Banker’s Detective Work Pays Windfall to Poor Villager

Lincoln Heights banker Jose Heras was delighted when two years of detective work paid off and he managed to track down the holder of a dormant bank account to a tiny Mexican village.

At first, 24-year-old Angelica Placencia didn’t believe that the $145,023 sitting in East West Bank was hers--the unclaimed proceeds of the 1982 settlement of a lawsuit filed against a Los Angeles doctor by her late mother.

Placencia, whose one-room shack lacks running water and is an hour away from the nearest pay phone in the state of Nayarit, waited a month before even calling Heras about her windfall.

But she wasn’t wasting any more time Friday when she traveled with friends to Los Angeles to claim the cash.

Placencia brushed aside pleas from Heras that she protect the money from Mexico’s shaky economy and costly exchange rates by keeping it in an interest-earning U.S. account that she could draw from.

With a smile, she dismissed warnings by bank manager Carl Cibrian that she might be targeted back home by thieves or kidnappers intent on stealing the cash for themselves.

Placencia instructed them to wire the money, posthaste, to the Mexican bank where she opened her first account last week with a 1-peso deposit--about 8 cents.

But first, Placencia told the two worried bankers, she needed some walking-around money: She and her friends were headed for Las Vegas.

“It’s not our money, it’s hers,” said Cibrian, as the mother of two sat at Heras’ desk at the North Broadway bank branch signing paperwork to close the dormant account.

“We’ve tried to guide her. She’s a young person--she needs help. She’s going to have a lot of new ‘friends’ when she gets back home. But we don’t control her. She’s entitled to her money.” Placencia, who has a sixth-grade education, said she intends to guard her windfall.

“I’d like to buy a house and provide education for my daughters,” she said. “I’ll leave some money in the bank and earn interest. I’ll try to protect it so it lasts.”

She acknowledged that she initially didn’t know what to make of the certified letter that Heras sent March 2 to her 20-house village of Rancho Paranal. It is located about three hours outside the city of Ixtlan.

At the one-room house she shares with her tobacco-farmer husband and their girls, ages 3 and 8, Placencia carries water in by bucket and cooks on a stove that she stores under the couple’s bed at night, she told the bankers.

Family finances are so tight that Placencia debated for a month whether to spend the few dollars it cost to call Heras from the nearest pay phone--which is miles from the village.

Heras began his search for Placencia after an audit uncovered the dormant account, which East West Bank inherited when it purchased a Home Federal Bank branch a few years ago.

After searching court records and finding an ex-wife of Placencia’s deceased stepfather who remembered her, Heras finally traced her to Rancho Paranal.

Placencia was 3 years old and living here when her mother died. Her stepfather, who opened the bank account after the settlement with the doctor, died when Placencia was 8, according to Heras.

Placencia was 10 and living with grandparents when they died. After that, her godmother raised her. That woman and her family traveled with Placencia to Los Angeles to claim the money Friday.

They all planned to continue on together to Las Vegas for the weekend. Placencia told Heras and Cibrian her intent was to enjoy the city’s sights, not to gamble.

But she told her friends--who loaned her the money for the journey to Los Angeles--that the Las Vegas trip was on her.