A federal judge sentenced a Chicago lawyer to 25 years in prison Tuesday for helping to embezzle more than $8 million from a small Bridgeport neighborhood bank that later collapsed, calling him a “delusional” and unrepentant criminal who abused the trust placed in him as a lawyer.
Robert Kowalski, 62, was convicted by a jury last year of all counts of embezzlement, bankruptcy fraud and income tax fraud after a 3 1/2-week trial before Chief U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall, where Kowalski took the unusual and generally ill-advised step of representing himself.
The long-running case has been marked by years of bizarre pretrial hearings in which Kowalski was locked up for violating bail and filed dozens of motions alleging that investigators withheld evidence and colluded with the judge to frame him.
The same thing happened during Tuesday’s five-hour sentencing hearing, during which Kowalski repeatedly interrupted the judge and prosecutors, complaining about unfair treatment.
For the most part, Kendall listened patiently to Kowalski’s ranting. But when he repeatedly interrupted her as she was handing down the sentence, the judge cut him off with an “enough.”
“You are completely incapable of looking at the reality of this situation and your role in it,” Kendall told Kowalski, who stood at the podium in an orange jailhouse garb, flanked by his deputies. “You fabricated documents for the IRS, you fabricated documents for the bankruptcy court … You are completely delusional in thinking that you are a victim in this case. You are not.”
Kendall said Kowalski’s criminal culpability was further exacerbated by his status as a lawyer and that he helped rob a community bank where “people felt they could trust that bank to hold their money.”
“You have no respect for the rule of law,” she said.
After the judge sentenced him to 25 years in prison and ordered $7.2 million forfeited, Kowalski shouted, “This is not fair! For all my hard work, I get life in prison? … This is very unfair. This is an unfortunate day.”
Kowalski was among 14 defendants charged in an alleged years-long embezzlement scheme that led to the collapse of the Washington Federal Bank for Savings, a family-owned institution that had been a mainstay of the city’s Bridgeport neighborhood for more than a century.
Kowalski, who was a major debtor to the bank when it was shut down by regulators in December 2017, was accused of conspiring with the bank’s chairman, John Gembara, to amass millions of dollars in unsecured loans and then lying and concealing assets and income in bankruptcy proceedings and on his tax returns.
Police records show Gembara, 56, was found dead on Dec. 3, 2017, in the Park Ridge home of a bank client where he was staying. An autopsy report showed Gembara was found sitting in a chair in his bedroom with a rope tied to the stair railing and around his neck. His death was ruled a suicide by the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office.
The sprawling investigation also spawned another high-profile trial. Patrick Daley Thompson, then an 11th Ward alderman and scion of the Daley political dynasty, was convicted in 2021 on two counts of lying to federal regulators about loans he took out from Washington Federal and falsely deducting mortgage interest on his tax returns.
Thompson, who by law was forced to resign immediately after his conviction, was sentenced to four months in prison.
Prosecutors said in their opening statement last month that Kowalski used his friendship with Gembara to turn Washington Federal into his own piggy bank, obtaining unsecured loans to finance his real estate projects and using letters of credit from the bank to defraud other creditors.
Kowalski, meanwhile, tried to shift the blame to Gembara, claiming his friend ran a scheme that allegedly involved years of dodgy loans, collateral transfers, forged signatures and even cash buried by one of his clients somewhere in the Cayman Islands.
“He wasn’t a bad man to begin with, but his plan was terrible,” Kowalski said in his opening statement to the jury. “He wasn’t George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life.”
The jury deliberated for only about an hour before finding him guilty on all counts.
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
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