Had you been standing in the Arkansas Business newsroom the Thursday before last, you’d have seen a group of reporters and editors momentarily paralyzed with disbelief and horror.
Close readers of this publication probably already know what I’m talking about. It was the moment we received the first tip that Bob Hartheimer, the now-former CEO of Evolve Bank & Trust, had been arrested and the bank’s headquarters raided by the FBI.
Not even 24 hours earlier, we’d gone to press, just as we do every Wednesday afternoon, on an issue with a cover story about Evolve’s efforts to turn things around after a bad year — a story that quoted Hartheimer extensively.
At that point, we assumed he’d been arrested in connection with his work at the bank, which is already under federal regulatory scrutiny. How silly would we look with that story on the front page just days after the arrest?
We, in some ways, became even more horrified when we learned the following day that Hartheimer had instead been arrested on child pornography charges apparently unrelated to the West Memphis bank or his work there.
Almost no details have been released about the federal case against Hartheimer, but the charges are disturbing enough. I hope justice is served, whatever that looks like. He, like all defendants in the U.S. justice system, is innocent until proven otherwise.
The criminal case aside, I’ve spent the last week reflecting on the series of events that led to Hartheimer’s words appearing in our publication after being arrested and accused of sexual offenses.
I’ve felt a mixture of helplessness (our issue had already been printed by our printer and was beginning to make its way to subscribers’ mailboxes) and embarrassment. But the more I’ve reflected, I’ve realized this was simply an unfortunate coincidence. There’s no way we could’ve known that this previously well-respected financial executive who has undergone intensive background checks and federal reviews to become a bank CEO was being criminally investigated by the FBI.
We’ve reported extensively on Evolve Bank & Trust’s problems with a data breach and questions about its anti-money laundering, risk management and consumer compliance programs. So we wanted to give the newly installed CEO a chance to explain his plans to fix it. We began working on that story more than a month ago, and reporter Griffin Coop interviewed Hartheimer three days before his arrest.
When we heard about the FBI raid, we pursued that story aggressively and were among the first to report details of Hartheimer’s arrest, charges and firing. We also acted quickly to append an editor’s note to online versions of the story we’d already written that quoted Hartheimer.
I wish this hadn’t happened, but that’s the inherent risk of producing a publication that is printed several days before it is distributed.
All we can do is what I’m attempting to do now and every week: offer up a dose of transparency.
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