Ex-broker pleads guilty to wire fraud
He lost $6 million in unauthorized trades from clients' account
Henry K. Lee, Chronicle Staff Writer Wednesday, October 24, 2001
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A former San Francisco stockbroker pleaded guilty yesterday to defrauding a wealthy Los Altos couple of $6 million in a stock-market scheme that backfired after he lost bonus money belonging to his wife.
Daniel Patrick O'Connell, 37, of San Clemente (Orange County) entered a guilty plea to three counts of wire fraud before U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco.
O'Connell, a former senior vice president who worked alone in the San Francisco branch of Spencer Trask Ventures Inc. of New York, could face 37 to 63 months in prison when he is sentenced on Jan. 29.
"I'm hoping the court will appreciate that Mr. O'Connell is doing everything he can to address what he did," defense lawyer Ed Swanson of San Francisco said outside court.
In February, O'Connell allegedly used $145,000 in bonus money his wife got from her employer, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., to make investments in high-tech stocks.
But his trading strategy failed, and O'Connell then withdrew $6 million in March and April from the account of his clients, Rajvir Singh, 55, and his wife, Swadesh, of Los Altos, according to a federal criminal complaint filed last month in U.S. District Court in San Francisco and unsealed yesterday.
"Rather than disclose his trading losses to his wife, the defendant decided to take money from one of the Singhs' Spencer Trask accounts and trade with it,
hoping to generate sufficient investment gains to replace his wife's bonus money in his own Spencer Trask account, and to replenish the Singhs' account with interest," the complaint said.
That failed as well, as O'Connell lost most of the money in "highly speculative trading," according to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which reached a settlement yesterday with O'Connell in a separate civil action.
By then, O'Connell had drawn the suspicion of officials at Charles Schwab, where he had opened a brokerage account in the name of a fictitious company. He allegedly transferred the Singhs' money in three installments of $2 million each, authorities said.
After Charles Schwab caught up with O'Connell, Swanson said his client approached the Singhs and then went to the FBI on his own, before any criminal investigation had begun.
Asked if O'Connell would be able to repay the Singhs, Swanson said, "He's going to do everything he can."
Under terms of the SEC settlement, O'Connell will be permanently barred from the brokerage industry but will not face civil penalties because he is expected to pay restitution in the criminal matter.
"This is an instance when a broker began with a small problem and made it into a much larger problem while violating numerous securities laws," said Robert Mitchell, SEC assistant district administrator in San Francisco.