Former President of NAACP Gets 6-Month Sentence for Loan Fraud

The former president of a local NAACP chapter was sentenced Wednesday to six months in jail and ordered to pay more than $63,000 for lying on a home loan application he submitted to a thrift where he worked as a high-ranking executive.

Anthony M. Essex, who headed the Los Angeles branch of the civil rights group, also was ordered by U.S. District Court Judge Robert Kelleher to serve 640 hours of community service and five years’ probation for providing falsified W-2 and 1040 tax forms to Founders Savings & Loan Assn. for the loan in 1984.

He will begin serving his jail term on or before Aug. 1.

Essex, 33, pleaded guilty in March to three counts of defrauding Founders, a now-insolvent thrift where he worked as a vice president and loan administrator in 1984 and 1985. He admitted he both exaggerated his income to obtain a $121,500 home loan and knowingly filed a false commercial loan application for a friend identified as Janet Caldwell. Both have defaulted on the loans.

In return for the guilty pleas, the U.S. attorney’s office dropped seven other fraud charges it had filed against Essex, a civil rights firebrand who was the youngest person ever to lead the local NAACP chapter. He lost the chapter presidency in a 1989 election.

Essex also has agreed to work with the federal government in its investigation of Founders’ collapse--and he had hoped his cooperation would help him to avoid a jail term.

“I would like to express my deepest regrets for my wrongdoing, for breaking the law,” Essex told Kelleher. “As God be my witness, I will never do this again . . . I ask that you temper your decision with mercy.”

In ordering Essex jailed, Kelleher insisted that “he’s not going to walk.”

“This kind of (crime) will not be tolerated,” said Kelleher, who also told Essex to pay the thrift $63,745.50. “It’s this type of self-dealing that has created the chaos” now gripping the S&L; industry and that forced Founders onto the U.S. government’s list of insolvent thrifts.

Defense attorney Robert Ramsey, who called the sentence “disappointing,” contended that Essex did not deserve jail time. Although neither said so directly, he and Essex have insinuated that Essex was targeted for investigation partly because he is black.

“There are people who line their pockets with gold” as a result of S&L; fraud, said Ramsey. “There are people driving his and her Rolls-Royces.”

Founders officials, who fired Essex in November, 1985, sparked the federal government’s investigation of Essex with several criminal referrals that accused him of improprieties, said Assistant U.S. Atty. Gregory D. Schetina.