For Top J. David Execs, Life Since the Fall Has Been Mixed Bag
In J. David & Co.’s heyday, executive Mark Yarry fancied himself something of a highly visible traveler, hopscotching the world and touting the investment firm’s foreign currency trading to would-be investors in dozens of countries.
Today, Yarry is in self-imposed exile, living in a studio apartment adjoining a large, half-empty country-style mansion somewhere in southern France. He says his days are spent cataloguing a large stamp collection for a French aristocrat.
His only traveling consists of monthly visits to a London dentist--he has trouble with an old bridge--and regular visits to his wife and two children, who are “living someplace comfortably away from it all.”
Like his former colleagues at the once prosperous J. David & Co., Yarry now is trying to put J. David behind him.
“I’m living day by day,” said Yarry. “The pay stinks, but the living’s great.”
Yarry calls his decision in March to leave the United States “the smartest decision I ever made.” He said he left to avoid the rash of publicity and lawsuits that later were heaped on him.
Other former J. David executives and staffers tell similar tales of their post-J. David lives. Most have remained in San Diego, although some have uprooted their families and traveled to new environs.
Like the investors they recruited and serviced, these staffers thought that J. David was the proverbial pot of gold.
They lived the good life on handsome salaries. So when the La Jolla investment firm collapsed and their fantasy life styles dissolved into reality, the 250 or so J. David employees were as stunned as the investors.
The impact in some cases has been devastating. As did the investors, employees lost homes and savings. But they also lost jobs.
And, for some, the effects linger.
“It’s like having a little number on your forehead: ‘I worked for J. David,’ ” said one former employee.
“There’s not a day that has passed that I haven’t thought about J. David,” said one former senior official. “And when you run into someone who you worked with there, the first thing you talk about is J. David.”
“I don’t brag about my work at J. David,” said a one-time executive. “There’s little sympathy for former J. David people. We all want to get it out of our system, and sometimes you dwell on this so long it affects other things you’re doing. It’s a curse everyone has to live with, even though we had nothing to do with the fraud part.”
For that reason, most former J. David executives and employees do not want their names to appear in newspaper stories.
“It serves absolutely no purpose to talk about it (publicly). It’s a private thing now,” said one former J. David executive who left San Diego and moved to the East Coast after he lost more than $350,000 in the firm.
“We lived through eight months of that B.S. and now the money’s gone, so let’s get on with our lives,” he said.
Not all former executives and staff are trying to forget their J. David experience, though.
“I want to remember why it happened,” explained a top executive who left San Diego last spring and relocated to Colorado.
“I want to be a smarter man and not ever work for a company where the principal shareholder creates this type of problem,” he said. “I want to analyze it, benefit from the experience, go on with my life and help my family--which lost more than $1 million--recover financially.”
For the most part, members of the upper echelon at J. David seem to have landed on their collective feet. Many of them were unable to find lucrative salaried positions, however, and have formed their own legal, accounting and consulting firms.
“I made a lot of money working at J. David--in the low six figures--and it’s tough for a company to say, ‘Yeah, I’ll pay your wage,’ ” said one former high-ranking executive who has formed his own consulting firm. “It’s also tough to take a job at $55,900. You get used to living a certain life style, and it’s tough to go back.”
Some of the unskilled workers who were paid extraordinarily high salaries at J. David have found it virtually impossible to find jobs with comparable salaries.
One former highly paid J. David executive secretary now is working part time at a fashionable clothing store, selling men’s apparel.
“Life is the school of hard knocks, and if you’re unskilled for a job and you got it only because you knew someone (at J. David), then you’re going to have a hard time finding a job that pays like J. David did.”
Former workers are finding job problems other than just salary differences.
“When we start talking about our J. David experiences, potential employers often call their lawyers to interview us,” said one former J. David worker. “They want to know if we raised money for interbank (J. David’s foreign currency fund),” and how much time off the job any pending civil litigation may take.
At least one former J. David official has used his tenure at the firm to his own advantage. Nicholas F. Coscia, a former Securities and Exchange attorney specializing in enforcement, worked at J. David for only one month before he concluded that there might be widespread fraud.
Coscia, who wrote a stinging letter to the firm’s outside attorneys informing them of his observations, is now in private legal practice in Rancho Santa Fe.
And he has no qualms about clients knowing of his J. David work.
“I tell them that I didn’t aid and abet Dominelli. I made (the firm’s officials) consider the hard questions.”
Although she is not likely to generate sympathy from her former colleagues, Nancy Hoover, J. David (Jerry) Dominelli’s second-in-command and former live-in companion, also has had a rocky road since the firm’s downfall.
Hoover, viewed by some as both villain and victim in the J. David saga, is jobless, renting a house in North County and living on money borrowed from friends and family.
She has a small but strong circle of support, friends say.
“She’s not sitting around moping,” said one associate. “She is anxious to get back in the world as soon as possible, get a job and participate in things.”
There are some obstacles to hurdle before that, however.
First, Hoover faces a county grand jury indictment charging conspiracy and fraud in connection with contributions to Mayor Roger Hedgecock’s 1983 campaign. A preliminary hearing is scheduled on March 4.
Second, a federal grand jury is still investigating her role in J. David, although federal prosecutors have not specifically told her she is a target of the grand jury, according to Dwight Worden, Hoover’s attorney.
Third, her share of the estate’s assets that have been sold so far is less than $50,000, said Worden. Under an agreement with J. David bankruptcy trustee Louis Metzger, Hoover will receive 20% from the sale of certain J. David assets, to a maximum of $387,500.
Most of those assets, however, have not been sold and those that have been are selling for less money than expected, according to sources familiar with the case.
Hoover declined an in-depth interview. However, in a brief conversation recently, she told The Times that she resents getting “blamed for causing someone to have an inflated life style.”
Although her fall from grace has been difficult, she views the past year “like a divorce--you’re either stronger for it or an emotional wreck.”
Hoover’s visits to Dominelli in the Metropolitan Correctional Center are less frequent these days. Friends say that Hoover finds sojourns to the facility painful because Dominelli’s’ estranged wife, Antje, is often there, also visiting the jailed financier.
But that isn’t the only reason.
Hoover seems no longer to believe in Dominelli. Although there was always tension between the two--they often argued about Dominelli’s false claims that he had divorced his wife--Hoover had hesitated to criticize Dominelli publicly.
But when asked recently to sum up her feelings about her one-time companion, Hoover sighed, “Jerry lied when he didn’t need to, and he lied about some things that weren’t important.”
