Swindler Ordered to Pay Investors $6.3 Million : Law: Michael E. Parker, in prison over a related scam, defrauded backers of an Irvine company he founded.

Convicted swindler Michael E. Parker, once called the “king of greed” by prosecutors, was ordered to pay $6.3 million to wealthy Bay Area investors he defrauded in raising funds for his Parker Automotive Corp. in Irvine.

Parker, serving an 11-year prison term in a scam he concocted while operating a related firm, was ordered to pay several dozen investors $3.3 million in actual damages and $3 million in punitive damages.

Whether the onetime Newport Beach resident has any assets left to pay the judgment, however, is uncertain. He had filed for bankruptcy protection once, but a federal bankruptcy judge ruled it a bad-faith filing and dismissed it.

Ronald Rus, an Irvine lawyer for the investors, said he will “undertake every effort” to find assets to satisfy the judgment.

In issuing the award, Orange County Superior Court Judge Francisco F. Firmat determined that Parker had recorded fictitious sales of a device to control engine emissions and used those phony financial records to raise cash for his company.

In 1990, Parker used investment banker Cruttenden & Co. in Newport Beach to find three dozen wealthy people from the San Francisco area to invest $3.5 million in the small, publicly held Parker Automotive. The investors included the Haas family, heirs to the Levi Strauss blue jeans fortune.

Parker’s company filed for bankruptcy less than a year later, and its assets were sold off. The stock became worthless.

Firmat’s judgment is the first in the civil case that was filed in 1991 against eight defendants. Last year, Cruttenden settled out of court for $650,000. Five others--including Parker’s wife, Diane, and Timothy L. Strader, Parker Auto’s president who also was a real estate developer--settled for small, undisclosed sums.

A trial last year over the alleged liability of the Ernst & Young accounting firm in auditing Parker Automotive ended in a hung jury. The case is expected to be retried later this summer, Rus said.

Parker was convicted two years ago of bilking $11 million from now-defunct Columbia Savings & Loan in a lease-loan scam involving another company he had set up, Parker North American Corp. in Costa Mesa.

Federal prosecutors at the time called him the “king of greed” and a “one-man crime wave” and said at his October, 1993, sentencing that he showed a “lack of remorse or guilt” about his actions.

Parker broke into tears in the courtroom as he apologized and asked for leniency for his “stupid” mistakes, which included padding orders and paying kickbacks.