Aubrey Lee Price, the indicted former banker recently captured after 18 months on the lam, pleaded not guilty to bank fraud at a brief court appearance Wednesday.
Afterward an attorney and family friend commented briefly, indicating Price will dispute government claims he defrauded investors of millions before disappearing to evade punishment.
“The facts in the case are going to be different than the facts in the (newspapers), and (the facts will be) in Mr. Price’s favor,” said D. Duston Tapley Jr., a Vidalia lawyer who said he’s known Price since his client was a child. One of Tapley’s sons, he said, is a close friend of Price, who grew up in the small town of Lyons in Toombs County.
At the request of prosecutors, a federal magistrate ordered Price to be held with no bond.
Price appeared in court in a grey-striped jumpsuit, looking much as he did at his first court appearance in Brunswick last week. He still had dark facial hair and locks down to his shoulders. He made no statement to the court but appeared to smile during conversations with defense counsel.
Price has told the government he does not have the money to afford his own defense, and his court-appointed attorney, Joshua Lowther, entered the not guilty plea.
Tapley, who said he is volunteering to assist in Price’s defense, declined to say more about the government’s accusations or about Price’s life as a fugitive.
Price told a federal probation officer he lived as a migrant worker doing odd jobs around the country. Authorities in rural Florida say Price is a suspect in the operation of a marijuana grow house near Ocala, where neighbors say a man they believe was Price was known as “Jason.”
Prosecutors allege Price, 47, embezzled more than $21 million from a small Georgia bank he and his investors tried to save. He is also under federal indictment in New York for wire fraud, and in a raft of civil litigation is accused of defrauding investors in his money management business of many millions of dollars more.
Price was captured after a traffic stop near Brunswick on New Year’s Eve. Prosecutors say he led family members and others to believe he’d killed himself by jumping off a ferry boat. He was last seen in June 2012 at a ferry terminal in Key West, Fla.
A Florida court declared Price, who also was a former preacher, dead just over a year ago. In a purported suicide note that was not signed, Price allegedly confessed to falsifying financial statements and defrauding clients in his investment business as well as the bank.
Wednesday’s hearing, which lasted about 10 minutes, drew local, national and French media, but it did not appear relatives of Price attended. At least one investor and a woman who described herself as a former employee of the failed Montgomery Bank & Trust were in the gallery. Ailey-based Montgomery Bank failed not long after Price disappeared, and prosecutors say Price’s alleged embezzlement depleted the already troubled bank of its capital reserves and led to its failure.
Tapley said he believed Price’s wife, Rebekah, and two of the couple’s four children had visited Price in jail.
Tapley said his client, known to friends as Lee, is “doing well.”
“He was kind of down at the beginning, but he’s better now,” Tapley said. “He’s tough, he’ll be all right.”
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