The biggest securities fraud case in Ohio history was built on misplaced trust and furthered by victims’ shame, the state’s top investigator says.
“People deny they’re involved in a fraud,” and that allows the fraud to continue unchecked, said Harvey McCleskey, who as a senior deputy attorney inspector with the Ohio Department of Commerce’s Division of Securities was the lead investigator of what came to be known as the Northwest Capital scheme.
The case, from its start to its final sentencings late last month in Lucas County Common Pleas Court, ran for about a decade. It involved an estimated 800,000 pages of paper documents, 2 terabytes of digital files, and an estimated combined loss of $72 million to at least 200 victims…