Bank Of Baltimore

Roberto Pagan-Franco didn't have a bank account for decades. His employer paid him in cash or with a check that the Baltimore resident took to a check-cashing store. A few years ago he lost his job after a severe illness and for a time was homeless. Not exactly the type of customer you'd expect a big bank to court. But Pagan-Franco enrolled in a PNC Bank program that targets consumers who otherwise might be shut out of the banking system. And today, the 54-year-old has checking and savings accounts at PNC and is in the process of getting a credit card.

Robert Gene Harris was sentenced Friday to 10 and a half years in prison for his role in robberies in Maryland and Pennsylvania. Harris, 29, of Chambersburg, Pa., was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Benson E. Legg of the Maryland district court for conspiracy to commit armed robberies and the use of a firearm during a violent crime. The judge also ordered Harris to pay $14,925. Harris' prison term will be followed by three years of supervised release, according to U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein.

Earlier this week I saw in the newspaper the list of abandoned savings and checking accounts that is published annually. It's the last-ditch effort by the banks and the state of Maryland to trace the owners of the funds.I'm not sure what happens to the money if it remains unclaimed.In some states the bank gets to keep it; in others, the state takes the loot.Well, because one year my mother-in-law found some money owned by my husband in his hometown account that he'd just forgotten about, I went browsing through the lists.

Roberto Pagan-Franco didn't have a bank account for decades. His employer paid him in cash or with a check that the Baltimore resident took to a check-cashing store. A few years ago he lost his job after a severe illness and for a time was homeless. Not exactly the type of customer you'd expect a big bank to court. But Pagan-Franco enrolled in a PNC Bank program that targets consumers who otherwise might be shut out of the banking system. And today, the 54-year-old has checking and savings accounts at PNC and is in the process of getting a credit card.

Baltimore Bancorp pushed for the recent resignations of three outside directors who had sought a review of the bank's new management by independent directors, according to letters of resignation submitted by the directors and filed yesterday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.The angry departures last week, which followed the resignation of another director and the withdrawal or firing of the bank's law firm, marked a break in the cobbled-together coalition that ousted former Chairman and Chief Executive Harry L. Robinson in a proxy fight last year.

Mark L. Wasserman, who spun a city-planning degree into a career that touched the top levels of state government, said yesterday that his next job will be helping to drum up customers for First Fidelity Bank's Bank of Baltimore division.One of Gov. William Donald Schaefer's closest aides, Mr. Wasserman will become vice president and manager of business and government affairs for the bank on Jan. 23.As now understood, his duties will consist mainly of helping to boost the Bank of Baltimore's commercial loan portfolio from its present 8 percent of assets.

Two downtown Baltimore banks were robbed in separate incidents yesterday by men who handed tellers threatening notes, bringing the city's 1993 record-setting bank robbery total to 103, police said.Neither of the men in yesterday's robberies showed a weapon, police said.A man dressed in dark clothes walked into the Mercantile-Safe Deposit & Trust Co. about 1:30 p.m. and -- after patiently waiting in a line of customers -- handed a teller a robbery note, police said.The note read: "There's a gun pointed at you. Put money in the bag. No dye pack or I'll start shooting."

Some in the industry characterize the practice as business raiding. But the Bank of Baltimore defends its aggressive campaign to persuade customers to transfer their home-equity loan balances to the bank from other institutions and says it's been very effective."

First Fidelity Bancorp. announced today that it will cut the staff of its newly acquired Bank of Baltimore unit by half as part of a larger drive to cut costs throughout the $36 billion bank holding company, which is based in Newark, N.J.The cuts are much deeper than First Fidelity had said it would make when its deal to acquire Baltimore Bancorp, the Bank of Baltimore's former parent company, was announced last March. At a press conference the day the deal was disclosed, First Fidelity chief financial officer Wolfgang Schoellkopf said he expected to reduce the Maryland staff by about 25 percent.

Baltimore Bancorp, parent of the Bank of Baltimore and one of the last big locally based banking companies, yesterday ended a wild three-year ride for its employees and shareholders by announcing it has agreed to be sold to the First Fidelity Bancorp. of Lawrenceville, N.J., for $346 million in cash.If approved by regulators and Baltimore Bancorp's shareholders, the deal, valued at $20.75 a share, would be First Fidelity's initial move into Maryland. The company, which has 650 branches in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York and Connecticut, is the nation's 24th-largest banking company, with $33.8 billion in assets.

Frederick-based BlueRidge Bank said Tuesday it opened a Baltimore area branch in Towson. The bank, which was established in April 2008, also hired Tim Daly to lead the new office as executive vice president and Hugh Robinson as senior vice president. Daly previously served as senior vice president for Chevy Chase Bank's commercial banking division for the Baltimore market, while Robinson was executive vice president and senior lender at Bay National Bank in Baltimore. BlueRidge Bank has nearly $100 million in assets.

The last time regulators ordered Ed Hale to fix a money-losing bank or have it seized by the government was the early 1990s. The trucking executive had gained control of the Bank of Baltimore, which lent itself into trouble in the last real estate crash. Hale and other dissident shareholders took over the board, pulled the bank from a pit and made millions of dollars when they sold it to First Fidelity a couple of years later. Now that 1st Mariner Bank is in the same flavor of soup, Hale is suggesting he can pull off a similar rescue.

If all First Mariner Bancorp's shareholders were as loyal as Frank Wesolowski, the company's stock would still be at $10 or $15. Wesolowski is a retired pharmacist from Edgemere, where First Mariner honcho Edwin Hale Sr. grew up and launched a real estate and shipping kingdom. He watched Hale win a proxy war for control of the Bank of Baltimore in the early 1990s. He figured Hale's new bank, founded in 1995, could fill vacancies left by Bank of Baltimore and other lenders that got sold to out-of-towners.

After a three-hour hearing that included rare testimony from Baltimore's sitting mayor, the city's Planning Commission yesterday unanimously endorsed Mayor Sheila Dixon's proposal for a new agency to streamline the sale of city-owned vacant property. The proposal for the quasi-governmental Land Bank Authority now goes to the City Council for consideration. "What we are doing is broken, and we admit it," Dixon said, addressing the nine-member commission for about 15 minutes. "Every day that we do not do something another lot becomes vacant."

Meet the new American lender. M&T Bank Corp., which said yesterday that it will buy Baltimore's Provident Bankshares, will typify U.S. finance in the next few years. Big. Based somewhere else. But something that looks like an old-fashioned bank, with branch offices and lollipops next to the teller. FDIC-insured. No investment banking division. No Masters of the Universe deal makers. No 30 dollars borrowed for every one dollar of capital. A lineup that recently would have seemed terribly dull for consumers as well as shareholders now looks very attractive.

As somebody who often preaches the virtues of free capital, surely I would be churlish to complain that Baltimore's biggest remaining bank is being bought by out-of-towners. Pittsburgh's PNC Financial is buying Mercantile Bankshares for what the market valued yesterday as about $45 per share - the highest price ever commanded by the stock. The efficiencies from the combination will contribute to the kind of productivity growth that is essential if the U.S. economy is going to pay its debts and finance Social Security in coming decades.

The Bank of Baltimore has won the bid for the $24 million home equity portfolio of Yorkridge-Calvert Savings and Loan Association. The purchase price was not disclosed.Yorkridge was taken over by federal regulators in December 1989 because of financial problems. At the time it was the 10th largest savings and loan in Maryland.The purchase will be made through the Resolution Trust Corp., a federal agency that is handling insolvent thrifts.Home-equity loans are secured by the borrowers' homes.

The stockholder vote turning over control of Baltimore Bancorp to dissident shareholders has been certified by the Corporation Trust Co., the company that counted the votes.The certification yesterday brings to an end a six-month effort by a group lead by Baltimore Blast owner Edwin F. Hale to seize control of the parent company of the Bank of Baltimore.The bank also announced that Richard P. Manekin and M. Peter Moser have resigned from the board, leaving only nine holdover board members on the newly enlarged 28-person board.

Police were looking for the man who robbed a Bank of America branch yesterday in Baltimore County. Police said a man entered the bank in the 7900 block of Belair Road in Fullerton about 10:20 a.m. and gave a teller a note demanding money. The man fled with an undisclosed sum and was last seen running south on Belair Road, police said. The robber is described as a white man in his early 20s, between 5 feet 5 inches and 5 feet 10 inches tall, with a slim build. He was wearing blue jeans, a black flight jacket and a "Ford" baseball-style cap, police said.

Wachovia Corp. publicly apologized yesterday for two predecessor institutions that owned slaves or allowed them to be used as collateral, and it revealed that two of Baltimore's oldest banks profited indirectly from slavery. The nation's fourth-largest bank disclosed its ties to the slave trade in a 111-page report to comply with a Chicago ordinance requiring companies that do business with the city to determine whether they had profited from slavery, which was abolished by the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865.