He had transformed his life by moving to South Florida, earning millions of dollars as a stockbroker and acquiring homes in Europe and the United States.
Today, all that is gone.
Faller's fortune has disappeared, his homes have been repossessed and he has spent 636 days in prison.
Now out of jail and trying to represent himself in the courts, Faller could face another nine years in jail if federal prosecutors win their appeal of his sentence.
This huge reversal of fortune all hinges on one question.
Was James Faller part of a conspiracy to defraud people by promising them loans he never intended to provide? Or was he himself duped by the man who masterminded the scam?
Faller has argued from the beginning that he was just as much a victim as the disappointed loan applicants he did business with, and that he and a fellow loan broker, Barbara Murray, of Stamford, Conn., were the people who blew the whistle on the architect of the scheme, Canadian-born Richard Armand Adam.
Federal prosecutors contend that Faller and Murray contacted them about Adam only to cover up their own complicity in the scheme. The prosecutors are vigorously pursuing appeals to put both in prison.
In the midst of all this, Faller and Murray have acquired an unlikely ally -- the judge who sentenced them.
After juries had found Faller and Murray guilty of fraud charges, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Ryskamp said at one of their sentencing hearings in September 2002 that "having heard all the testimony, I didn't come away with an overwhelming conviction that these defendants were participating in this. ... I could certainly see where they could have been duped."
A year later, at the sentencing of Adam, the scam's undisputed ringleader, Ryskamp again questioned whether justice had been done.
"I've heard the trial and I have some ambivalent feelings about their involvement or whether they might have been victims," the judge said.
"I mean, some things just didn't ring true. You know, the jury found as they did, but it always bothered me."
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida refused comment on the case because of pending appeals, except to say that no judge, including Ryskamp, has been willing to reverse Faller's conviction.
College dropout Faller was raised in West Toledo, graduated from Whitmer High School in 1978, then washed out after a semester at The University of Toledo before getting married and starting a family at the age of 19.
He cleaned carpets and did odd jobs, then spent time in the heavy construction business. After the business failed, he studied for a stockbroker's license and in 1991 moved his family to Tampa, Fla., for a new start.
In Tampa, Faller obtained a job in a brokerage firm. That's where he encountered Adam, whom he met after a cold-call sales session.
There were indications from the start that Adam might have problems.
The bond he gave Faller to open an account at the brokerage turned out to be phony, but Adam persuaded Faller that he himself had been duped by the person who sold him the bond.
Adam soon offered a job to the ambitious Faller, who was then 32. He told Faller he controlled
European trust funds with millions of dollars in them that could be used to make venture capital loans in the United States.
Faller could earn big money working for his firm, International Business Service Alliance, by collecting advance fees for loans aimed at individuals and companies that could not qualify for conventional financing, Adam said.
Adam advanced money to Faller to lease a car, open an office with staff and retain a lawyer to handle loan closings.
In Connecticut, Barbara Murray went through the same process, and even hired investigators and lawyers to check out Adam's business before agreeing to broker loans for him.
In less than a year, Faller's Tampa office had taken in about $1 million in return for the promise of funding more than $150 million in loans.
But when no loans had been closed after three months, Faller said, he began pressuring Adam and his lawyer to produce. Murray, who had sold three times as many loans as Faller, also was becoming alarmed.
Soothing their worries Adam told the two that the process was a slow one, and invited Faller to Luxembourg to see how it worked. During the monthlong trip, Faller said, he became convinced that Adam indeed had access to millions of dollars.
Adam took him on a whirlwind tour of several banks. He literally took me into banks and showed me accounts that held as much as $30 million, Faller said.
Adam told Faller as he was going back to the United States that he and Murray should prepare closing documents for the loans.
But by November 1993, nine months after he had gone to work for Adam, Faller's suspicions had returned. He hired a private detective, and discovered his boss had a criminal fraud record in Canada.
Within 30 days of that revelation, Faller, the lawyer he hired to do the loan closings and the private detective all reported Adam to the Florida state controller and persuaded another associate to report Adam to the FBI in South Florida. Murray reported Adam to the FBI in Connecticut.
Faller quit his job and told his clients that Adam was a crook.
Murray was more aggressive. She took a few of her clients to Europe to confront Adam over the unfunded loans. Shortly afterward, Adam fired her.
The investigation Using contacts he developed in Europe during his visit to check out Adam, Faller then joined a European brokerage, handling transactions on the American stock exchanges for foreign citizens and earning millions over the ensuing three years.
Faller said he invested about $1 million in an Ohio company developing an early detection process for breast cancer. He also partnered with a European businessman to start an Internet service provider business in Augusta, Ga.
Faller thought he was on a path to becoming extremely wealthy. But he also was in the middle of a divorce and a nasty custody fight with his wife.
While he knew there was an investigation going on because of the reports he and Murray had made to the government, it was not until a custody hearing that Faller learned he was an official target of the probe.
That's when an FBI agent served him with a federal grand jury subpoena that demanded handwriting samples and fingerprints.
After that, he said, the FBI agent began turning up in virtually every part of his life. Federal agents and prosecutors had numerous conversations with his bankers, and hinted he might be part of a criminal enterprise that smuggled drugs and laundered money.
Those were crimes that Adam was being investigated for in Europe, but Faller said he knew nothing about that at the time.
The federal officials' calls put a severe strain on his business, Faller said, and he lost potential investors in the Internet firm.
Fraud indictment In May 1997, more than three years after Faller had quit working for Adam, a federal grand jury in South Florida indicted Adam, Faller, Murray and four others on 20 counts of mail fraud, conspiracy and illegal monetary transactions related to the loan fraud scheme, which generated advance fees ranging from $25,000 to $350,000.
In truth and in fact, the participants in the scheme have no capability to provide funding and do not fund the loans of the applicants; rather they merely convert the advance fees to personal use and/or use the money to finance the continuation and expansion of the scheme, wrote James G. McAdams III, a prosecutor who is now senior litigation counsel for the U.S. attorney in South Florida.
Adam was jailed without bond in Europe, and authorities froze a bank account with $11 million in it.
Murray was granted bond, but Faller was jailed after federal agents told a judge that he had $2 million in a suitcase, a pilot's license, an alias, Jarret Rouge, and had made preparations to disappear.
Faller was locked up for 10 1/2 months in the Palm Beach County Detention Center awaiting trial.
From his jail cell, he began a letter-writing campaign to Ryskamp, the judge in the case, accusing the government of abuses in how they had treated him and denying the reports that he had planned to flee.
He was released when the prosecutor conceded that Faller did not have an alias or $2 million in a suitcase.
As their trial approached, everyone in the case but Faller, Murray and Adam pleaded guilty in exchange for lenient sentences and their cooperation.
I wasn't guilty and I was not about to have my reputation lost for something I did not do, Faller said. Murray felt the same way.
Problems at trial
At the trial in the spring of 2000, the government contended Faller and Murray not only were willing participants in the fraud, but that Faller, after reporting Adam to the authorities, had formed a company to continue the loan fraud and cut Adam out of the scam's proceeds.
The defendants' highly paid attorneys argued that their clients were scammed just like everyone else who lost money.
The most damning testimony came from nine of the 25 victims, who said Faller and Murray told them they had secured loans for other clients in the past. If that was true, it would mean they had lied to the prospective borrowers, because the records showed no loans had been made to any clients.
Later in the trial, Faller learned that the government had conducted interviews with these same witnesses in which they clearly said neither Faller nor Murray ever claimed to have arranged previous loans. By that time, though, the witnesses had left the area and it was too late to recall them.
In a subsequent appeal, Michael Pasano, who was then Murray's attorney, said prosecutors sat quietly even while they were listening to those witnesses, in essence, testifying to something that they, the government, knew was not accurate.
For the government not to have given us those [interview] materials [before trial] is an absolute outrage.
To counter Faller and Murray's arguments that they had tried to find out whether Adam's business was legitimate before they agreed to work for him, prosecutors offered the testimony of a man, identified as a Luxembourg banker, who said Adam had no legitimate businesses, no personal assets and no relationships with bankers, and that anyone who had checked into his background would have discovered that.
What the defendants' attorneys didn't know at the time was that, according to European police reports, the banker put on the stand by federal prosecutors was actually a former associate of Adam's who was one of the targets in a European criminal investigation of Adam's activities.
After a 2 1/2-week trial and two days of deliberations, the jury convicted Faller and Murray of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering.
But Ryskamp, the judge, already had reservations about their guilt, so he released both of them on bond while they appealed their convictions.
Fighting back After his conviction, Faller mailed voluminous packets protesting his innocence to every member of Congress.
He also complained about the prosecutors to the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility.
Shortly after that, Faller was arrested by agents as he walked out of his Augusta, Ga., home with his 2-year-old child. This time, the agents said he had been intimidating witnesses. Faller said he merely had paid investigators and lawyers to help him question some of the witnesses against him to bolster his appeal.
Ryskamp agreed that Faller had not been guilty of intimidation and released him, but only after Faller had spent 31/2 more months in prison.
The two arrests caused him to serve 14 months in prison before he was sentenced for his conviction.
In February 2003, Faller appeared before Ryskamp in a final hearing before his sentencing.
The judge said it goes without saying that this has probably been the most difficult and troubling case that I have tried in the 17 years that I've been doing this. There are a number of factors that contribute to this problem, the judge said, and then listened to some of Faller's allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.
While Ryskamp did not overturn the convictions, he refused to sentence either Faller or Murray on the money laundering convictions, which carried mandatory 10-year terms, because, he said, the case had nothing to do with that crime.
He then ordered Faller and Murray to serve 24 months in jail -- the same sentence that had been given to an Adam employee who originally had drawn Faller into the scam and whom Ryskamp considered a more serious defendant.
Faller and Murray also were barred from involvement in financial businesses. Faller was ordered to pay $236,000 in restitution and Murray, just over $400,000.
I really believed that what I was doing was right ... and truly regret that I am here today in front of you. I never wanted to let anyone down, Faller said at the sentencing.
Prosecutors quickly appealed Ryskamp's sentence reductions as illegal. They said Faller and Murray should serve at least 10 years in prison based on the money laundering convictions.
A third arrest By the time he was sentenced, Faller had lost his European and American homes, his Georgia Internet business and his stake in other companies in which he had invested.
He moved to Russell Springs, Ky., to help operate a telephone call center that had been bought by a business associate from Europe.
As Faller awaited a ruling on his appeal, he said, federal agents got in touch with people he was doing business within Kentucky, which led to a dispute with his landlord.
Then Faller and his new wife were charged with fraud for not paying employees in the call center business. He denied the charge and said they did not own the business.
But the filing of the charges allowed federal officials to jail him for a third time, saying it violated the conditions of his bond.
He was released in July, when he completed the sentence Ryskamp had given him.
Earlier this year, Adam pleaded guilty in return for credit for the time he already had served in Europe and Canada fighting extradition.
He also was given permanent residency in the United States because he is married to an American citizen, and he agreed to turn over $4 million from his Luxembourg accounts.
What the judge did not hear was that the account already had been frozen by officials in Luxembourg because of allegations it was being used to launder money for a major drug trafficker, and because Adam was being investigated for criminal activity there.
That information was contained in thousands of pages of evidence the government turned over to Adam before his scheduled trial. Faller contends he should have received the documents, too, because it would have demonstrated to his jury that he had been duped by a career criminal.
Court papers called letters rogatory in Luxembourg showed Adam was being investigated for scams involving 25 corporate shells he'd set up, that he was implicated in major drug smuggling operations in South America, Europe and the United States, and that he may have laundered money for organized crime interests in the United States, Italy and the Middle East.
They also showed that U.S. officials knew about the investigations into Adam's activities long before Faller and Murray's trials, and that their prosecutor had even attended hearings for Adam related to the criminal probe.
Unseen evidence The new documents contained a memorandum from the initial prosecutor in the case in which he voiced concerns about the its soundness because Faller was the first person to report Adam to authorities.
The Luxembourg documents also backed up Faller and Murray's contention that they had tried to get Adam to fund the loans they had promised to clients. The records showed they badgered Adam and his attorney so much that Adam told his associates and his attorney not to talk to them anymore.
And while the government claimed Faller had formed a new company to keep the loan fraud going after he had turned Adam in to authorities, the papers showed that it was Adam who formed that firm.
As a result of these revelations, Faller and Murray not only have asked for their cases to be dismissed, but also for Ryskamp to refer the information to a federal grand jury.
Murray is awaiting a ruling on her appeal and possible sentencing date while struggling to maintain a business she had built over 20 years.
Faller, besides losing all his assets, has had health problems.
Today, he is willing to admit that he did one thing wrong -- he listened to Richard Armand Adam and believed him.