Of all the questions lingering since the collapse of a storied Bridgeport bank almost exactly seven years ago, perhaps the biggest that federal authorities have been unwilling, or unable, to answer is this: Where’s the missing money?
More than $82 million is still unaccounted for following the discovery of a major embezzlement scheme in late 2017 at the century-old Washington Federal Bank for Savings, and the sudden death of its president, CEO and largest shareholder, John F. Gembara. The bank executive was found dead with a rope around his neck in a customer’s Park Ridge home as regulators were bearing down.
Was some of the money sent to the Cayman Islands, as has been asserted in court by Robert Kowalski, a longtime Gembara friend sentenced to 25 years for embezzling $7.2 million from the bank?
Or was it spirited off to Poland, where three of the convicted embezzlers are originally from?
Authorities won’t comment, and many of those being investigated are mum or plead ignorance.
Sixteen people have since been charged in the case, with one of the central figures, Marek Matczuk, hit with a nearly 13-year prison sentence on Dec. 16 after he was found guilty of embezzling almost $6 million from the bank. Matczuk has been ordered to pay back that amount to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the government banking regulator that’s out all that cash.
Matczuk, who owns the home where Gembara was found dead in what police and pathologists say was a suicide, was the latest sent off to prison but likely not the last — seven others who pleaded guilty in the scheme haven’t been sentenced because they are cooperating with the federal investigation.
They include Boguslaw Kasprowicz, a former contractor who pleaded guilty in 2022 to helping embezzle $14.3 million from the bank, and cheating on his taxes. With him, investigators have an idea of where the money landed.
According to his plea agreement, Kasprowicz used money embezzled from the bank to pay off Gembara’s credit card bills and personal loans that were used in part to pay for the purchase of a yacht named Expelliarmus after a spell in the Harry Potter books.
Kasprowicz used some of the money to buy a home in suburban Los Angeles and to pay for his son to study acting at the University of Southern California. Prosecutors say Kasprowicz also sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to two other children in Poland, one of them a doctor.
Kasprowicz, who built homes in Bucktown and Wicker Park financed by Gembara’s bank, got $14.3 million from the bank in construction loans between 2009 and 2017 — loans Kasprowicz and his Thomas Development company never intended to repay, not even after the homes were sold, authorities say.
Under Gembara, bank money was siphoned in creative ways, authorities believe — loans that were given without expectation that they would be paid back, no-collateral loans and then cooked books to cover tracks.
It’s unclear when Gembara began looting the bank his family ran for three generations. Some sources believe it started after he replaced his father as the bank president and CEO in 1997. But federal authorities say the scheme was well underway when he replaced his father as the bank chairman in 2005.
Which leads to another unanswered question: Why?
Was sheer greed behind the scheme, or were other factors in play — was Gembara, for instance, being muscled into the plot?
Some of Gembara's family and friends believe he didn’t kill himself but instead was murdered. There was discussion at some point of exhuming Gembara’s body, but that apparently never happened.
Matczuk alluded to that theory at his recent sentencing hearing, saying, “When that man took his own life, he raised his hand against himself at my house. At that time, a party for my children was taking place. The thought that I wanted to finish off that guy or that I was OK with him finishing himself in my house is not true.”
