Abacus:
Small Enough to Jail **** / *****
Directed
by:
Steve James.
In the wake of the Financial
crisis of 2008 all the big banks pretty much got off Scot Free – or with
bailout money, that yes, eventually they repaid, although that didn’t help all
those people who got screwed over. Prosecutors in New York did go after one
bank however for their mortgage practices – and that bank was Abacus: Savings
and Loan – a bank you have probably never heard of, and, in reality, there is no
reason for you to have heard of it. It’s not a major bank – it doesn’t have
millions of customers, or anything. But it is an important bank for the family
that runs it – and those who use it. It was started by Thomas Sung – now almost
80 – a Chinese immigrant, who got frustrated when he realized that banks were willing
to take his money in deposits, but none of them seemed to want to lend him – or
other Asian Americans – any money. He set up a bank in Chinatown in New York
City to change that. He operated the business for years – and now two of his
daughters run have continued that legacy. There were some shady things
happening in their mortgage department – but when the Sung family discovered
them, they fired the employees who did them, and even reported them to their
regulators, and co-operated with the D.A.’s office up to the point where they
realized that they were no longer being treated as witnesses, but as suspects.
While no one in the Sung family was personally indicted with a felony – the corporation
itself was. The Sung family decided to fight the charges – not in least because
unlike the major banks, who got slaps on the wrists or hit with fines, the D.A.
refused to let them off with anything less than a felony conviction – which would
doom them as a bank.
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail is a
documentary by Steve James – the great filmmaker behind such films as Hoop
Dreams, The Interrupters and Life Itself. Here, he seemingly sets an impossible
task for himself – to make a bank sympathetic – but it really doesn’t take him
that long to do that. The film spends a lot of time with the Sung family –
father, mother and three daughters, all of whom are smart, witty, charming and
tough as nails. In short, they are not going down without a fight.
As the film goes on, it slightly
expands its focus to Chinatown – and Chinese immigrants in general. While the
bank fully admits that some of their employees did shady things in their
mortgage department – they say they did everything they could to co-operate
with the investigation into them, and have nothing to hide on a corporate
level. The movie follows the trial closely – and it’s amazing how flimsy the
evidence against Abacus is. After all the months – years – of investigation,
this is what they had on Abacus, and they still decided to go to trial? To be
fair, I’m not wholly convinced that Abacus did nothing wrong – but there isn’t any
proof that they did, and many other banks did far, far worse things. I am more
on the side of those in the documentary who believe that the D.A. wanted to
show they were tough on banks – and decided to pick one to prosecute – just one
that wasn’t too big, and only effected a small enough community that it wouldn’t
hurt anyone election chances.
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