O.C. Man Guilty of Defrauding 3 More Lenders

Michael E. Parker, the Newport Beach businessman convicted of stealing $11 million from a Beverly Hills savings and loan, Monday admitted defrauding three other financial institutions of $14 million.

In return for pleading guilty, Parker will serve no additional time for the three frauds against financial institutions in Southern California, Oklahoma and Nevada. He already faces a maximum of 235 years in prison and fines of more than $15 million at his sentencing on Oct. 4.

Federal prosecutors--who have dubbed Parker “the king of greed”--would not say how much time they will ask the judge that he serve. Under federal sentencing guidelines, he could face at least 15 years in prison.

Parker, 45, remains free on $1-million bail but is restricted to his house in Henderson, Nev., a small town outside Las Vegas.

“I’m just glad to have it over with,” he said after the hearing in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles Monday afternoon.

During the hearing, wearing a blue suit and brown loafers and flanked by two somber lawyers, Parker in a subdued voice admitted to each charge as it was intoned by Judge Robert M. Takasugi.

Those charges--for which he would have faced 90 years in prison and $3 million in fines--included defrauding Sooner Federal Savings and Loan Assn. in Tulsa, Okla., of about $5 million.

Parker’s company agreed to buy Sooner’s furniture and equipment for $10 million in cash--which the troubled thrift needed for working capital--and lease it back to the thrift at a low rate.

Parker North American Corp., Parker’s Costa Mesa-based company, then borrowed $9.2 million from a Houston bank to pay Sooner. Sooner repeatedly demanded its money, but Parker admitted Monday that he lied to Sooner and kept about half of the cash.

He still owed Sooner when Parker North American filed for bankruptcy in 1989.

Parker also admitted defrauding Home Bank in Signal Hill through another of his companies, Parker Automotive Corp. That was the first time Parker Automotive has been tied to Parker’s wrongdoing. Parker Automotive was a small public company in Costa Mesa that sold machines and chemicals to clean car engines.

Parker admitted lying about the company’s sales to get a $2-million line of credit from Home Bank in 1990. Prosecutors said Home Bank was out $700,000 after Parker Automotive filed for bankruptcy a year later.

Finally, Parker admitted to stealing $8 million from First Interstate Bank of Nevada through seven loans he ostensibly obtained to finance sale-leaseback transactions like the Sooner Federal deal.

The money, according to the indictment, actually went for Parker’s own use and to fund his other business ventures.

Parker was convicted in April of defrauding Columbia Savings & Loan in Beverly Hills of $11 million. The jury found him guilty of 36 counts of selling Columbia phony or inflated tax shelters and paying kickbacks to a Columbia officer to look the other way.

Meanwhile, prosecutors are trying to take Parker’s $1.2-million house in Newport Beach’s posh Big Canyon neighborhood. It was there that Parker once parked his Ferrari, Aston-Martin and Bentley with the “1 PARKER” license plate.

For a while in the late 1980s, Parker made a splash in Newport Beach business, political and social circles. He once gave $100,000 to the Republican Party at a single stroke.

Prosecutors said he once flew the company jet to Las Vegas to pay a traffic ticket. Much of the money Parker stole from Columbia, prosecutors said, went for lavish gambling sprees.

Now, however, Parker has told the court that he is penniless. With the exception of the Big Canyon house, federal prosecutors will not say where--or if--they are looking for any of the stolen money.

Meanwhile, Parker added to the two long, tangled bankruptcies of his companies--which creditors say still owe them millions--when he filed for personal bankruptcy on July 2.

By filing, he avoided being evicted from a beachfront house on the Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach. Parker had been paying rent of $5,500 a month for a year, but had recently fallen $12,000 in arrears.

Parker said Monday that he has lived in Nevada for about a month. He has told the judge he would like to serve his sentence in a minimum-security prison in Nevada, near where his family intends to stay.