Terrorized by criminals, victimized by police investigators and prejudged by people in his community, the media and the credit union industry, Matthew Yussman lived under constant stress and suspicion for more than a year.

But the exhilaration of exoneration finally came March 2 after a Maine man admitted in court documents that he and another man invaded the Achieve Financial Credit Union CFO’s home and duct taped a bomb to his body in a failed attempt to rob the $122 million Achieve Financial branch in New Britain, Conn., on Feb. 23, 2015.

Ironically, what led the two men to commit this crime was to get cash to support a floundering national company they operated, which provided financial services for inmates, giving them access to money after they were released from state and federal prisons, according to federal prosecutors.

After they were captured in November, Michael Anthony Benanti, 43, of Lake Harmony, Pa., and Brian Scott Witham, 45, of Waterville, Maine, were charged with multiple felonies including armed bank extortion of the $929 million Y-12 Federal Credit Union in Oak Ridge, Tenn., SmartBank in Knoxville in July and the $106 million Northeast Community Credit Union in Elizabethton, Tenn., in October.

The victims, Mark Ziegler, president/CEO of Y-12 and Brooke Lyons, a teller at Northeast Community, declined to comment because of the pending legal process. Although Witham agreed to plead guilty to six felony charges, Benanti pleaded not guilty and may go to trial.

Benanti and Witham took Ziegler and his wife and child hostage, and threatened to cut off the fingers of Ziegler’s wife if he didn’t return on time with the money. Lyons was taken hostage by the two men as she was putting her three-year-old son in his car seat and then forced to rob the credit union.

In both cases, the suspects didn’t get any money and no one was physically harmed.

“I was very relieved and very happy,” Yussman said in an exclusive interview with CU Times. “I high-fived everybody in my office. I was so excited that this has finally passed and there will be no more thoughts of when I go walking into a mall or somewhere else, people aren’t going to be whispering behind my back, ‘Hey, there’s that guy who did those crimes.’”

He explained, “I can hopefully say now that I’m going to be stress free on this. The hardest part was that all of this was in the back of my mind thinking when this was going to be resolved. Now that it is resolved, I envision that I will get back to normal.”

Yussman, who doubles as Achieve Financial’s security trainer, shared how he managed the eight-hour hostage ordeal, the grueling police investigation and the constant stress of suspicion.

“The most terrifying part for me was when I got to the credit union and I’m in the car strapped to what I think is a bomb and I’m just sitting there by myself waiting,” Yussman recalled. “And there’s nothing to do. Your mind plays awful tricks on you and you start thinking of things like, Am I going to feel this? Am I going to know if it goes off? There’s a security camera out front. Are they watching this? Am I going to blow up with them watching? That was by far the worst part of it.”

Benanti and Witham told Yussman the bomb would explode at 11 a.m. and that the bomb under his mother’s bed would detonate if he failed to bring back money to them.

After his car was surrounded by police, he had to strip down to his waist in February’s frigid temps for several hours until the bomb squad determined the device was fake. After being treated for hypothermia at a local hospital, he went to the police station, where investigators grilled him with questions until he finally agreed to take a lie detector test, which he failed. That information was later released in public court documents, putting him under a cloud of suspicion in his community and the media.

His lawyer, Richard Brown of Hartford, Conn., dismissed that polygraph test as totally unreliable and inaccurate because Yussman was traumatized for hours. Though many police departments use polygraphs as an investigative tool, most courts do not allow polygraph tests to be used as evidence because they have been shown to be unreliable.

“I felt like the police victimized me because they treated me right off the bat as a suspect instead of a victim,” he said. “And then I felt victimized by the media because the media was printing all this stuff trying to make connections as to why they thought I was guilty.”

Police also questioned Yussman’s 71-year-old mother.

“When police asked my mother how she knew I didn’t do this, my mother said, ‘Because if he did do it, he’d be sitting on a beach right now and you wouldn’t know where he was.’”

In the March 16, 2016 print issue of Credit Union Times, read full details on how Yussman managed the eight-hour hostage ordeal and grueling police investigation. Plus, learn how the two suspects’ bank and credit union crime spree began.

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Achieve Financial CFO Recounts Home Invasion Terror

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