From the pages of sober financial journals to Hollywood’s slapstick-econ adaptation of The Big Short, commentators often note that no American banks were indicted in the wake of the 2008 financial cave-in. Hoop Dreams director Steve James is here to say that’s not true. In May 2012, New York’s district attorney brought charges against Abacus Federal Savings Bank and 19 of its employees.
The case was little covered at the time, and while its outcome is a matter of public record, James prefers that reviewers not reveal whether the verdict was guilty, innocent, or mixed. That’s because his Abacus: Small Enough to Jail is a compelling non-fiction thriller. It should engross most viewers, even those who’ve resisted learning what a subprime mortgage is.
As it happens, Abacus didn’t deal in subprime. The Chinatown-based bank also didn’t package its mortgages into the sort of financial instruments that made The Big Short‘s machinations so arcane. In fact, the bank had one of the lowest default rates in the country.
The problem was a loan officer, Ken Yu, who asked borrowers for bribes and falsified income statements for mortgage applications. His activities were hard to track, because, as the film explains, Chinatown residents are more likely to make cash transactions than the average American consumer. Also, Yu spoke a dialect that even most of his fellow Abacus employees didn’t understand.
That includes Jill Sung and Vera Sung, the English-speaking, Connecticut-raised sisters who had inherited day-to-day operations from their father, one of the bank’s founders. Shanghai-born but all-American, Thomas Sung is a devotee of It’s a Wonderful Life, an affection James could hardly help but exploit. Thomas Sung even once halted a bank run with the aplomb of James Stewart’s George Bailey.