BANKING / FINANCE : Ex-Heritage Bank President Named to Eldorado Post

Herbert E. Slezinger has returned to Orange County’s banking community nearly a decade after leaving his post as president of the now defunct Heritage Bank in Anaheim, then the county’s biggest--and most troubled--bank.

Slezinger was appointed senior vice president and manager of mortgage lending at Eldorado Bank in Tustin. He will oversee the bank’s newly established mortgage banking department.

Slezinger comes to well-regarded Eldorado with 29 years of banking experience, including the last seven as president of Rancho Vista National Bank in north San Diego County. He engineered the growth of that bank and set up a mortgage banking operation in Orange as the bank grew from a single branch in Vista to five branches.

Despite his experience and the good job he did at Rancho Vista, however, Slezinger figures that the short year he spent as president and chief operating officer of Heritage Bank from 1982 to 1983 will haunt him the rest of his life.

Regulators seized and closed Heritage in March, 1984, and eventually sued its strong-willed leader, Douglas Patty, and his executives, including Slezinger. Regulators won very little in settlements with the bank’s insurance company. Patty and his top aides won defense verdicts in other civil cases against them.

But a 1986 Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit accusing them of fraud led to consent judgments signed by everyone but Slezinger, who maintained his innocence and insisted on fighting it. In 1990, though, he relented, signing the judgment without admitting liability.

“The personal hurt from that experience, there’s no way to explain it. You get destroyed,” he said.

Since Heritage’s failure, Slezinger has been approved twice by regulators to take high positions at two other banks, Rancho Vista and the Bank of Los Angeles, where he was executive vice president and senior credit officer for three years.

He started his career in 1963 at Bank of America, and joined Alaska State Bank in 1972 as vice president. He was hired at Heritage in 1978 and became a senior loan officer.