Greed Makes the County a Big League of Con Games

These bad guys don’t use guns--they use telephones. They’re more concerned about banking hours in Switzerland than at the neighborhood savings and loan. Greed, they find, is an emotion more profitably exploited than fear.

They make all the thieves who have made Orange County the bank robbery capital of the country look like puny, pathetic underachievers by comparison.

They blithely accept seven- and eight-figure loans, never planning to repay them, from some of the same places that require most people to do everything but wear electronic collars before they can get a modest second mortgage.

These are the white-collar criminals.

This year has yielded a bumper crop of crime by members of the county’s business and professional elite, judging by the accusations of federal prosecutors.

Leading the 1988 list of alleged white-collar criminals is Robert Buceta. In just 11 months in 1983, he acquired a condo empire appraised at $85 million without having to pay a single dollar down, law enforcement authorities have charged.

The few banks that care to discuss their dealings with Buceta have claimed aggregate losses of more than $28 million.

Buceta, living and working out of posh Newport Beach quarters, was known to open business meetings with Bible readings and prayer. He was a small-time loan broker until he learned how to doctor financial statements and structure land purchases through straw parties he controlled, a maneuver that allowed him to grossly overstate property values in loan applications, according to charges.

He has pleaded innocent.

The family approach to white-collar crime may have reached its peak in the form of the Fisch family, late of Mission Viejo.

Father Joel, son Todd and mother Joan have pleaded guilty to running sophisticated telephone sales schemes in which they dangled promises of big profits in gold, silver and platinum in front of investors, who lost $8.5 million.

When local authorities were closing in on their operation, they simply moved, first to Washington, then to Canada, Boston and, finally, Miami.

They lured some of their victims along in part by claiming to work for a Parisian financier named J. Claude Le Vasseur--a name that son Todd admitted he had picked out of a Long Island phone book.

Todd, who pleaded for mercy by claiming that Dad “did this to me,” was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Mom was given probation. Patriarch Joel’s case is still pending.

Then there’s bank fraud.

The county now boasts the dubious distinction of being the base of operations for one of the first California executives ever charged with fraud in running a bank.

John L. Molinaro and Donald P. Mangano Sr., both owners of the now-defunct Ramona Savings & Loan Assn. of Orange, are facing charges, based on bank real estate dealings, that could theoretically land them in jail for more than 100 years.

The government alleges that they are responsible for up to $40 million in losses at Ramona.

Molinaro was caught last year trying to sneak out of the country under an assumed name, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and access to millions more in secret bank accounts in the Caribbean.

There are many, many more.

Of course, the victims of the white-collar criminals often seem unusually willing to be taken in. That is a phenomenon that led one judge, sentencing a local con man whose contemptibly insignificant $2-million take didn’t qualify for this article, to refer to the “get-rich-quick schemes that are floating around Newport Beach, and Orange County, and hangouts for weird people.”

It’s almost enough to make you bristle--and then wonder.