James E. Mahoney died back on August 8 from medical complications, after being involved in a bicycle accident a year earlier. He was 67.
He had been employed by Bank of America in the Boston area for twenty-five years, working at predecessor institutions Fleet Financial and FleetBoston during that period.
According to his obituary, he worked in public policy, strategy, issues management, media relations, and global communications.
A resident of Newton, Massachusetts, he was an active member of the Boston area community and a supporter of several national organizations, including the National Urban League and the Equal Justice Initiative. Stanford University's Precourt Institute for Energy hailed him as a "Champion of Sustainability" for his efforts and those on behalf of his employer.
SNEAKY INFORMATION BROKERS
On November 5, 1998, the Wall Street Journal published a front-page story titled Sneaky Information Brokers Specialize in Prying Open Your Private Records. The article described how Fleet Financial/Fleet Bank lawyers had hired unlicensed private investigators to steal bank account information on Fleet customers held at third-party financial institutions.
According to bank insiders, Fleet Financial Group's then CEO, Terrence Murray, was livid that the ‘information broker’ story had surfaced both in the WSJ and a matter of days earlier in the Boston Globe.
As Fleet's leading Media Relations and Issues Management person, James Mahoney was asked by Mr. Murray to handle the ‘Information Broker’ issue.
It would seem reasonable to believe that any company official charged with the task of handling a "reputation risk" matter would tread very carefully with all the parties involved. But that did not occur.
BANKS, LAWYERS & LIARS
With the advent of telephone banking in the 1980's, it had become more accessible for ‘bad actors’ to steal sought-after information from financial institutions (see Telephone Banking and the Story of Banks, Lawyers and Liars).
Primarily, banks and other financial institutions recognized the advantages of stepping over the legal line in order to circumnavigate recognized and lawful practices and procedures for obtaining information in a lawsuit or other legal matters. And especially a debt collection matter.
But Fleet and their lawyers went too far and got caught.
Fact is, if you steal anything of value from a bank, including sensitive customer information, or ask someone to steal it for you, you are committing a crime.
True to form, Mr. Mahoney did a good job in persuading the news media to lose interest in the Sneaky Information Brokers story. And by early 1999, both the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe were no longer interested.
Victims however, were still interested.
As the months went by, they realized that Mr. Mahoney had successfully managed to convince the news media that the sneaky information broker's story was a nothing burger. Local, state and federal law enforcement authorities too.
Consumer rights activists and law firms specializing in the banking and financial services industry all weighed in on how costly and time-consuming litigation against Fleet and their information brokers would be, making the merits of a class-action lawsuit a non-starter.
With his smooth talk, charm, and Rolodex full of political contacts, Mr. Mahoney achieved his employer's objectives while throwing the bank's fraud victims under the proverbial bus.
While it is too late to address Mr. Mahoney's conduct with him in person, it is certainly not too late to find out to what extent Fleet used fraud as a business tool back in the 1990s and 2000s.
The one person who should know, is current Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, who was hired by the bank as deputy legal counsel in 1993, and who went on to become legal counsel before heading up private banking in 1999.
The chances that Mr. Moynihan did not know about the Sneaky Information Brokers scandal is, to say the least, remote.
To be continued...
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