Michael Wise – Silverado Savings & Loan
He blew up a Denver S&L. Then he moved to Aspen and started a Ponzi scheme.
Michael Wise was an icon of the savings and loan bust as the former CEO of Denver’s Silverado Banking. There he helped stick taxpayers with a $1 billion tab when the savings and loan collapsed in 1988.
Making this implosion world-famous was U.S. President George H.W. Bush’s son Neil, who got a regulatory wrist-slapping after serving on Silverado’s board.
Wise got off easy, too. He was ultimately acquitted on bank-fraud charges related to his personal loans from the thrift, but regulators barred him from the S&L industry.
In the end, Colorado’s biggest banking scandal resulted in just one conviction. That of the thrift’s majority shareholder, W. James Metz, who got a six-year prison sentence, but only had to serve six months of it.
For a time, Wise had come a long way from Emporia, Kan., where his parents raised hogs and cattle. He was smart, charismatic, impeccably groomed and always wearing the priciest of suits. He lived in a Tudor, country-club mansion befitting his aristocratic presence.
After the Silverado debacle, he moved on to Aspen, Colo., where he headed Cornerstone Private Capital, which made high-dollar, high-interest real estate loans in the local mansion market.
He essentially ran Cornerstone like a Ponzi scheme, fleecing nearly $9 million from his investors. In 1999, he pleaded guilty to wire fraud and received a 3-1/2-year prison sentence.
“I will work the rest of my life if necessary to pay back the money involved,” he wrote in a bizarre confession.
“I’ve hurt a lot of people,” he told the judge at his sentencing. “I’ve done major wrongs.”
Wise served his time a federal prison camp in Leavenworth, Kan., and was released in 2002. Then, inexplicably, he began running a mortgage company from St. Petersburg, Fla. just before the housing bust that set off the 2008 financial crisis.
Chris Likens, owner of Prairie Village, Kan.-based Nations Holding Co., the parent of CFIC Mortgage, claimed he hired him because he thought Wise was a talented businessman who deserved yet another chance. (It was actually his third chance, but back in those reckless days who was counting?)
CFIC had boasted about 350 branches in 48 states, but it shut down as the 2008 financial crisis loomed and Wise was out of a job.
On April 8 2009, Wise drove a rental car to the top floor of the parking garage at the Tampa International Airport. Surveillance cameras captured him nervously pacing and witnesses said he jumped. He died in an emergency room.