High-Flying Businessman Gets 9 Years for Frauds

Alan Fabian wanted more, more than the affections of his family, more than the admiration of his friends.

The ambitious young entrepreneur got it: A beach house in North Carolina. A six-figure family vacation to Egypt and Israel. A place among Maryland's Republican powerbrokers.

Then it was gone, the money and the influence all revealed as little more than the proceeds of a succession of frauds that prosecutors say totaled almost $40 million.

After pleading guilty in May to federal fraud and tax charges, Fabian, of Cockeysville in Baltimore County, knew that he was going to lose his freedom, too.

Yesterday, in a Baltimore federal courtroom packed with family members and friends, Fabian, 44, was sentenced to nine years in prison for swindling millions of dollars from businesses and banks.

It was the culmination of a remarkable fall for a man who served as finance chairman for the U.S. Senate campaign of then-Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele and last year was co-chairman of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's national finance committee.

In a sentencing that spanned two days, it was as if two different people were before U.S. District Judge Catherine C. Blake. To his wife, his attorneys and the dozens of tearful supporters who filled the courtroom, Fabian was a beloved father and husband, a devoted Christian and a man of good works. To the federal prosecutors and agents who pieced together Fabian's frauds, he was, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Biran told the court, a man "totally lacking in moral character."

With Fabian facing 10 to 12 1/2 years under the federal guidelines, federal public defenders James Wyda and Sean P. Vitrano asked for a sentence of five years. The prosecutors, Biran and fellow Assistant U.S. Attorney Tonya Kelly Kowitz, asked for 12 1/2 years, the high end of the range.

When time came for the judge to pronounce her sentence, Blake made plain her challenge, acknowledging Fabian's dedication to his family, then enumerating the "consistent, repeated, sophisticated pattern of fraud" he perpetrated.

"How," the judge asked, "do you reconcile this?"

It was, she said in answering her own question, "moral blindness," and it could hardly be excused by other acts. Unfortunately, she said, the good that Fabian had done and wanted to do was outweighed by years of "grossly illegal" conduct.

Indicted last year, Fabian was charged with orchestrating one scheme, and in pleading guilty, he admitted to another.