The jury forewoman's voice broke as she said "Not guilty" to each of the charges against banker and lawyer Robert Altman. Moments later, jurors with watery eyes hugged Altman and his wife, actress Lynda Carter, then posed for photos with them and exchanged addresses. All agreed: this was an innocent man, unfairly accused.
The verdict ended Altman's five-month New York City trial on eight felony charges, ranging from bribery to deceiving the government, all relating to his various affiliations with the corrupt Bank of Credit & Commerce International. Altman, whose partner, Clark Clifford, was deemed too ill to stand trial, had endured a 30-month personal struggle during which he and Clifford were stripped of their bank jobs, lost their once powerful law firm, and saw their reputations tarnished.
A little more than two years after B.C.C.I. exploded into the biggest financial scandal in history, the prosecution of the bank and its operators now seems destined to end with a whimper. Even though as much as $20 billion was stolen, misappropriated and lost outright by B.C.C.I. officers, a mere handful will ever stand trial anywhere. The maddening complexity of the Altman case illustrates the difficulty of even mounting a prosecution of B.C.C.I.'s principals and their associates. The case dragged on through 45 witnesses and reams of documents -- 15,000 pages of transcript in all. The material was so numbingly complex that some jurors fell asleep listening to it. Meanwhile an agile defense team managed to shred many prosecution witnesses, several of whom were former B.C.C.I. officers. So confident was the defense team that it did not call a single witness of its own.
The pivot of the trial was whether Altman -- and by extension Clifford -- knowingly helped B.C.C.I. secretly buy an American bank and then lied to regulators about it. The issue was neither their long and intimate involvement with B.C.C.I. nor their huge profits from that relationship. The two men acknowledged making millions of dollars in fees from their roles as legal counsel to B.C.C.I. in the U.S. and reaping additional millions from stock deals as payment for their work running First American Bank, the largest bank in Washington, which B.C.C.I. illegally owned through front investors. Nor did the case address the larger issues of B.C.C.I.: the million or more depositors who lost money and the bank's involvement with drug lords and terrorists. What the jury found was simply that though Altman had worked for B.C.C.I., he had not knowingly concealed the bank's true ownership or lied to regulators.
The verdict was a bitter disappointment for New York district attorney Robert Morgenthau, whose early zeal was a driving force behind the July 1991 seizure of the bank. Despite the setback, however, his investigation to date has yielded convictions of B.C.C.I. and its principal front man, indictments of its key executives, and forfeitures totaling $750 million.