Background
Bernard Kent Marcus was born in 1890 in New York City, and was the son of Joseph S. and Celia R. Marcus. His father, who had been a clothier, organized the Public Bank of New York in 1908 and later founded the Bank of United States.
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Bernard Kent Marcus
Edit ProfileEducation
Marcus attended New York City public schools and received the B. A. from Columbia University in 1911.
Career
Marcus joined the Bank of United States around 1911 and became president on his father's death in 1927. The bank then ranked thirty-fifth among 30, 000 institutions in the country, and Marcus was said to be the youngest head of a large banking establishment. Through mergers he expanded the organization; by 1929 the bank had fifty-seven New York City branches, with $314. 7 million in assets and deposits of more than $220 million in 440, 000 accounts, many of them small savings deposits. Marcus and his vice-president, Saul Singer, also controlled the affiliated Bankus Corporation, City Financial Corporation, Municipal Financial Corporation, three safe-deposit companies, more than twenty subsidiary real-estate corporations, and an insurance company. Subsequent investigation showed that Marcus and Singer had also made more than $2. 5 million in uninvestigated loans to members of their board and had manipulated the bank's stock prices while permitting more than $70 million to become frozen in real-estate holdings. In 1929 and 1930 they attempted unsuccessfully to solidify the position of the bank through mergers. Final desperate efforts in the early days of December 1930 also proved fruitless, and on December 11 the New York state superintendent of banks closed the institution. It was the second major New York City bank to fail during the Great Depression and the largest failure in state history at that time. The bank listed book assets of more than $237 million but had only $33 million on hand to meet claims of $189 million. In the eventual settlement, however, those debts were repaid at over 70 percent. In June 1931 Marcus and Singer were convicted of misapplying funds of an affiliate of the Bank of United States and were sentenced to prison terms of three to six years. After unsuccessful court appeals, they entered Sing Sing on March 21, 1933. Marcus served twenty-three months before he was paroled; six years later he was pardoned by Governor Herbert H. Lehman of New York. In September 1937 he filed bankruptcy papers, listing more than $18 million in liabilities. Two years later Marcus accepted the vice presidency of the Continental Factors Corporation in New York. The firm had been organized and financed by Joseph Kohn, a Bank of United States depositor, who asserted that his $100, 000 loss had not been Marcus's fault. The new corporation supplied cash to manufacturers on their receivable accounts. He died at a resort in Hunter, New York.
Achievements
Connections
Marcus married Libby Phillips; they had three sons.
