Carnell Dawkins, manager of a Mail Boxes Etc. branch in midtown Manhattan, remembers when David Russell set up an account to receive his mail there, but Russell was never seen and rarely used the box.
"He never received much mail, maybe one piece," said Dawkins, who didn't think that was strange because overseas customers occasionally open accounts to establish a U.S. address. "It was only open for about three months and then he just disappeared."
David Russell, federal prosecutors say, never existed. He was the alias, they allege, for John M. Rusnak, the former currency trader for Allfirst Financial Inc. charged yesterday with defrauding his former employer of $691,204,113 in trading losses dating to 1997.
Yesterday's indictment, layered on top of previous information, described a case of man over machine: a rogue trader who concocted a fake persona and paper trail to keep his bosses, auditors and back-office colleagues with sophisticated computer systems in the dark about his ultimately unsuccessful charade to conceal huge losses in currency trades.
Many of Rusnak's deals assumed - wrongly - that the U.S. dollar would weaken against the Japanese yen.
The indictment repeated some findings revealed last March in the report by Eugene A. Ludwig, a former U.S. comptroller of the currency. Ludwig was hired in mid-February to investigate the losses about a week after their discovery by Baltimore-based Allfirst and its parent bank in Dublin, Ireland, Allied Irish Banks PLC.
Rusnak had "a very sophisticated knowledge of the process," Maryland's top federal prosecutor, Thomas M. DiBiagio, said yesterday.
The seven-count federal indictment accuses Rusnak, among other acts, of creating a false identity as "David Russell" and setting up a mailbox in that name to help throw bank auditors off his trail.
He directed the auditors on or about Jan. 20, 2001, to contact Russell, of a fictitious entity called RBCDS FX, at that mailbox address - 2472 Broadway, Suite 162, New York, N.Y., 10025 - to confirm one of his trades.
Prosecutors allege that Rusnak falsified a confirmation of the trade as David Russell and returned it to the auditors so that they would believe the contract was legitimate.
Dawkins said yesterday that Rusnak would have had to supply a copy of a credit card and a driver's license or passport to lease a mailbox, although prosecutors did not say yesterday whether Rusnak had forged documents other than bank-related records. The mailbox was closed after Rusnak - "Russell" - did not respond to invoices to continue it, Dawkins said.
