Beck falsely claims Creamer “stole” $2 million “from the banks”

From the December 8 edition of Fox News' Glenn Beck:

GLENN BECK: America, our politicians are ignoring you. They're following a guy now in Washington, this guy, who's a felon. Convicted felon. He wrote it in prison.

[...]

BECK: Now David Axelrod calls the prison plan a blueprint for progressives. Forget the measly $2 million he stole from the banks. Please, banking fraud, who hasn't done a little $2 million theft? He's here to help now, help fraud America on one sixth of the economy.

Creamer did not steal any money - banks incurred no financial losses in case

Judge reportedly stated no one lost any money. Contrary to Beck's claim that Creamer “stole” $2 million from banks, U.S. District Judge James B. Moran reportedly gave Creamer a lighter sentence because no one suffered any “out of pocket losses.” [CBS 2, 4/05/06]

From Chicago's CBS 2 article:

CBS 2 Political Editor Mike Flannery reports the jail term could have been much worse but still came as a shock to the powerful couple.

Prosecutors had wanted a three-year sentence, but U.S. District Judge James B. Moran said five months was fairer because no one suffered “out of pocket losses” and Creamer acted not out of greed but in an effort to keep his community action group going without cutting programs.

Creamer: Banks didn't lose any money. Following his April 2005 guilty plea, Creamer reportedly said in a statement that “that ”no bank ever did lose any money as a result of my conduct in 1997 or at any other time while I was at Illinois Public Action." [CBS 2, 8/31/05]

From the August 31 Chicago CBS 2 article:

Minutes after Creamer pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge James B. Moran, he and his supporters took issue with what prosecutors said were significant sums of money lost by banks as a result of three complex, so-called check-kiting schemes he admitted that he had engineered.

Creamer said in a statement that “no bank ever did lose any money as a result of my conduct in 1997 or at any other time while I was at Illinois Public Action.”

Creamer admitted in his 18-page signed plea agreement that he wrote checks on accounts that lacked sufficient funds to cover them. He was able to do this repeatedly because he moved money from one account to another in three banks in 1997, playing what bankers describe as the float and thus making them believe that the accounts had more money in them than they actually did.

When the three banks realized there was a problem and froze the accounts in May 1997, there was a positive balance in two of the accounts, according to the plea agreement. But it said that his account in Chicago's Cole Taylor Bank had a negative balance of $2.385 million.

At the time, there were $370,000 in insufficiently funded checks outstanding, the document said. Prosecutors said, however, that when Creamer is sentenced the $2.385 million figure will represent the amount of the fraud. They said it took months to pay off the negative balance.