But if you're a small, family-owned bank in Chinatown, well, it's a different story. The titular bank is named for the Chinese calculator. It's owned and run by the Sung family, Chinese-Americans who live in Greenwich, Connecticut and commute to Manhattan to oversee the flow of funds, the distribution of loans, the collection of payments and so forth. James, whose distinguished career includes "Hoop Dreams," "At the Death House Door" and the recent Roger Ebert documentary "Life Itself," has a knack for finding the universal within the specific, and often a much larger and more complex story nestled within a specific account of one event.
That's the case here, too. The main object of interest is the 2015 trial of Abacus bank officials on charges of conspiracy, larceny and systemic fraud. But woven around that is a story of immigrants assimilating and obeying the laws of their home country over generations, only to be made an example by their adopted nation's power structure for what seem, in James' account, like specious or intellectually dishonest reasons.
As the film explains, no one in the Sung family—including bank co-founders and married couple Thomas and Hwei Lin Sung and their four daughters—was directly connected to the shenanigans in the loan department of their Chinatown bank. The offenses included embezzlement, bribery and larceny. Documentation proves that once the Sungs realized they were employing dishonest people, they fired them immediately and reported their offenses to authorities, even providing fat binders full of documents to the district attorney's office to strengthen the case against the accused. James makes a compelling case that Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. threw Abacus and the Sung family under the bus because he needed to prove he was tough on white collar crime, and knew he could scapegoat a Chinese family because they owned a small, independent bank in a community too small to affect his chances at re-election.
Government and media witnesses to the investigation and trail agree that they never saw anything like the treatment of Abacus bank employees by Vance's office. They were handcuffed and paraded down public corridors in a group of fifteen, their wrists linked by handcuffs as if in a chain gang, and three of the people in that lineup were Chinese-Americans who technically shouldn't even have been there because they had already been released on bail. (Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi called the image "almost Stalinist.") There is, by this film's account, no compelling evidence that the Sungs were guilty of anything worse than failing to detect the actions of dishonest employees until they'd already caused a lot of damage. The case presented by the film is one of negligence or poor oversight, not active conspiracy to break laws.
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