Vania May Bell was sentenced to federal prison for six years and eight months on Oct. 11 for her role in a $11.4 million Ponzi scheme at her family’s financial planning firm in Rockland County.
U.S. District Judge Nelson S. Roman also ordered her to forfeit $589,942 she received in salary and benefits and pay $8,041,233 in restitution.
Her attorneys had recommended a lenient sentence, depicting her as a victim of manipulations by her father, Hector May, the founder and president of Executive Compensation Planners Inc. in New City.
“But for her father,” attorneys Elizabeth K Quinn and Benjamin Gold argued in a sentencing letter, “she would never have become involved in this criminal scheme.”
But federal prosecutors recommended a longer prison sentence, describing May as “ruthless and seemingly sociopathic” for pilfering the retirement savings of friends, relatives, the elderly and blue collar workers for 16 years.
May founded ECP in 1982. Bell joined the firm in 1993 and worked as the comptroller and chief compliance officer.
They persuaded clients to move funds to ECP from outside brokerage accounts, on the assurance that ECP could buy bonds directly and avoid transaction fees.
But instead of buying bonds, according to court records, they used client funds for personal and business expenses, and they created fake account statements to conceal the crime.
When clients asked to redeem bonds, May and Bell used the stolen funds, in a classic Ponzi scheme, to…
