CHAPTER 176 SHAKEUPS EVERYWHERE IN WILMINGTON TRUST 1997 - 1998
In 2018, Robert Harra and Dave Gibson were convicted of fraud and sentenced to 8 years in prison. They haven’t served a day yet. The Wilmington Trust executives indicted have been allowed to remain free during their appeal and the fraud conviction was overturned in January 2021. On July 6, 2021 the prosecutors decided not to retry the four executives. This travesty of justice allows them to walk free. Once again the elite of our country get away with dishonesty that hurt so many others.
In the years preceding these event, Leonard Quill finally retired and reorganization occurred at the top. Ted Cecala (left) was named the new Chairman, and he would oversee the financial end of the bank and be the voice out to the world, while
Bob Harra (right) was named
President and be in charge of internal operations.
Bill Farrell (left) became Senior Manager of Trust and another old buddy of Ted Cecale’s,
Administration.
I had worked with all four during my years at Wilmington Trust, especially with Harra.
Not long after this John Kipp (Kipp is the this from left in this photo) retired and Bill Farrell was also given responsibility for Information Technology. (Ted Cecala, himself, retired June 3, 2010.)
This decision sealed John Behringer’s fate. Everyone knew he would go no higher in the company now. Cecala might have made this choice because John Behringer had “come out of the closet” in the past year and he and his wife went separate ways while he moved in with his long-time lover. This coming out did answer some questions about
John and his wife married out of high school and had two children twenty years apart. John, himself, always attended various bank social functions alone where everyone else brought their spouse, never bringing his wife. I met his wife eventually and discovered she was a dwarf. She was the type who has the hump on the back and one leg shorter than the other. She wore a built-up shoe on that leg.
(John died of cancer, after a five year battle, on October 21, 2000. He was survived both by his pardner, Richard “Ric” Brown and his former wife, Karen Matthews. He had been Phyllis Fawcett and Tino Funaro’s smoking partner all the years I knew him They always took smoking breaks together. He was about 55 when he died. Phyllis also died of cancer at age 58.)
As John faded in his career, Doug Harden’s power was growing. He was actually starting to get assignments I had been asked to do, but I kept turning them down because I wanted to work with Walt Whittaker. This would prove to be a foolish choice.
Fil Sherry, now Vice-president of Deposit Services ( He left Wilmington Trust in the great purge of 2011 and went to Merrill Linch.) just didn’t seem to know what to do with me. I had too good a record. and was too well known to fire.Meanwhile, older managers in Deposit Services began to disappear into early retirement.
Like John, their backups weren’t necessarily replacing them as expected either. In some cases their units simply disappeared with them. Or like Julie Reganauer, who left in a cloud of bitterness, which included the disappearance of all her files, whose clear replacement was a woman named Claire Green because Claire knew everything about the Check Statement Unit, was great at handling people and as nice a person you could meet, but she didn’t get Julie’s Job as qualified as she was. Instead Fil hired a young woman out of Accounting named Heidi. Heidi knew nothing about the unit. She was the manager, but in reality Claire Green was really running everything. Clair was the face of Check Statements, she just didn’t get the salary or title. It was a mystery why Heidi was there. She was an accountant with a CPA. Why would she want a job managing the Check Statement Unit? Heidi did eventually leave the bank to go elsewhere.
Next Rose Jones, supposedly my communications assistant, had her 55th birthday and suddenly decided on early retirement, and she was quickly gone, but not replaced.
One day in January, Fil calls me to his office and introduces me to Dave Ernst, another young man on the fast track at the bank. Dave had replaced Fil as head of Sales Support when Fil became Cecala’s assistant, but now Dave was in trouble. The Strong Points program was being rolled out and it was the current big buzz word at the bank, the number one priority, and Dave was having his butt chewed off because he was in no way providing the data needed and had no way of getting the information out of the old referral system that was to be joined with the Strong Points program.
Fil claimed he had met with Ted Cecala and Robert Harra and they all said I was the perfect fit to save Dave's butt from corporate death.
How was I a perfect fit? I knew nothing about Sales Support issues or about the proposed Strong Points program. I wasn’t a systems guy. I had created a cost system in Excel all on my own as a secret project, because I needed it. Accounting learned of It and began getting data from me to use in their reports. Something of a feat I suppose, but they wanted someone to create a M/S Access Database and tap into an existing dBase system. I had never heard of either Access or dBase, but there were some comments that Fil made that told me I better take this job like it or not or I might be going out the door right behind Rose.
There was another little catch. I was only going to work for Dave short-term, about 12 months, and then I was going to go work in Accounting. Fil had worked out the deal with Jon Parmiter, the Division Manager of Accounting. (And I had never wanted to end up in the accounting area after I began working for Walt.)
Off I went. Packed my desk contents at the Plaza and moved them to my new desk in my new office on the street floor of the headquarters on Rodney Square. A much nicer office, actually, wood trimmed walls with large windows overlooking the street and another big window inside overlooking the lobby. Still, I lay in bed at night convinced they were “greasing the skids”, that I was being set-up to fail and to be forced out the door.
But I fooled them all.
Laurel briefly joined the Air Force, probably trying to keep up with her younger sister. She flew to Texas for basic training, but she was soon honorably discharged for medical reasons. She had had a slight nervous breakdown. She had never had the same makeup as her sister. Laurel got a job with the Humane Association of Delaware working with cats
Darryl was still going to high school. He still had a couple of years to go. He had joined the ROTC program at Mt. Pleasant. He decided against joining the Boy Scouts after graduating from Cub Scouts. I had been the Treasurer for the Cub Scout Troop for a number of years, but now I gave that and being a Den Leader up.
Darryl was also finishing his last year in organized baseball.
The kids were growing up rapidly, which was a good thing because a crisis for me lay ahead
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