CLEVELAND – An investment broker suspected of stealing up to $300 million from his clients surrendered to the FBI on Saturday after nearly a month on the run.
Frank Gruttadauria, 44, who was the manager of a Cleveland office of Lehman Brothers, turned himself in without incident at the FBI’s downtown office around 5 p.m. He will appear before a U.S. magistrate Monday, the FBI said in a one-page news release. A federal warrant issued Jan. 25 charges him with making false statements to a financial institution.
Gruttadauria, a suburban Gates Mills resident, is suspected of a plot in which he had account statements for about 25 clients mailed to his post office box. He then allegedly forwarded falsified statements that inflated the value of client accounts.
Gruttadauria disappeared with his passport Jan. 11. He left the FBI a letter saying he acted alone and didn’t take money for personal use. He wrote that lax supervision made it possible for him to misappropriate money over a 15-year period.
Among the clients who lost money are businessman Samuel Glazer, a Mr. Coffee co-founder who lost about $30 million and George Forbes, head of the local NAACP and a former president of Cleveland City Council who lost more than $1 million.
Another investor, Golda Stout, 86, of Elgin, Ill., said she considered Gruttadauria like a son. Now she suspects him of taking her $2.5 million and leaving her with just $83,000.
Stout said Saturday that she was glad Gruttadauria was still alive. “I am so excited about this that I’m not even able to talk sense. I didn’t want him to kill himself even though I was mad at him,” she said. “I’m trying to rationalize why a person would do what he has.” Gruttadauria wrote a letter to his family following his disappearance, apologizing to his mother for putting her through the ordeal.
“I don’t know how to live as a fugitive,” the letter concluded. His mother and a lawyer for the family did not immediately return calls seeking comment Saturday.
Investigators have characterized Gruttadauria’s fraud as a giant shell game where he transferred client money into accounts he controlled under fictitious names. Whenever a client needed a withdrawal from an account that was empty, Gruttadauria would transfer money from someone else’s account.
