The One About the Chinatown Bank
Abacus Bank, in New York’s Chinatown, was under investigation until this year for fraudulent loan information, with the DA pitting the bank’s employees against it. A nefarious yet charming young man who can speak every kind of Chinese admitted to stealing money from a lovely young couple, but claims the management made him do it. BUT did they??? The bank was founded by an absolute fantasy model immigrant who started the whole business back when the Chinese immigrant population had no lawyers or banks that they could trust or depend on. BUT now it’s run by his 100% assimilated daughters. Were they in on it??
THEN we learn that actually the bank may have been making true statements about their clients’ incomes, when many of those same clients had been lying to the IRS for years because tax evasion is so rampant (I guess that’s probably going to be a problem when a community only has cash economy jobs available to them because of racism and/or cultural insularity).
We ALSO LEARN that actually most of these loans were really fucking reliable because (a) only a tiny fraction of them were wonky, in comparison to the big banks that sold shitty mortgages and (b) Chinese Americans tend to be really fucking good at paying back formal loans. AND THEN we learn that court budgets are so tight that the translators and interpreters in these court hearings are almost always doing a really shitty job because nobody understands what’s going on and it all goes on record.
Some really exciting tidbits about a previous employee who made away with $10 million and NEVER GOT CAUGHT! #WhereIsCarolLim? And that a Chinese woman was murdered and her apartment was cover-up-arson’ed because she didn’t pay back her money pool loan with members of her community. AND that the young husband who got hustled out of a two-year-salary down payment on a house that never happened is convinced that the only GOOD guy is actually the only guy who definitely 100% admitted to lying and stealing their money. Lots of folks think the whole case got blown out of proportion when it should have all been about the larger thieving banks instead of this tiny linchpin of the community, or about the raging tax evasion issue plaguing the Chinese community, depending on whom you ask.
Totally love the suggestive way we leave the young husband, who now hates everyone and will never trust banks or lawyers ever again, who dreams of creating schemes to get rich off others - the cancer of ill will metastasizing throughout humanity!
The moral here: If you’re a good guy, get everything in writing! If you’re a bad guy, don’t write anything down!