Barry Bekkedam, former Main Line investment manager, ordered to prison Monday

Barry R. Bekkedam, the former Main Line investment manager who was convicted in 2016 of conspiracy to defraud the federal government’s bank bailout program during the financial crisis, has apparently run out of options on his bid to avoid an 11-month prison term.

A federal judge in Philadelphia last month ordered the former Villanova University basketball player to report to prison or surrender to a U.S. marshal on Monday to begin serving time for his role in an attempt in 2009 to obtain $13 million in bailout money for the now-defunct Nova Bank in Berwyn.

Bekkedam, who moved to Florida in 2010, has maintained that he is innocent, even as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia in August upheld the convictions of Bekkedam and his co-defendant, Brian Hartline, who was chief executive of Nova. Bekkedam, 51, faced long odds in getting the U.S. Supreme Court to take his case, according to a federal prosecutors' October motion to revoke bail.

Bekkedam could not be reached for comment.

In contrast to Bekkedam, Hartline has already served his 14-month prison term, paid a $50,000 fine, and has been out of prison for more than a year and has a job working for a furniture company, according to a motion Thursday seeking the return of Hartline’s passport.

In April 2016, a federal jury found Bekkedam and Hartline guilty of using a circular loan scheme to defraud the U.S. Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and two counts of false statements to the federal government.

Prosecutors had charged in a 2014 indictment that Bekkedam, the bank’s founding chairman, and Hartline orchestrated a series of fraudulent loans to customers who would then immediately invest the money back into Nova to help the bank qualify for a $13.5 million bailout.

One of the investors was George Levin, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., businessman who had helped facilitate Bekkedam’s investment of about $30 million for clients in a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme. Levin received a $5 million loan from Nova. That Ponzi-scheme debacle led in 2010 to the closure of Bekkedam’s Ballamor Capital Management, which had received a line of credit from Levin.

Ultimately, the Treasury Department rescinded its conditional offer of money to Nova for unrelated reasons. Nova was closed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in October 2012.

Bekkedam, who moved from Canada to the Philadelphia area in the 1980s to play basketball at Archbishop Carroll High School and then Villanova, could face deportation proceedings after prison, according to a filing in his Third Circuit appeal.