NEW ORLEANS — A federal grand jury has added three new counts against First NBC Bank founder Ashton Ryan and his alleged co-conspirators in a 49-count superseding bank fraud indictment.
Ryan was charged with 44 of 46 counts in an initial indictment in July 2020, along with two former First NBC officers, Bill Burnell and Robert “Brad” Calloway, and a former borrower, Frank Adolph.
The new indictment adds an alleged co-conspirator, former bank vice president Fred Beebe of Donaldsonville, alleging Beebe acted as a loan officer for contractor Warren Treme, another of seven borrowers also charged in the alleged scheme.
Ryan, Burnell, Calloway and Adolph have already pleaded not guilty to the first indictment. They and Beebe are charged with conspiracy, bank fraud and false statements that prosecutors allege allowed them to profit personally off First NBC’s $1 billion collapse in 2017, the largest U.S. bank failure since the 2009 financial crisis.
The grand jury charges that the bank officers extended more than a quarter-billion dollars in loans to borrowers they knew couldn’t pay and hid the true financial picture from the bank’s board of directors. In return, they allegedly kept making large salaries while Ryan received personal benefits from three of the borrowers.
