Dec. 1 (UPI) — President Donald Trump commuted the prison sentence of former private equity CEO David Gentile, 12 days after he went to prison and joined thousands with clemency since January, the White House said Monday.
In May, District Judge Rachel P. Kovner in Manhattan sentenced Gentile to seven years in prison on wire and security fraud charges.
Gentile, 59, of Long Island, began his sentence on Nov. 14 and he was freed on Wednesday, according to the Bureau of Prisons website, when Trump was at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. The prison site wasn’t specified.
Also, White House pardon czar, Alice Marie Johnson, confirmed Gentile’s release in a post on X on Thanksgiving, writing she is “deeply grateful to see David Gentile heading home to his young children.”
The DOJ hasn’t posted the commutation on its website, and it’s unclear if it ends financial penalties, The New York Times reported.
His co-defendant, Jeffry Schneider, 57, of Austin, Texas, doesn’t appear to have received a commutation. Schneider was the owner of a marketing firm who prosecutors said marketed GPB funds to investors. He was sentenced to six years in prison but the website said he is not in Bureau of Prisons custody.
In June, prosecutors asked the judge to have Gentile forfeit more than $15.5 million and Schneider more than $12 million. In September, prosecutors wrote a letter to the judge saying the court-appointed receiver had access to more than $700 million.
In August 2024, a jury in the Eastern District of New York convicted Gentile of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud. The trial lasted eight weeks.
He was the CEO and co-founder of GPB Capital Holdings in 2013.
During the Biden administration, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said that the “charges related to a yearslong scheme to defraud more than 10,000 investors by misrepresenting the source of funds used to make monthly distribution payments and the amount of revenue generated by three of GPB’s investment funds.”
“The defendants built GPB Capital on a foundation of lies,” United States Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. said. “They raised approximately $1.6 billion from individual investors based on false promises of generating investment returns from the profits of portfolio companies, all while using investor capital to pay distributions and create a false appearance of success.
“The sentences imposed today are well deserved and should serve as a warning to would-be fraudsters that seeking to get rich by taking advantage of investors gets you only a one-way ticket to jail. My Office is committed to protecting the investing public and the integrity of the financial markets.”
Between approximately 2015 and 2018, the defendants defrauded investors and prospective investors in the GPB Fund.
The DOJ under Trump disputed the charges, saying regular annualized distributions were paid to investors. In 2015, the company “disclosed to investors the possibility of using investor capital to pay some of these distributions rather than funding them from current operations.”
“Even though this was disclosed to investors the Biden Department of Justice claimed this was a Ponzi scheme,” the official said. “This claim was profoundly undercut by the fact that GPB had explicitly told investors what would happen. At trial, the government was unable to tie any supposedly fraudulent representations to Mr. Gentile. Mr. Gentile also raised serious concerns that the government had elicited false testimony and failed to correct such testimony.”
The former prosecutors said they received statements from more than 1,000 “hardworking, everyday people,” including small business owners, farmers, veterans, teachers and nurses.
“I lost my whole life savings,” one person wrote. “I am living from check to check.”
In 2021, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Gentile in other co-defendants. A source told NBC News it doesn’t change the merits of the civil case against Gentile.
And pardons and commutations by Trump only apply to federal cases.
Trump has granted clemency to several thousand people, including 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants on his first day in office on Jan. 20. He also granted pardons and commutations during his first term,
That includes others convicted of fraud, including Republican Rep. George Santos of New York who was serving a sentence of more than seven years on wire fraud and identity theft charges. And
In October, Trump pardoned executive Changpeng Zhao, who founded the Binance crypto exchange and is a billionaire. Zhao was sentenced to four months in prison after pleading guilty in a deal with the Justice Department to enabling money laundering at Binance. Trump’s family has been involved in bitcoin.