A Golden Touch and an Iron Fist : Banking: Gerald Garner’s American Commerce Bank, though healthy, was closed by regulators partly because of his bullying business practices.

By most accounts, it was a rowdy night at Fullerton’s old Dal Rae restaurant as players for the Comanches flag football team and their sponsors ate and drank their way through a boisterous meal.

During that December, 1986, evening, according to witnesses and court records, the adult players intimidated other customers, confronted armed guards and kicked down an office door as a hulking 6-foot-3, 230-pound Gerald J. Garner directed some of the action.

Garner, though, was no football coach. He was a banker, chairman of American Commerce National Bank in Anaheim--a team sponsor that also had lent money to the company which owned the restaurant. Garner, also chief executive and a director of the restaurant company, had been trying for weeks to oust the company’s president.

Garner’s interests in the Dal Rae and other restaurants are among a number of insider deals now under scrutiny by banking regulators who closed American Commerce on April 30.

The federal seizure was the nation’s first-ever regulatory takeover of a well-financed, seemingly healthy bank. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency alleged that insider abuses and other violations of banking laws were so pervasive that it no longer could trust Garner or the bank’s “weak, abusive and self-serving” officers and directors.

Garner is well known in Orange County as a community booster and reliable fund-raiser for various charities.

But a different picture emerges from the records of a dozen lawsuits, other public records and interviews with former associates. Garner is accused of bullying his staff, manipulating bank accounts and running roughshod over quiescent bank directors and inexperienced business associates.

Though magnanimous at times, Garner also would stoop to petty retribution. He caused one employee who left the bank to be fired from a new job, and he tried to bad-mouth other workers who left, said other Orange County bankers.

Garner even took a former teller to small claims court over a $1,000 discrepancy at her teller station.

He lost the case.

Last year, Garner, an attorney, was disbarred in New York for lying to banking regulators about previous disciplinary action against him--including a 1984 suspension from practicing law for using false names of adoptive parents in notarized legal documents.

The 56-year-old founder of American Commerce, a one-branch bank, would not agree to be interviewed for this story, comment about accusations by bank regulators, former employees and associates or answer questions about the civil lawsuits filed against him.

Among Garner’s business relationships currently under federal scrutiny is his chairmanship of Coast Plaza Doctors Hospital in Norwalk, where two American Commerce directors and a major bank shareholder are physicians. His wife, Joan, and his brothers, Danny and Harvey, also recently took staff positions at the hospital.

Several lawsuits involve restaurant and real estate deals in which Garner found partners to organize and run operations or buy into existing companies. The suits allege that he then would wrest away control, sometimes accusing his new partners of theft and mismanagement.

Typically, regulators said, the comptroller’s office never knew that Garner or other directors had stakes in the restaurants or that the bank’s loans to these companies were benefiting insiders.

At the Dal Rae, Garner arranged a $250,000 loan in 1985 to help Alfred H. Stuetzle buy the restaurant out of bankruptcy. But Stuetzle, who was made president and manager of the restaurant company, had to give up 51% of the ownership to five shareholders picked by Garner.

According to court records, the shareholders included Garner and two other bank directors--Garner’s wife and Santa Ana lawyer Duffern H. Helsing. Another was a close Garner associate at Coast Plaza hospital, Dr. Sheldon S. Zinberg.

Soon, Garner was accusing Stuetzle of skimming money from the restaurant. Stuetzle claimed Garner took receipts, refused to cash checks written on the company’s account and siphoned money and services out of the restaurant through unpaid dinner parties and donations to various charities.

In December, 1986, Fullerton police were called to the Dal Rae four times--twice in one day--to quell disturbances as Garner tried to physically eject Stuetzle.

Stuetzle called the police to the Dec. 29 party, which the football players said was their team’s post-season banquet. The police said they considered the football players Garner’s security guards. No charges were filed.

In interviews, Stuetzle has accused Garner of paying the football players to disrupt business. And, according to affidavits related to lawsuits over control of the restaurant, Garner passed out business cards as the players were leaving, thanked them and said, “I’ll pay you later for showing up tonight.”

Garner’s lawyer, Neil F. Kligman, said last week that as a member of the party, he didn’t hear Garner promise any payment. But he said Garner did pay money to the team as a sponsor.

In settling the lawsuits, Stuetzle won control of the restaurant, but when he later defaulted on the company’s loan from American Commerce, Garner took over operations and eventually put the restaurant in bankruptcy.

From the bank’s opening in February, 1984, regulators were wary of Garner.

Examiners conducted seven audits in the bank’s first 40 months of operation. The comptroller ordered Garner to disclose to shareholders both the suspension of his New York law license and that his initial stake in the bank was more than twice the amount allowed in the offering. Regulators also prohibited him from acting as the bank’s president, though as chairman he remained in control.

Only Garner and his brother had the authority to approve loans, according to sworn statements. Loan committee hearings were not much more than social occasions.

Garner’s iron fist at American Commerce also was felt by the employees.

When a loan officer quit for a job at rival El Camino Bank in Anaheim in the mid-1980s, Garner called El Camino’s chairman, Stanley Pawlowski.

“Garner said he would not give (him) a good reference,” Pawlowski said last week. “He said he didn’t think the guy would be good for my company. That made us rethink the situation, and we decided not to hire him.”

Pawlowski said Garner gave no concrete reasons why the loan officer shouldn’t be hired, but the way he spoke was a “banker’s code” for warning an employer about possible trouble with a new hire.

Some who know Garner only as a fellow fund-raiser for charitable events declined to talk about him. Others, including Elaine Ornitz, a former part-owner of Ocean Pacific Sunwear Ltd., extolled his charitable contributions and knew him as “a nice man and a family man.”

Bank shareholders such as Santa Ana lawyer Frank P. Barbaro can’t believe that someone as hard-working and diligent as Garner could be the target of such drastic action by the federal government.

“The bank was doing good things, too,” he said, “like sponsoring youth events and programs for the elderly and minority groups.”

Times staff writer Davan Maharaj contributed to this report.