A California-based former registered broker/dealer was sentenced with several co-conspirators for defrauding a number of churches and a real estate development company out of more than $3.5 million, via a scheme the sentencing judge said “required a great deal of planning and heartlessness.”
Jeffrey N. Crossland was sentenced to more than four years in prison, according to the DOJ’s announcement. Crossland was a managing member at Crossland Capital Partners, a California-based b/d; according to BrokerCheck, the firm’s FINRA membership was canceled in 2009 for “failure to pay fees.”
According to the DOJ’s original indictment, filed in 2019, Crossland conspired with Stephen C. Parente, the head of Eagle Capital Investment Partners, a Georgia-based financial advisory consulting practice, and Raymond Robinson, a pastor who ran a consulting firm for churches and also purportedly worked with a Missouri-based church-building company.
The trio allegedly began working together in 2013; Robinson would find the clients, Parente would review their financial profiles and assist them in applying for loans, while Crossland would supposedly offer the funding. The setup was a plan to defraud clients by enticing them into the loan agreements, according to the DOJ, and the conspirators hoped to target churches by capitalizing on Robinson’s background.
According to the DOJ, the trio drafted loan agreements that would require victims to deposit money into an escrow holding account at an Ohio bank that would, supposedly, act as security for the loans. Over time, victims put more than $3.5 million into the escrow account, but according to the Justice Department, the money didn’t stay there.
“Instead, it was used for others’ personal and business expenses, transferred to bank accounts abroad, and used to make payments to certain victims in order to perpetuate and conceal the fraud,” the 2019 indictment against Crossland read. “The purported loans were never funded, and millions of dollars of the victims’ ‘deposits’ were never returned.”
Crossland would tell victims that the money transfers were loan draw payments, but he never actually had the money to fund the loans. Crossland and Robinson would tell victims that their loans would be funded and then try to prevent them from revealing what was happening to law enforcement or pursuing legal recourse options, according to the DOJ. The conduct continued through March 2015, according to the indictment against Crossland.
Crossland, along with the co-defendants, pleaded guilty to committing wire fraud last year. In addition to his prison sentence, Crossland was sentenced to three years of supervised release, as well as paying $37,873 in forfeiture and more than $3.2 million in restitution. Robinson was sentenced to more than three years in prison and was similarly sentenced to supervised release and to pay more than $17,000 in forfeiture and a similar amount in restitution. Parente received a 33-month prison sentence, forfeiture of more than $33,000 and more than $2.9 million in restitution.
