a lawyer. He did not say anything else. He stood up. He let the officer follow him into the bedroom. He put on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. He walked back out into the living room with his hands at his sides.

[00:34:00]His mother was sitting in a kitchen chair with her hand over her mouth.

[00:34:04]Jonathan did not look at her.

[00:34:07]The detective said her son's name again and asked him to turn around. Jonathan turned around. The handcuffs went on.

[00:34:16]The senior detective said the rest of the Wright's advisory in a flat voice.

[00:34:22]Jonathan said nothing. They walked him out of the apartment and down the brownstone steps and into the back of an unmarked sedan.

[00:34:31]His mother was still sitting in the chair. She did not get up. She did not say a word. The last words Jonathan Francis spoke inside that apartment were the words, "I want a lawyer."

[00:34:45]Dion Allison was arrested in Marietta, Georgia in late December 2015 on a federal extradition hold filed by the Brooklyn DA's office. He waved extradition. He was flown back to New York and arraigned before Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Cassandra Mullen.

[00:35:06]Bail was set at 25,000 bond or 15,000 cash. He posted he went home to a relative's apartment in Queens to await trial.

[00:35:18]Carrie Phillips, the fourth defendant, remained at large at the time of the indictment's public announcement and was named in the press release as still being sought.

[00:35:29]The announcing officials were Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson and NYPD Commissioner William J. Bratton.

[00:35:37]Thompson stood at the podium and said the defendants had betrayed not only their employer, but the most vulnerable customers their employer had been put in that neighborhood specifically to serve.

[00:35:50]Bratton stood next to him and said in a line that would be quoted by every local paper that ran the story that the defendants failed to conceal their deceitful tracks. He did not elaborate.

[00:36:03]He did not have to. The audit trail was the case. The 4-count indictment unsealed in Brooklyn Supreme Court in December of 2015 charged Jonathan Francis, Dion Allison, Carrie Phillips, and Gregory Desrao with conspiracy in the fourth degree under New York Penal Law, section 105.10.

[00:36:28]Grand lararseny in the second degree under section 155.40.

[00:36:33]grand lararseny in the third degree under section 155.35 and falsifying business records in the first degree under section 175.10.

[00:36:45]The top count grand lararseny in the second degree carried a maximum sentence of 15 years in state prison.

[00:36:54]Francis and Allison pleaded not guilty at arraignment. The cases were assigned for further proceedings. Defense attorneys filed the standard motions.

[00:37:05]The prosecution turned over discovery, the workstation logs, the ATM transaction histories, the surveillance stills, the text messages, the cell phone records, the internal bank audit memos. The discovery package, by one estimate cited in the early proceedings, ran to several thousand pages.

[00:37:27]JP Morgan Chase in a public statement issued through a corporate spokesperson said the bank had been cooperating fully with the district attorney's office and the social security administration since the moment the internal investigation had identified the scheme.

[00:37:43]The bank committed to reimbursing affected customers. their estates were applicable and the federal government for any social security funds that had been improperly withdrawn after the death of the account holder. The bank declined to comment on the specific defendants, citing the pendency of the criminal case. The families of the deceased account holders in the cases where families could be located were notified by the district attorney's office and by the bank.

[00:38:13]Some of those families learned for the first time that their elderly relative had even had an account at Chase.

[00:38:21]One granddaughter, the same granddaughter in Atlanta, whose call to the customer service line had triggered the investigation in the first place, gave a statement to a local reporter that ran on the day of the indictment.

[00:38:34]She said, "My grandmother worked her whole life. She raised three children on a sanitation worker's pension. She did not have a lot of money, but what she had she earned, and it sat in that bank for almost a year after she died, while those men took it out of an ATM $200 at a time. She said the part of it that she could not stop thinking about was not the money. The part of it she could not stop thinking about was that the bank that her grandmother had trusted had been the place from which the people who knew her grandmother was dead had been the ones taking it. The procedural posture of the case in the period after the indictment became complicated by a fact outside any of the defendants's control.

[00:39:22]Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson, who had personally announced the indictment, died unexpectedly in office in October of 2016.

[00:39:32]The case was transferred within the office.

[00:39:36]Acting District Attorney Eric Gonzalez inherited the file along with hundreds of others.

[00:39:43]The case was not high-profile enough in the context of the office's overall case load to receive the kind of accelerated attention it might have received under the original DA who had brought it. It moved through the system the way most cases move through the system, slowly with continuences, with motion practice, with the ordinary attrition of a court calendar that handles tens of thousands of felony matters a year.

[00:40:13]The final dispositions for Jonathan Francis and Dion Allison are not present in the publicly available reporting that this episode is built on.

[00:40:22]What is present and what is the part of the case that matters most for the purposes of understanding what happened is the structure of what they did. Two young personal bankers working inside a branch that had been placed in their neighborhood specifically to serve as a corrective to a half ccentury of financial extraction from that neighborhood. used the access that came with the title personal banker to identify the customers at the branch who were least able to look back at them.

[00:40:55]They selected the elderly. They selected the isolated. They selected eight separate times customers who were already dead. They they issued cards.

[00:41:07]They walked the cards out of the branch.

[00:41:11]They handed the cards to two men in Prospect Leffort's gardens. The men ran the cards through Chase ATMs across Brooklyn 350 times across 14 months.

[00:41:24]Approximately $400,000 left the accounts.

[00:41:29]Not one cent of it left for any reason that resembled the reason the bank had given them the access in the first place.

[00:41:37]The customers whose money was stolen included by the indictment's accounting retired sanitation workers, retired transit workers, retired postal workers, a church secretary, a former teacher, and a number of widows who had outlived their husbands and outlived their savings expectations and had been in the years before they died or in the years they had been forgotten.

[00:42:07]the customers most loyal to the branch that became the instrument of their loss.

[00:42:13]The granddaughter in Atlanta described her grandmother in a single sentence in the local press. She said the woman had banked at that branch since the day it opened. She had been a customer there for 46 years.

[00:42:28]She had trusted the people behind the desks at Restoration Plaza with every dollar she had ever saved. and the title on the business card of the man who had taken those dollars in $200 increments out of an ATM machine on Udica Avenue at 11:40 p.m. on a Friday night, 4 months after she had been buried in a cemetery in Cypress Hills, was the title personal banker. The case sits, even in the absence of a public final disposition, as one of the cleanest illustrations on the record of a particular kind of institutional failure.

[00:43:05]The bank's audit logs caught the operation in real time. The bank's audit logs were silent in real time because nobody was watching the audit logs. The bank's anomaly detection software flagged early irregularities. The flags were dismissed because the workstation under which one of the early queries had run belonged to a c-orker who had walked away to get coffee.

[00:43:31]The institution that had been built specifically to anchor capital inside a black neighborhood employed two young men, both of them from that neighborhood. Both of them the children of immigrants who had counted every dollar twice and gave them the keys to the back office. They used the keys.

[00:43:51]They used them for 14 months. They used them 350 times. Eight of the people whose accounts they used the keys to access were dead before they started. By the time it ended, more were. What happened at the Restoration Plaza branch between August of 2012 and October of 2013 was not in the end a complicated crime. It was simple. It was a betrayal of the precise relationship the institution had been built to protect.

[00:44:25]And the only reason anyone ever knew it happened at all is that a granddaughter in Atlanta got a phone call from a probate attorney in Brooklyn one afternoon in the summer of 2013 and decided to make a phone call of her own.

[00:44:41]This case was disturbing.

[00:44:44]But the case right here on the side of your screen, the one with the badge and the body camera, is something else entirely. Click it now.