- Frank founder Charlie Javice is on trial in NYC, charged with defrauding JPMC out of $175M.
- She’s fighting to suppress a text in which she called her codefendant “the best partner in crime.”
- Prosecutors told the judge the 2022 text “reflects a nonchalant consciousness of guilt.”
Federal prosecutors believe Frank founder Charlie Javice was joking at the time, back in October 2021, when she texted her second-in-command and gave him her brief feedback on his job performance.
“My comment is ur the best partner in crime,” she wrote. “The end,” she then signed off, receiving a smiling emoji in response.
But a month into a New York fraud trial, neither prosecutors nor the defense are treating the remark as a joking matter.
Prosecutors say Javice and her underling-turned-codefendant Olivier Amar, are indeed partners in crime — a brazen conspiracy to trick the nation’s biggest bank, JPMorgan Chase, into paying $175 million for their financial aid startup.
On Tuesday, the defense lawyers fought to keep her jury from learning about the exchange.
At the time of the sale of Frank, Javice was a former Forbes “30 under 30” honoree and a financial-media darling, and Amar was her chief growth officer. Prosecutors say the two conspired to purchase data for some 4 million students, and clinched the deal with JPMorgan Chase by falsely claiming they were Frank users.
JPMorgan purchased the startup in hopes of marketing its banking products to college-bound students. A year passed before the bank realized that Frank had only 300,000 users, prosecutors allege.
The four texts that comprise Javice and Amar’s “partner in crime” exchange are “relevant and admissible,” federal prosecutors wrote US District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein. They are asking the judge to let the jury see the exchange as evidence.
“This exchange reflects a nonchalant consciousness of guilt, and further reflects the type of closely intimate relationship that Javice and Amar shared,” only two short months after the bank purchased the startup, prosecutors wrote.
In the first text in the pair’s WhatsApp chain, Amar, a citizen of Canada and Israel accused of pocketing $2 million in the fraud, tells his boss, Javice, “Kept my self evaluation brief as you requested.” He added a smiley face emoji.
Javice, a citizen of France, responded with a smile of her own — a colon and a close-parenthesis.
“It’s a fake review as everything comp is already set,” Javice then wrote, an apparent reference to the millions in “compensation” the two were making as a result of the deal, which included JPMorgan Chase salaries for each of them.
Javice — who prosecutors say stood to make $45 million through the deal — then “joked with Amar about disclosing to JPMC in a performance review that Amar and Javice are partner[s] in crime,” federal prosecutors added.
“Indeed,” they wrote, “the defendants are charged with conspiring to commit crimes together, i.e., being partners in crime.”
Defense lawyers for Amar and Javice argue that “the context provided indicates that Ms. Javice was simply making a joke,” including by indicating it was a “fake” review.
The defense teams are also asking the judge to keep jurors from seeing a February 2022 WhatsApp exchange conducted by the two defendants during a Zoom meeting with JPMC personnel.
The text exchange begins with Javice saying “gave him the shit show of all systems in spreadsheets.” A minute later, after Amar texts, “okay,” Javice responds “ah we are fucked.”
“There is no probative value to these messages” absent the context of whatever was going on in the Zoom meeting, the defense wrote Tuesday.
Prosecutors said they expected to rest their direct case Tuesday afternoon.
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