Sentencing Ends the Saga of Massive J. David Swindle

The $80-million J. David & Co. investment swindle saga came to an end Tuesday with the sentencing of the last figure in the case.

Mark Robert Yarry, 52, of Southampton, England, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Earl B. Gilliam, who has presided over nearly seven years of J. David-related cases.

Yarry received three years in federal prison for his guilty plea earlier this year to mail fraud. He was also ordered to serve three years of probation for admitting to selling unregistered securities.

Yarry was managing director of the Montserrat-based J. David Banking, part of the scam that promised investors exorbitant profits from overseas investments.

The massive Ponzi scheme engineered by J. David (Jerry) Dominelli in the early-1980s bilked hundreds of investors out of about $80 million and indirectly led to the ouster of Roger Hedgecock as mayor of San Diego.

Hedgecock resigned after two trials in Superior Court dealing with the alleged illegal financing of his campaign. Much of that money was tainted J. David funds. The charges led to a guilty verdict that was overturned on appeal.

Dominelli is serving a 20-year prison sentence for masterminding the Ponzi scheme, in which money from new investors was used to pay profits supposedly earned by longtime investors.

His girlfriend during the heyday of the La Jolla firm, former Del Mar Mayor Nancy Hoover Hunter, is serving a 6 1/2-year term in prison resulting from an eight-month trial in 1989.

Hunter’s trial was the longest in the history of the local federal courts, but prosecutors obtained convictions on only four of the 197 counts against her.

While a jury was unable to decide if Hunter was directly involved with misleading J. David clients, evidence presented in her trail detailed how millions of investors’ dollars were spent on race horses, European skiing vacations and sponsorships of race car teams.

Six people involved in the J. David scandal have been convicted in federal court.

The J. David & Co. case was one of the longest and most complicated criminal prosecutions in San Diego County. “It’s about time for us to move on to other things,” said Yarry’s prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Atty. George Hardy.

Hardy reported that civil action against J. David has led to the recovery of millions of dollars.

“Quite a number of the investors got a substantial amount of their money back . . . some as much as 85%,” he said.