Ex-Money Manager Gets 12 Years in Scheme

Former money manager Alan B. Bond was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison Tuesday for cheating pension funds out of millions of dollars and taking kickbacks, as the judge condemned his “greed.”

U.S. District Judge Leonard Sand also ordered Bond, 41, the former president and chief investment officer of Albriond Capital Management, to pay $6.6 million in restitution and a $36,000 fine.

“This is unquestionably a tragedy where the defendant was motivated not by need, not by duress, not by any other circumstance but greed and ego,” Sand said during a hearing in New York.

The judge rejected Bond’s request for a sentence below the minimum 12 years and seven months.

Bond was convicted in June of defrauding clients by sending unprofitable securities trades to their accounts while directing most of the profitable ones to himself.

He subsequently pleaded guilty to charges relating to receiving kickbacks from brokerages.

Prosecutors charged that Bond’s “cherry-picking” scheme ran between March 2000 and July 2001 while Bond was out on bail awaiting trial on 1999 charges of taking more than $6 million in kickbacks from brokerage firms.

They said Bond made $6.3 million from the cherry-picking scheme while his clients lost more than $56 million.

Among the victims were Birmingham Amalgamated Transit Authority Local 725, a union pension fund; and the Old Dominion Disability & Retirement Allowance Plan.

The sentencing marked the bottom of a precipitous fall for Bond, a Dartmouth College and Harvard Business School graduate, as well as one of a small number of African Americans to rise to a top position in the lucrative world of money management. He had once made regular appearances on television’s “Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser.”

During Bond’s trial, prosecutors argued that the pension funds lost two-thirds of their value, while Bond received a 5,000% return on his own investments in a little more than a year.

With good behavior, Assistant U.S. Atty. Steve Peikin said, Bond may serve only 85% of his sentence.