Crooked Bridgeport bank official gets home confinement in Washington Federal Bank for Savings embezzlment

For more than a decade, the corporate secretary for a crooked Bridgeport bank falsified records and documents, helping carry out an embezzlement scheme that led to the clout-heavy bank’s failure.

Caught by the feds, Jane Tran Iriondo pleaded guilty. She admitted her role in the embezzlement scheme at Washington Federal Bank for Savings that led to a rare government shutdown of a bank. And she worked with authorities to make their cases against her colleagues and bank customers whose insider connections got them millions of dollars in loans that never were meant to be repaid.

On Tuesday, appearing in court in downtown Chicago, Iriondo, 44, learned the price she must pay for her crimes. Chief U.S. District Judge Virigina Kendall spared her any prison time, instead ordering her to spend the next year held under home confinement in Boise, Idaho, where she moved.

Iriondo also was must pay 10% of any wages she makes for the rest of her life to help repay $27,899,991.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is trying to recover more than $90 million in insured losses it suffered as a result of the scam led by John F. Gembara, who was president and chief executive officer of the tiny bank his father and grandfather previously ran.

Iriondo’s sentence was one of the lightest in the investigation, six months shorter than the 18 months of home confinement that Kendall handed last month to Rosallie Corvite, who was the crooked bank’s chief financial officer. Corvite, too, faces a lifetime of restitution payments.

Iriondo had faced a maximum sentence of five years in prison. But federal prosecutors asked Kendall to give her home confinement because her testimony helped convict two key figures in the embezzlement scheme: Gembara’s friend Robert Kowalski and the bank boss’s “right-hand man,” Marek Matczuk, a handyman and Washington Federal mortgage recipient who died in prison in June.

Matczuk — who had millions of dollars in unpaid loans to the bank — owned the Park Ridge home where Gembara was found dead in December 2017. That was two weeks before regulators shut down the bank. Authorities ruled Gembara’s death a suicide.

Born in Hong Kong, Iriondo began working at Washington Federal as a teller in 1999. She was promoted in 2003 to be Gembara’s personal secretary and then, in 2006, to be the bank’s corporate secretary.

Gembara threatened to fire Iriondo if she refused to alter bank records to conceal the scheme from federal regulators, and she agreed to do so because she feared she would lose her job at a time she was caring for her dying mother, according to her attorney Terry Ekl.

Kendall told Iriondo she was “a weak person” and that Gembara “took advantage of you. And you let him do that. That’s why you’re standing here today.”

A tearful Iriondo told the judge: “I am ashamed, and I regret everything I have done. I wake up every day hating myself. I was scared of losing my job . . . I’m sorry to all of those who are affected.’’

The FDIC has been trying to recover the embezzled money by selling assets seized from bank officials and customers involved in the scheme.

Some customers are hoping enough will be recovered so they can get back more of the money they lost because they had more in their accounts at Washington Federal than the FDIC’s insured limit of $250,000 per account.

Federal prosecutors filed charges against 16 bank officials, employees and customers, including Gembara’s sister Janice Weston and William Mahon, a former top Chicago city official who was a member of the 11th Ward Regular Democratic Organization the Daley family has run for generations.

Among the customers charged was then-Ald. Patrick Daley Thompson, a grandson of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley and nephew of former Mayor Richard M. Daley. Thompson was found guilty of cheating on his federal income taxes and lying to regulators about the money he owed the bank. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Thompson’s conviction for lying but not tax fraud.

Three former bank employees still await sentencing.