The Midas Touch: would you give Michael Wise your money?

• Author: Rundles, Jeff
• Position: Disgraced former chief executive officer of Silverado Bancorp. - Column

I was driving down I-25 recently, at night, and I happened to notice that the old, bright blue "Silverado" sign still adorns that building there on the corner of the highway and Colorado Boulevard. I guess I knew it had been there all these years, but I noticed it that night, well, because of something that happened the very next day. Frankly, I wish it had been lottery numbers I saw that night, but I figure you take cosmic coincidence on its own terms.

Silverado, of course, was the name of the ill-managed savings and loan that came to be a national symbol of greed gone wild and economic hubris in the go-go '80s. My first inclination was that the sign be taken down, but a very good friend of mine thinks it ought to stay up there as a permanent reminder that Denver can be as gullible as the next place.

I can live with that, except that it hurts my sense of civic pride that a name that would shame us would remain glowing over one of the city's main thoroughfares probably forever, yet such reputable, historic Colorado names - like First of Denver, The May Co., The Denver Dry, and Boettcher & Co. were immediately obliterated the very moment a corporate acquisition took place. We erase what would remind us of our greatness, and leave our blemishes lit up. In the end, I suppose, success buries history, while failure illuminates it.

On the day after I saw the blue light, I unexpectedly had to go to that building for a mortgage thing, and I was reminded that I hadn't actually been there since it was Silverado about 15 years ago and I was there to interview its chief executive, Michael Wise. While I was waiting for my mortgage appointment, what do I see in the newspaper but that Michael Wise himself had been in federal court making bond on a wire fraud charge. Seems he pocketed somewhere between $4 million and $6 million of investors' money - a charge he apparently doesn't dispute.

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't give Michael...