Southern California money manager has decades-long history of alleged scams

Jeri Tulipan had plans for the $1 million her father had left the family. She would use it to care for her aging mother, crippled by Alzheimer’s disease, and her older brother, who lives in an adult care facility.

A lawyer suggested the Florida woman invest with a West Covina wealth management company operated by a British citizen named Robert Tringham, she said. He’d use her money as collateral to trade securities on margin and split the profits with her. Tulipan said it sounded like a safe home for her family’s money.

So she invested the family nest egg with Tringham’s company, Finbar Securities Corp., in 2006. But she says she never got her money back and remains devastated by what happened.

In 2009, prosecutors accused Tringham of fraudulently raising $7.2 million from investors. They said he used Tulipan’s money to repay earlier investors.

Her testimony helped lead a jury to convict 65-year-old Tringham of 10 felony charges, including wire fraud, mail fraud, making false statements to federal investigators and tax evasion. He’s scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 13.

Prosecutors, regulators and disgruntled investors have accused Tringham of a series of investment scams dating back decades. His alleged victims have included real estate investors in Florida and Illinois charity Kids Fight Cancer. For years, he had portrayed himself as a seasoned banker with a track record of investment success. It was all a ruse, prosecutors said.

He wasn’t even Robert Tringham.

Born Rodney Tringham in Nottingham, England, in 1945, he had been convicted of fraud in the 1980s in England, where he served a three-year prison sentence. Later, rocker Bruce Springsteen sued Tringham for copyright violations for attempting to release early recordings of his music. In 1998, a London judge awarded Springsteen 2 million pounds ($3.3 million), which he reportedly never collected.

Tringham then moved to the United States and ultimately settled in Southern California. Soon, prosecutors said, he re-invented himself as Robert Tringham, a well-dressed, well-spoken and disarming European banker, with decades of experience at top financial institutions.

Tringham, jailed without bond at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles, declined to be interviewed for this report. He acted as his own lawyer at trial and denied any wrongdoing.

Speaking to jurors in final arguments, Tringham pleaded for leniency in his distinguished British accent.

“I’d like you to — if it’s possible — to give me a leap of faith. And I can’t show you enough of what I need to convince you,” he said. “And I hope if it ever came around again, we’d be able to have more time and we would have much more evidence and documents to bring to you.”

Jurors convicted him after deliberating less than one hour.

The criminal case centered around First National Ban Corp. in Rancho Cucamonga, through which Tringham raised $7.2 million over a three-month period in 2005. He told investors he’d use their money as collateral to purchase discount bonds and then split the profits with them.

But instead, federal prosecutors would later contend, Tringham diverted more than $2 million to himself, buying a $1.4-million house in the hills of Diamond Bar, a $70,000 Land Rover and fertility treatment for his girlfriend.

The government initiated a criminal investigation and obtained a court order freezing the assets of First National Ban Corp. In 2006, Tringham started raising money through Finbar Securities Corp., the Securities and Exchange Commission would later allege.

“Tringham spun fanciful stories about multimillion-dollar investments, none of which were borne out by Finbar’s bank records,” SEC attorney David Brown said in a court filing. “Finbar was nothing more than a conduit through which Tringham fraudulently raised money from investors that were misappropriated to support his lifestyle and to pay off, among other things, victims of his prior fraud.”

Acting at the SEC’s request, a federal judge shut down Finbar in 2009 and in June of this year ordered it to pay $12 million to investors.

A federal grand jury indicted Tringham in May 2009, accusing him of misleading investors in First National about his past, misappropriating their money and lying to federal investigators when asked about it.

Prosecutors said he wooed investors in elaborate settings, including the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York and an ocean-view hotel in Miami Beach, winning their trust with stories of a long career in banking that were pure fiction.

“He made no trades. He was a fake. He knew he was a fake, and it was his plan all along to take that investor money and transfer it to his control,” Assistant U.S. Atty. Joseph Akrotirianakis told jurors during Tringham’s trial.

Tulipan, 50, now living in Burbank, said her life has been ruined by her financial loss. When her mother died in 2009, she traveled to the funeral alone. She couldn’t afford a plane ticket for her husband. She said she intends to ask U.S. District Judge S. James Otero to impose the maximum sentence.

“He has turned my life upside down. I’ve lost everything,” she said.

Tringham faces a sentence of 11 to 14 years in prison, a federal probation officer has determined. The prosecutor said in a sentencing brief that he hopes the judge chooses the high end of that range.

He called Tringham “a lifetime recidivist who appears either unwilling, or unable, to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law.”

stuart.pfeifer@latimes.com