Jill Sung was CEO of Abacus Federal Savings Bank- The only bank indicted after the 2008 financial crises. Other MUCH LARGER Banks were helped and bailed out while they were fined $20 billion for a $ 2 Trillion fraud.
The DA built up the case from a transaction which the bank had reported voluntarily and promptly. The surprising thing is none of the "fraudulent" beneficiaries defaulted.
“It has taken a while because the case went on for five years when we were not able to do the business we wanted to, so it’s taken about a year to rebuild, to establish contacts with contracts, with our counterparties because no one wants to do business with a bank that’s indicted,” Jill Sung
5 years of grueling court room presentations and false testimony by the actually guilty employee ( who was later punished) took a heavy toll on her personal life- there was NO personal life. It was only "the case".
Abacus won! And in the process filmmaker Steve James in collaboration with PBS’s investigative documentary series Frontline made an award winning documentary of this fight. It’s called Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
“To go from being accused [of fraud] to being part of an Oscar-nominated documentary is very odd,” says Jill Sung