The Other Side of “The Mafia’s Banker”

There are books that tell a story.

And then there are books that force someone who lived another part of that story to ask a much more uncomfortable question:

What happens when the person telling the story is not the only person who remembers what happened?

Luca Alessandro Longobardi’s Branded “The Mafia’s Banker” is presented as the story of an ambitious young Italian who left Naples for America, built a career in finance, founded State Capital, and later found himself arrested in Brazil and publicly associated with allegations of organised crime and money laundering.

The book presents Longobardi’s experience as a devastating injustice. Public accounts describe his arrest in Brazil in 2010 and his subsequent release after the charges against him were dropped or dismissed. Longobardi has repeatedly described the episode as the destruction of everything he had built. (The Standard⁠)

I have no intention of rewriting a judicial history from memory.

Nor do I claim to know more than the courts about allegations made against anyone.

But there is another dimension that deserves to be discussed.

The dimension of the people who were on the other side of the business relationships.

And that is where my own experience begins.

A book can tell one story. Reality can contain several.

Reading Branded “The Mafia’s Banker”, I was struck by the confidence with which a personal narrative can become the dominant version of events.

That is one of the great powers of writing.

Once a person publishes a book, appears in the media and tells a compelling story of adversity, the public naturally identifies with the protagonist.

The entrepreneur who arrives in New York with very little.

The ambitious financier.

The businessman who builds a financial organisation.

The dramatic arrest.

The prison experience.

The fall.

The recovery.

The rebirth.

It is a powerful narrative.

And I understand why people find it compelling.

But my experience with Luca Longobardi is radically different.

According to my own records and recollection, there were business obligations involving ownership interests in a company that had been sold and which I expected to receive.

Those interests were not transferred to me as I understood they should have been.

This is not a philosophical disagreement.

It is a matter of ownership, contractual obligations, money and accountability.

And therefore it deserves to be examined through documents, contracts, corporate records and financial evidence — not through competing autobiographical narratives.

What I lost was not simply money

Financial losses are measurable.

Trust is not.

When you enter into a business relationship with someone, you are not simply exchanging money.

You are exchanging something much more valuable:

trust.

You trust that agreements will be respected.

You trust that ownership will be transferred when it is supposed to be transferred.

You trust that money provided for a specific purpose will be used accordingly.

You trust that people who call themselves partners will behave as partners.

When that trust disappears, the damage is much larger than the balance sheet.

In my case, I experienced a situation in which assets and financial resources that I believed were connected to a transaction were not ultimately reflected in the ownership position I expected to receive.

I believe I was financially harmed.

I believe I was left without what I was entitled to receive.

And I believe that the full circumstances deserve to be understood through evidence rather than through anyone’s preferred narrative.

That is my position.

The uncomfortable question of responsibility

There is another question that I have asked myself repeatedly over the years.

Why did I allow the situation to continue?

The answer is not flattering.

At a certain point in my life, I was not in the psychological condition to fight as aggressively as I might have done under different circumstances.

I was weak.

I was exhausted.

I was dealing with depression.

And I trusted people around me.

One of those people was an attorney who was also a friend — someone whose advice I trusted and who repeatedly encouraged me not to escalate the situation.

Looking back, I understand that advice differently.

At the time, I believed that avoiding confrontation might allow the situation to resolve itself.

It did not.

That experience taught me one of the hardest lessons in business:

sometimes avoiding conflict does not resolve a problem. It simply transfers the cost into the future.

Revenge was never the answer

There was a moment when anger could easily have taken control.

I could have spent years thinking about revenge.

I could have tried to destroy reputations.

I could have dedicated my energy to making other people suffer.

I chose not to.

Not because I did not feel anger.

I did.

Not because I did not feel betrayed.

I did.

But because revenge is ultimately another form of dependence.

If your entire life becomes an attempt to punish somebody who harmed you, that person continues to control your life.

I refused to give that power to anyone.

Not taking revenge was a decision of maturity, not weakness.

Karma is not a legal system

I believe in karma.

But karma is not a court.

It is not a substitute for evidence.

It is not a substitute for lawyers.

It is not a substitute for contracts, corporate records or judicial proceedings.

The law must do what the law is designed to do.

Lawyers must do their work.

Documents must speak for themselves.

And if there are unresolved matters, they can be addressed through legitimate channels.

What I believe about karma is something different.

I believe that people’s choices eventually shape the lives they live.

Character compounds.

Reputation compounds.

Trust compounds.

So do bad decisions.

A person can escape one consequence and still face another.

A person can win one battle and lose something much more important.

And sometimes the consequences do not arrive immediately.

That is why I have never needed to predict anyone else’s future.

The question I refuse to answer

There is one temptation that I deliberately resist.

People sometimes ask:

Where is he today?

What is he doing?

Who is he working with?

Who might be affected by the same behaviour?

I do not know.

And I do not need to speculate.

If there are legitimate questions about past business relationships, they should be answered with evidence.

If there are legitimate legal claims, they should be handled by lawyers and courts.

If there are legitimate corporate questions, they should be examined through corporate records.

I have no interest in replacing evidence with rumours.

That would make me no better than the people whose behaviour I criticise.

What the book does not tell the reader

This is the part of the story that interests me most as a financial professional.

A financial business is not built only on transactions.

It is built on reputation.

Money moves because people trust institutions.

Investors commit capital because they believe contracts will be honoured.

Partners enter transactions because they believe ownership rights will be respected.

Banks lend because they believe borrowers will comply with their obligations.

Financial markets function because millions of participants accept a fundamental principle:

promises have consequences.

Once that principle disappears, the financial system becomes nothing more than a collection of transactions without trust.

That is why stories involving financial disputes are never merely personal.

They tell us something about the architecture of business itself.

The difference between accusation and evidence

There is an important distinction that I want to make absolutely clear.

I am not interested in declaring someone guilty because I have a personal grievance.

I am interested in putting my own experience on the record.

There is a difference.

An accusation is a statement.

Evidence is something else.

Contracts.

Share registers.

Bank records.

Corporate filings.

Emails.

Transfer instructions.

Closing documents.

Correspondence between lawyers.

These are the things that establish what actually happened.

And if, at some point, the relevant evidence needs to be examined, I have no reason to fear that examination.

Quite the opposite.

Facts are not afraid of scrutiny.

What I learned from State Capital Bancorp

My years in finance taught me something that became particularly clear after difficult experiences:

Never confuse success with immunity.

You can build companies.

You can negotiate large transactions.

You can work across countries.

You can establish relationships with powerful people.

You can spend decades developing a professional reputation.

And still make the mistake of trusting the wrong person.

That is not a failure of intelligence.

It is a reminder that business is ultimately conducted between human beings.

And human beings are complicated.

I did not disappear

Perhaps the greatest irony of the entire story is that the experience that could have destroyed my confidence ultimately produced something else.

It forced me to rebuild.

I had to reconstruct my professional identity.

I had to reassess relationships.

I had to decide what kind of person I wanted to become after experiencing disappointment, betrayal and loss.

And eventually I reached a simple conclusion.

I would rather build than destroy.

I would rather create companies than destroy reputations.

I would rather analyse markets than obsess over old enemies.

I would rather develop new ideas than spend my life litigating the past.

That does not mean the past disappears.

It means the past no longer controls the future.

What has not happened yet may still happen

There is another principle I have learned.

The fact that something has not happened until today does not mean that it can never happen.

Some matters take years to understand.

Some documents surface later.

Some corporate structures change.

Some witnesses become willing to speak.

Some legal questions become clearer with time.

And sometimes circumstances change completely.

That is not a threat.

It is simply reality.

I have no interest in revenge.

If legitimate matters ever need to be revisited, they can be revisited through legitimate means.

Evidence. Lawyers. Courts. Facts.

Nothing more is required.

The best revenge is not revenge

There is an old idea that success is the best revenge.

I would change it slightly.

Success is not revenge when you have stopped living for the person who hurt you.

For me, the real victory has been rebuilding.

Creating.

Analysing.

Investing in ideas.

Working internationally.

And building Fintech SCB into a global platform for independent analysis across finance, economics, geopolitics and global markets.

That is the chapter I am interested in writing now.

Not the chapter about what somebody did to me.

The chapter about what I built afterwards.

The final balance sheet

Every financial professional understands the concept of a balance sheet.

Assets.

Liabilities.

Equity.

But life has another balance sheet.

Trust.

Reputation.

Character.

Decisions.

Consequences.

Some people accumulate money and lose trust.

Some accumulate influence and lose credibility.

Some accumulate followers and lose substance.

Others lose almost everything and discover that they still possess the most important asset of all:

the ability to start again.

I know which balance sheet matters to me.

I chose not to take revenge.

I chose not to become consumed by anger.

I chose to rebuild.

And today, when I look at the journey from State Capital Bancorp to the creation and international development of Fintech SCB, I understand something that I could not have understood at the time:

What happened to me may be part of my history, but it does not have to be the definition of my life.

That is my answer.

Not revenge.

Not hatred.

Not threats.

Results.

And if karma exists, I am perfectly comfortable letting it do its work.

My responsibility is different.

To keep building.

To keep succeeding.

To keep telling the truth as I know it.

And to leave the final judgment to evidence, the law, time — and history.

Roberto Balbino
CEO, Fintech SCB
Independent Analyst — Finance, Economy, Geopolitics & Global Markets

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