Broken Trust in God’s Country

 “Hello: At A & M Investments our aim was to provide a decent rate of interest and for a number of years it worked. However some investments in stocks and bonds should not have been made and when they went bad I should have asked for advice from other people and the church. Instead I kept this to myself and went on hoping to recover at least some of the loss. But then we were forced to shut down at a low point in the economy and the loss is large. I am really sorry for this.”

 

He concluded: “I have made a confession to God and the church and feel I have been forgiven. I hope you can forgive me too.”

For the Amish plan to be put into action, the bankruptcy court would have had to dismiss Mr. Beachy’s case and turn back the clock to the moment before his filing. Only then could his dealings with creditors follow a different path.

The committee’s vigorous campaign to have the Beachy case dismissed, based on the First Amendment’s religious freedom protections and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, won wide support. More than 2,300 creditors filed form letters with the court endorsing the plan.

THERE may have been some practical reasons for that. The public’s fascination with the charm of the Amish is the bedrock of the tourist economy here, and the Sugarcreek scandal was an ugly scar on that landscape. A solution emphasizing fundamental Amish values might well neutralize any damage that the Beachy case inflicted on the Amish image.

But the campaign’s intensity left some non-Amish creditors feeling uncomfortable. One grandmother recalled attending a meeting at which supporters insisted on a “standing vote,” not a secret ballot. She opposed the plan, she said, but she remained seated because she felt intimidated at having her position exposed publicly.

No such qualms afflicted the S.E.C. legal staff, the United States Trustee’s office and the bankruptcy trustee. In court, they all stood firmly against the alternative plan. It would lack judicial oversight and protections against mismanagement or unequal treatment, they argued. And it could well be unconstitutionally unfair to a small minority of non-Amish creditors, who would be steered out of court and into a religious forum tacitly endorsed by the government.

Last March, Federal Bankruptcy Judge Russ Kendig in Canton, in the federal courthouse closest to Sugarcreek, ruled that “delegating insolvency proceedings to a religious body” would be unconstitutional.

Given the high constitutional hurdle, the judge said, Mr. Beachy simply had not “met his burden” for showing why his case should be dismissed after it had started moving through the court. Once “the rock begins to roll,” he concluded, something much stronger than a change of mind is required to stop it.

No part of this story contrasts as sharply with the real Bernie Madoff case as what happened next.

In the Madoff bankruptcy, virtually every adverse ruling has been appealed by the losing side, as have disputed decisions in countless other high-profile bankruptcy cases. But when the Amish leaders lost their passionate plea, rooted in their deeply held religious beliefs, they simply sent the judge a letter.

“We are agreed among ourselves to accept your ruling as the will of Almighty God in this matter,” they wrote, after thanking him for considering their point of view so carefully. “If there is anything which we can do as members of the Amish-Mennonite community to facilitate the bankruptcy process and help bring it to a speedy conclusion please do not hesitate to contact any member” of the committee.

On Sept. 15, 2011, more than a year after Monroe Beachy closed his office and made his fateful trip to bankruptcy court, federal prosecutors held a press conference in Cleveland to announce that he had been indicted on mail fraud charges arising from a “scheme to defraud” that they said dated back to 1990.

He is scheduled to go to trial next month in Youngstown. If convicted, he faces a possible jail term of up to 20 years. His court-appointed defender, a prominent Youngstown criminal defense lawyer, J. Gerald Ingram, did not respond to messages seeking comment on the case.

The bankruptcy case in Canton, meanwhile, is moving forward. The trustee, Ms. Silagy, is optimistic that up to 50 cents on the dollar ultimately can be returned to investors, according to her lawyer, Bruce R. Schrader. Some creditors have filed letters with the court expressing frustration with the delay, but he said that only about 400 creditor claims, out of 2,600, have not been pursued in court.

The criminal trial, scheduled to open on March 19, will no doubt generate new headlines in Sugarcreek — which would much rather tell the world the sort of news it had last month: the village will soon install one of the world’s largest cuckoo clocks.

Mayor Clayton Weller of Sugarcreek says he hopes the trial will not cause renewed rancor. “I personally feel that the people are accepting what has happened,” he said. “They are understanding, and most of them are forgiving.”

But as the church fathers see it, something of lasting importance was tried in Sugarcreek.

“A hundred years from now, what will be the difference about how much money we had here?” asked Emery E. Miller, a village resident and a proponent of the alternative plan, at the first creditors meeting. “But a hundred years from now, there will be a difference in how we responded to this from our moral being, from a moral level — the choices we made to forgive or not to forgive.”