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Los Angeles Times, 16 November 1979
$88,000 to Cover up 'Nightmare'
Spanking Banker Paddles Way to Jail
PITTSBURGH (AP) -- Former banker David Rhodes says spanking customers was an effective way of getting tardy loan payments until some of his customers threatened to tell his superiors about the paddlings.
Today the former bank manager, who spanked the delinquent customers in his office with a wooden paddle, started a three-year prison term in Mercer, Pa., for misappropriating more than $88,000 in bank funds.
"I didn't want to hurt the bank, yet I couldn't stop what had started," said Rhodes, adding he was relieved when bank auditors detected the scheme. "I wanted to keep the bank's customers, to help the bank flourish, but it turned into a nightmare."
U.S. Dist. Court Judge Paul A. Simmons issued the sentence to Rhodes, former manager of a Century National Bank branch in Baden, Pa., who was arrested in August by FBI agents.
Rhodes, 38 and father of two, told Simmons the spankings started as a joke but snowballed out of control.
He said he paddled more than 50 people who were delinquent on loan payments. "I never had any trouble with them afterward," Rhodes said.
Rhodes estimated he averaged about 1,500 loans a year at the Beaver County bank from 1964 until his discharge in 1978.
However, Rhodes told the court he was forced to make eight unrecorded loans totaling $88,268 when six of those who were spanked threatened to report him to his superiors.
One of the six, none of whom has been charged, demanded more money or "he was going to make it out as a homosexual activity," Rhodes told Simmons.
Although he was aware the loans were illegal, Rhodes said he didn't turn himself in because he didn't think the authorities would believe his story.
Defense attorney Robert W. Lewis says Rhodes, who is married and the father of two teen-agers, spanked only men, mostly under middle age. Lewis says "all undertones of homosexuality were disproved," by full psychiatric testing and polygraph tests, to the satisfaction of the FBI.
He also said the FBI was satisfied Rhodes never kept a penny of the money for himself.
Note by C. Farrell: Another US paper, not yet identified, ran a shorter version of the same story under the following all-time-great headline:
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