Virginia Smith Fields repeatedly turned to glare at Brenda Montgomery as she pleaded, unsuccessfully, with U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker to reject a plea deal under which Montgomery would spend less than five years in federal prison.
Fields talked about the small-town bank that her grandfather, father and brother worked to build and preserve, and she vented her fury at the first of three defendants to be sentenced for her role in stealing nearly $4 million from First National Bank of Lawrence County over the course of 10 years.
Fields, of Austin, Texas, described Montgomery as a "petty, delusional manipulator" and a "sociopathic narcissist of the highest order," and complained that Montgomery had shown no remorse and paid no restitution since the theft was discovered in April 2015.
Instead, Fields said Montgomery, who was 57 when she offered her guilty plea in May, had used stolen money to hire a high-priced lawyer — Bill James of Little Rock — and even had the nerve to ask the court for probation rather than a prison sentence.
She asked Baker to reject the plea deal and to let a jury trial determine Montgomery's punishment, which could have been up to 30 years in prison.
Fields' brother, Milton Smith, CEO of the bank at Walnut Ridge since their father died unexpectedly in 1994, also asked Baker to reject the conditional plea deal that Montgomery and her co-defendants, Cindy Tate and Peggy Sutton, entered with federal prosecutors.
Smith, 49, said he had known all three of the defendants since he was a child — Montgomery had worked for the bank for 35 years, and the three had combined tenure at the bank of nearly a century. Yet none of the three has paid any restitution, and Smith told Arkansas Business that only Sutton had expressed any remorse to him personally.
The losses that exceeded the amount stolen — lost dividends, legal and accounting expenses — were compounded, he told the judge, by an "emotional toll" that was "difficult to describe."
Montgomery, however, told Baker that she felt the "deepest remorse for my crime" and for letting down her husband, coworkers and friends. And James said a letter Montgomery wrote asking to be sentenced to probation — a violation of the plea agreement, which anticipated 41 to 57 months in prison — was a mistake that had been withdrawn.
Baker disappointed the Smith siblings by accepting the plea agreement, but she did sentence Montgomery to the 57-month maximum contemplated by the deal. That will be followed by three years of supervised release.
Montgomery agreed to pay restitution of almost $1.32 million — a third of the $3.95 million she, Tate and Sutton admitted stealing during the course of a 10-year conspiracy.
James asked that his client be allowed to report to prison after the Christmas holidays, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Angela Jegley said she would not object to giving Montgomery 60 days to report. But Baker said she thought 45 days was adequate and ordered Montgomery to report to prison on Nov. 14.
Tate and Sutton are scheduled to be sentenced Friday, Tate at 10:45 a.m. and Sutton at 1:30 p.m. Sutton's attorney, Tim Dudley of Little Rock, attended the sentencing hearing and said he expected his client to receive the same sentence.
The exact nature of the embezzlement was not discussed at Thursday's hearing. In a press release announcing the conditional pleas by the three defendants in May, federal prosecutors said the three stole money from the vault at the main bank office and would transfer cash from branches to cover the shortage when Tate, as head cashier, got advance notice of internal audits.
But Smith said Thursday that the cover-up involved bookkeeping entries, although there may have been some cash transfers as well.
Tate was 57 as of May, and Sutton, a former teller, was 61. In her impassioned statement to Judge Baker, Virginia Fields said Montgomery knew that Sutton was going to attempt suicide when a surprise audit uncovered the shortage, but didn't report it to authorities.
Smith confirmed that Sutton had made a suicide attempt, but he said rumors of a suicide pact by all three women or a plan to shift the blame to Sutton after she killed herself were never confirmed.