The film opens with Sung and his wife watching It’s A Wonderful Life and explaining how much they relate to Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey. One is the story of the Sung family, headed by Thomas Sung, a successful lawyer who started the bank in 1984 in part as a way to give back to the Chinese immigrant community. One sequence details, for instance, the curious decision to handcuff bank employees together chain gang-style for processing, one that seems to have been made out of a need for a photo op than any real concern for security.īut the most compelling parts of Abacus use the bank’s story as a way to tell other stories.
James talks to both sides, and to journalists who covered the case, like Rolling Stone Matt Taibbi and The New Yorker’s Jiayang Fan, and the facts that emerge suggest that Abacus wound up on the receiving end of a too-vigorous effort to prosecute somebody, anybody, for the sins of the financial world.
But the bank’s higher-ups also began cooperating as soon as they realized something was amiss - yet ended up indicted anyway. Abacus was not blameless, largely due to its employment of a con man who used his job to fill his own pockets. In pursuing Abacus, the New York District Attorney’s Office found a convenient target that offered some good press. That’s the central thesis of Abacus: Small Enough to Jail the latest from documentarian Steve James ( Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters). Where others were deemed “too big to fail,” Abacus wasn’t. But for all the harm perpetrated by big-name institutions, only one bank tied to the crisis ever was ever indicted for mortgage fraud, the family owned Abacus Federal Savings Bank headquartered in New York’s Chinatown. At the heart of it: banks that should have known better engaging in shady dealings at the expense of the everyday consumer - and ultimately the world at large. The family drama adds an emotional dimension to the strictly legal narrative, in which the Sungs’ attorneys try to prove that the wrongdoing was confined to a handful of loan officers.In 2008, at the height of a presidential race between John McCain and Barack Obama, the world economy suffered a crisis that seemed to push it toward the brink of a meltdown, one caused by dubious lending practices and a housing market that bubbled until it burst. James focuses on Thomas Sung, the septuagenarian founder of Abacus, and his grown daughters, several of whom are executives at the bank (and one of whom, ironically, worked in the DA’s office when the indictment came down). Yet good intentions weren’t enough to protect Abacus after New York prosecutors indicted 19 employees and accused the bank of having purposely sold hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent loans to the Federal National Mortgage Association. A family-owned business, Abacus provides home loans to immigrants in New York’s Chinatown (James, laying it on a bit thick, stresses the bank’s civic-mindedness with clips from It’s a Wonderful Life). Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & RecreationĪbacus Federal Savings Bank holds the distinction of being the only financial institution prosecuted as a result of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, though as this engrossing documentary by Steve James suggests, it may have been a sacrificial lamb.Best of Chicago 2022: Music & Nightlife.
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