1 Innocent, Mistrial for 2 Others in Bank Fraud Case

A federal jury acquitted an Oklahoma oil contractor Tuesday on charges of scheming to defraud Continental Illinois National Bank & Trust Co., but failed to reach a verdict on two bank executives charged in the case.

U.S. District Judge Milton Shadur declared a mistrial after jurors said they were “hopelessly deadlocked.”

The government maintained during the 6 1/2-week trial that former banker William Patterson manipulated his two debt-plagued co-defendants, John Lytle and Jere Sturgis, in a scheme involving high-risk energy loans to save his own failing bank by defrauding Continental.

But the panel found Sturgis, an independent oil contractor from Tulsa, Okla., innocent of wire-fraud charges. Patterson and Lytle were charged with wire fraud and misapplication of funds.

Continental came to the brink of collapse in 1984, in part because of troubled energy loans, but the Chicago bank survived with help from a $4.5-billion federal rescue plan.

“What can I say? The dream came true,” Sturgis said after the innocent verdict was read. “I’m getting on the first plane” back to Oklahoma.

Lytle, a former Continental vice president who headed the Chicago bank’s energy-lending division, said, “I am very disappointed (about the mistrial). I had hoped for a resolution.”

Outside the courtroom neither Patterson, a vice president at Penn Square Bank in Oklahoma City until its collapse in 1982, nor his lawyer, Warren Bickford, had anything to say to reporters.