By David Dayen

Copyright prospect

This article appears in the October 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.

One Tuesday night in July 2023, Ron Luessen got contacted by a late-shift worker on the support team for Elcon, a construction firm in the Pacific Northwest. Luessen, an equipment manager, was off the clock, but he was the main point of contact, and the worker was puzzled. “We’re supposed to be working tonight, and this place is closed,” Luessen recalled the message. “What do you want us to do?”

There wasn’t any reason for the building to be closed. Elcon was steadily busy, recently picking up business in Billings, Montana, beyond its base of operations in Seattle. The company had even just updated the kitchens.

But the next day, around 120 Elcon employees got the official word: Don’t come in. After 42 years building bridges, highways, rail lines, airports, and basic infrastructure Americans use every day, Elcon was history.

“Everybody was just dumbfounded,” said Luessen, who had put 16 years in at the company. He started tearing up on the phone. “Sorry, I’m a big marshmallow,” he apologized. “Elcon took me in, I knew nothing about nothing in construction. They were just very good to me … We worked together, had fun together, outside of work we got together. On a regular basis, celebrating birthdays, if they’re doing a charity walk we’d have 10 to 15 people show up. I don’t know how else to put it but family.”

Several months later, Abilene Eplin, a single mother of three, was building a company that set up electronic payment terminals for businesses. She was able to sign a major contract with an automotive dealership group, projecting revenue of $1.1 million per year with the potential to scale past $2 million. It was the fulfillment of a year of toil. “She put 120 percent into this night and day,” said Jenell Cabrinha, her best friend. “It was something to help her create a life for her kids.”

Yet one day, she went to withdraw funds from the company bank account, and the transaction was blocked. Someone else had claimed that they were the sole owner of the business, preventing Eplin from accessing her money. Eplin provided copious evidence that she in fact owned the business, but 19 months later, she has been unable to pry one cent out of the hijacked account.

“My bank should have protected me,” she told me. “Had they done any bit of due diligence none of this would have happened.”

The ten largest U.S. banks control over 60 percent of the country’s total financial assets.

The common thread in these two stories—one company’s demise after decades of success, and another snuffed out right at its incipiency—is the role of the large, impersonal institutions that served as their bankers. KeyBank, a Cleveland-based regional lender with $185 billion in assets under management, decided to call in Elcon’s loans, instantly vaporizing the company and destroying its value. Wells Fargo, America’s fourth-largest bank by asset size, froze Eplin’s business account and has declined to release the funds, extinguishing her dream of owning her own company.

KeyBank and Wells Fargo were asked about every allegation in this story. Spokespeople for both banks said that because the matters involved litigation or were “being addressed through legal channels,” they could not comment or share any details.

Small businesses, and especially startups, are precarious institutions. One in five fail every year. In these two case studies, both businesses made mistakes. Elcon got behind on its invoices and ran up a debt on its line of credit with KeyBank, and Eplin trusted a friend who she says ended up double-crossing her. But these slipups did not have to be fatal. It was the cold-eyed choices of their banks that led to the failures, a by-product of trends in the financial industry over the past several decades.

In the old days of relationship banking, a local official worked with small-business owners to prevent catastrophe, aiding businesses and the bank’s bottom line. But after decades of bank consolidation, about half of all companies now use large institutions as their primary financial services provider, according to the 2023 Small Business Credit Survey from the Federal Reserve Banks.

This often puts key financial decision-makers far from the millions of businesses they serve, without the stake in community success that characterized previous eras. In these instances, off-ramps with mutual benefit were ignored, promises made were not kept, and emotion seemed to take precedence over sound decision-making.

Among the many reasons given for today’s sour economic mood, we don’t talk much about small businesses with enduring financial needs that have been forced into shotgun weddings with soulless institutions that are disinterested in their futures. “One of the reasons money is channeled through banks, they’re supposed to be on the ground, they’re supposed to know clients,” said Graham Steele, former assistant secretary for financial institutions in Joe Biden’s Treasury Department. “The larger an institution gets, the less they care about small businesses.”

JASON DECKER MET PETER WILLIAMS when he worked as an apprentice electrician 50 years ago. “Peter wanted to start his own business and wanted me to help him,” Decker told me. In 1981, with $5,000 from Decker’s father, Elcon was born.

The company did electrical subcontracting. “They were very technical, had a lot of good structure,” said Luis Martinez, a senior project manager with the electrical team. Led by Williams, who is Black, Elcon became one of Washington state’s first minority-owned contractors for public infrastructure projects, operating across Seattle, the Portland metro region, and even Alaska. Some of Elcon’s full-time employees had more than 30 years at the company, and it hired hundreds of others for construction tasks.

“It was a very successful business, but I did not want to be married to it the rest of my life,” Decker said. He retired in 2015, retaining his ownership stake. Williams stayed to run Elcon, but as the years went on, friends inside the company whispered to Decker that something was wrong. It turned out Williams was suffering from early-onset Parkinson’s disease and experiencing cognitive decline. His inattention to detail caused problems with accounts receivable. While Elcon was still booking jobs and taking on work, even during the COVID years, invoices weren’t being sent or receivables collected in a timely fashion, leading to a cash flow crisis.

By the fall of 2022, Williams no longer had the capacity to lead Elcon, and Decker felt the pull to come back. The co-owners and their families had signed indemnity agreements on Elcon’s bonded projects. If something went wrong with the company, bond insurance companies assume the defaulted projects. They in turn could seek restitution directly from Williams and Decker. So they had a personal stake in the company’s survival.

For most of its life, Elcon had a local lender, Columbia Bank. “I knew the folks at the prior bank … I knew them by name,” Decker said. But in 2019, KeyBank, which had branches in Washington and Oregon along with 13 other states, pitched Elcon to switch. Elcon signed up for a checking account and a $7 million line of credit. Because of irregular flows of payments in the construction industry, lines of credit provided critical bridge funding to meet expenses.

By the spring of 2023, Elcon had over-advanced on the line of credit by more than $3 million, violating covenants KeyBank laid out in its loan agreement. There were also several overdrafts on the checking account. KeyBank sent a notice of default on April 24, 2023, denying Elcon all future advances or overdrafts and “accelerating” the loan, meaning all $7 million was due immediately, along with interest and other costs. The Elcon account was shifted to Dale Conder, a senior vice president in KeyBank’s Western Asset Recovery Group who specialized in distressed loans. He was based in Boise, Idaho, not Seattle.

In the context of Elcon’s portfolio of work, $7 million wasn’t a lot of money. A May 31, 2023, balance sheet showed that Elcon had total assets of over $23 million, and Decker claimed that the company had about $250 million in future contracts in the pipeline. In addition, there were $12.3 million in receivable invoices out for work already completed. “It was normal to have these kinds of cash flow issues,” Martinez told me. “You have to get your ass working and knocking on doors.”

Part of Decker’s career involved “perfecting” claims to get proper payments, he explained. On a long-term project, subcontractors would often perform more work than what was stipulated in the contract. Companies would have to document labor costs to obtain an equitable contract adjustment. This was tedious but critical work for construction firms, which Elcon had lapsed in undertaking; Decker was sure he could get it moving again.

According to Decker and other experts, construction firms with cash flow problems typically secured forbearance agreements from their lenders, to buy time until invoices got paid.

Forbearance made sense for both sides. If KeyBank demanded immediate payment, it would trigger a series of adverse actions making the company’s debt all but unrecoverable, Elcon attorney Ryan Sternoff explained to the bank in email correspondence. Plus, Elcon’s partners needed assurances that it would continue as a going concern. Insurance company Nationwide Insurance told Elcon that June that it was “favorably inclined” to issue a surety bond on $53 million in projects, but “our ability to move forward will be negated” by KeyBank’s refusal to issue forbearance.

“Elcon is in a box to which KeyBank holds [the] key,” Sternoff said to his legal counterpart at KeyBank in a June email. “Elcon cannot pay off KeyBank without new projects; it cannot get new projects without bonding; and it cannot get new bonding without forbearance from KeyBank.”

Decker estimated that, if KeyBank participated in a workout, he could repay the loan within 60 to 90 days. He wouldn’t get that chance.

ABILENE EPLIN HAD NEVER STARTED a business. She had no college degree. She had just gotten out of a bad marriage, alleging mental and emotional abuse. She won full custody of her three daughters after the divorce, but needed a spark to set her life back on track.

After working in merchant processing in Los Angeles for a couple of years, she decided that she knew enough to create her own company. A merchant processor assembles the systems that allow businesses to accept electronic payments, like credit or debit cards. Eplin thought she could carve out a niche by offering a revenue share, enticing merchants to work with her and earning profits by keeping operational costs low.

She named the business Merchant Consultancy, LLC, and never stopped hustling: cold-calling contacts, putting up videos, whatever she could to get people’s attention. Her friend Cabrinha, a sales and marketing professional who lived in the apartment across the hall, was helping her out. “This is something she put together from the ground up,” Cabrinha said. “She was good at it, she worked really hard to make those connections.”

A breakthrough came early in 2024. Through an industry colleague, Eplin connected with Mills Automotive Group, the largest individually Black-owned car dealership in the country with 34 locations. Mills agreed to a three-year contract with Merchant Consultancy for processing services. Even with the revenue share, Eplin projected $91,000 per month in earnings. “I was so proud of her,” said Eplin’s mother, Kathy Cumber. “She was in Hawaii when she got the phone call. I remember her telling me, ‘I’m going home first class.’”

Cumber knew her daughter would need operating capital to buy equipment and visit dealerships for training. So she floated a $20,000 loan to get Merchant Consultancy off the ground. “She didn’t really ask for it, I just knew she had to pay rent,” Cumber said. A grateful Eplin planned a mid-February launch for the first ten dealerships.

Eplin needed a business account to finalize the contract. Her personal bank was Chase, but they were taking too long to set up an appointment, and a credit union she contacted wanted more documentation. She ended up at a Wells Fargo in Sherman Oaks, California, where she only needed formation documents.

While small in relative terms, the contract was a big responsibility for one person with limited experience. Eplin had an old friend in Fort Lauderdale named Ari Daniels, who offered to help her. “He said, ‘I’ll get your business filed, and file it in Florida, I’ll be your registered agent,’” Eplin told me. IRS documents, the operating agreement, and the articles of organization for Merchant Consultancy reflect this arrangement; Eplin was the business owner, and Daniels the registered agent. Similarly, Eplin’s bank application with Wells Fargo clearly indicated that Eplin was the business owner and “authorized signer” on all checks; Daniels is not mentioned at all.

Daniels then asked to become a 50 percent owner. “He said, ‘This industry, they don’t respect women, you need a man to have your back,’” Eplin said. In a weak moment, Eplin admitted to me with embarrassment, she signed an addendum to the incorporation documents establishing split ownership. But that agreement was never finalized, and within hours, she called Daniels to say she made a mistake. “I said, ‘This is mine, I definitely want to compensate you, but I can’t turn over my business like that.’”

In an email exchange and an interview, Daniels told me that “the version of the story you’ve been provided is completely inaccurate.” He said that he was helping out as a friend, and ended up doing all the work, “creat[ing] the company’s name, brand, and structure.” He said he negotiated and finalized the Mills deal himself. And after agreeing to an equitable split, Eplin went back on her word and a signed document, which angered him. “I said, ‘If we can’t get to a resolution here, I’m going to facilitate the business on my own and I’ll give you the 50 percent,’” Daniels said.

The two argued in a series of texts reviewed by the Prospect. Daniels wrote at one point, “If you wonder why I’m going to react so drastically it’s because of your actions.”

On January 27, 2024, Daniels filed a notarized “statement of fact” with the Florida Department of State’s Division of Corporations. Instead of an equal ownership share, the statement of fact instead asserted that Eplin had been removed from Merchant Consultancy, LLC, effective immediately. Then Daniels filed an annual report, placing himself as the sole “authorized person” for Merchant Consultancy.

Eplin filed documents with the state changing everything back, but Daniels refiled his documents. This happened several times. Eplin hired an attorney to contact the Florida Division of Corporations to stop the tug-of-war, but to no avail. “Our office is just a filing agency and we have to take documents at face value so I am sorry but there is no way to stop all future filings from being filed,” an operations manager from the Division of Corporations wrote to Eplin.

According to Eplin’s testimony in a report with the Los Angeles Police Department, Daniels used the statement of fact to take over Merchant Consultancy’s website and get into her business email. She surmised this is where he found the Wells Fargo bank account information.

Daniels said he knew nothing about the Wells Fargo account. He denied that he ever contacted Wells Fargo, tried to take control of the account, or made any attempt to withdraw money from it. “Anyone can write what they want on a police report,” he said. But for whatever reason, when Eplin tried to withdraw funds on February 6, the account was blocked from her.

She immediately notified Paul Sin Woo, the Wells Fargo bank representative with whom she opened the account, that she remained the lawful business owner, supplying incorporation documents, IRS communications, police reports filed with LAPD and the FBI, and an identity fraud claim with the Federal Trade Commission. Sin Woo submitted them to the Loss Prevention Department.

Meanwhile, Daniels sued Eplin in Florida, claiming that he was a full partner in the business and did most of the work. The lawsuit reads like an inverted version of Eplin’s story, with Daniels alleging that she stole his identity.

Eplin denied every allegation in the lawsuit and produced documents showing Daniels’s involvement in what she told the LAPD were “shady business dealings” under a variety of assumed names. Within a month, Daniels’s attorney withdrew from the case, and the judge later dismissed it; Daniels said he dropped the case because Eplin didn’t have any money and it was no longer worth it.

By phone, Wells Fargo representatives insisted to Eplin that they could only go by the ownership records in Florida, which were changing by the day. Eplin eventually filed a new incorporation in California. If she could get the remaining funds in the account back from Wells Fargo—$10,791—she thought she could weather the incident and move forward with the Mills rollout.

Finally, Wells Fargo contacted her with a message: “We’re going to close the account but will issue you a cashier’s check within 10 days.”

She’s still waiting.

KEYBANK AND WELLS FARGO HAVE large numbers of small-business customers today due to our concentrated banking sector. In 1984, there were 14,496 insured depository institutions in the U.S.; 40 years later, there were fewer than 4,000. As late as the 1980s, some states, like Illinois and Texas, did not allow any bank to have more than one branch, even inside their borders; now, JPMorgan Chase has 4,994 branches in every state in the contiguous U.S. The ten largest U.S. banks control over 60 percent of the country’s total financial assets.

Several laws and policies contributed to this shift. The Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994 allowed banks to cross state lines. Lenient antitrust enforcement smoothed the ground for thousands of bank mergers; the last time the Federal Reserve rejected one was 2003. The assumption that larger institutions are too big to fail drove consolidation as well. Many see the prospects for bank mergers under President Trump as incredibly favorable.

Consolidation weakened the tradition of the locally focused banker with a stake in the community. In past decades, “the directors of the bank usually lived right in town,” said Ron Grzywinski, whose ShoreBank on Chicago’s South Side was the biggest community development bank in America for decades. “They knew the borrowers. They often knew the father of the borrower or the grandfather in some cases … They’d work with the borrower on making the original loan or they’d work on trying to help the borrower repay.”

It wasn’t just that community bankers were necessarily more responsible; local banks needed to make successful loans to thrive. They didn’t have other business lines in trading or selling derivatives. Borrowing short and lending long was the business, and failure would hit them directly. “The shareholders who would lose money were the shareholders of the bank,” Grzywinski said. “It wasn’t somebody else’s money they were lending, it was their own.”

The notion that your success and your bank’s success were linked may sound like a foreign concept today. Modern big banks are definitely hyperefficient. But I asked Grzywinski what gets lost in that transition. “In my opinion,” he replied, “you only lose what essentially built this country.”

WHEN THE ELCON LOAN DEFAULTED, KeyBank had advised the company to present all its financial documents to a third party, Huron Consulting Group, to determine “a viable path for short-term financial restructuring.” Elcon cooperated with the request, but KeyBank repeatedly complained that it hadn’t received basic information. Elcon countered that Huron merely wanted updates to documentation it already had in hand.

At the time, Elcon was completing construction of a Sound Transit light-rail station in Bellevue, Washington, for which it was owed $6 million by the general contractor, Absher Construction. KeyBank threatened to issue a Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) notice on the project, directing Absher to forward all future payments to the bank. Sternoff, Elcon’s lawyer, warned that would create a “contractual default,” voiding Elcon’s ability to collect, and that the bonding company, Travelers Insurance, would claim seniority over KeyBank for the proceeds, creating uncertainty and delay.

This is precisely what happened when KeyBank issued a UCC notice to Absher on June 30; Travelers asserted seniority and a legal battle ensued. But Decker had already settled much of that payment claim earlier in June; Elcon got an advance check from Absher for $2.5 million. Sternoff asked KeyBank for assurances that no money would be swept out of Elcon’s checking account to pay off the line of credit without 14 days’ notice, allowing Elcon to pay its employees. KeyBank replied that it could only give a seven-day grace period, “provided there is no material adverse change in Elcon’s financial circumstances.”

Facing a gut-check decision, Decker was advised to open a second checking account with a local lender named Umpqua Bank. “I’m thinking I have payroll to make,” he said.

Decker estimated that he needed 60 to 90 days to return KeyBank their money. He wouldn’t get that chance.

Throughout June and July, Elcon pleaded with KeyBank for dialogue toward a resolution. Elcon outlined $8 million in expected near-term profit, not including the Sound Transit project. It proposed a 13-week cash flow plan and even drafted a forbearance agreement. Decker repeatedly sought in-person meetings with Conder; while Conder did meet once that spring with Elcon’s then-president, Scott Wood, he would not agree to meet with Decker. (Wood, now president at a different electrical firm in Seattle, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Finally, KeyBank scheduled a July 17 conference call with Elcon representatives over Zoom. Decker called in from his car, with other Elcon personnel and four lawyers on the line. They figured this would finally put the company on the right path. But the meeting lasted five minutes.

KeyBank had found out about the Umpqua Bank account. What followed was described by Decker and others as retaliation. “I just want to let you know that KeyBank will not be considering forbearance,” Decker reported Conder as saying. “We will be shutting Elcon down.”

A half-hour after the call, KeyBank had issued 13 UCC notices to Elcon’s receivables, demanding priority payment. In his legal declaration, Sternoff notes that KeyBank wouldn’t have had critical information about outstanding invoices without forcing Elcon to give it to Huron Consulting, purportedly so it could assess the company’s financial condition. “In other words, KeyBank utilized premeditated ‘bait and switch’ tactics to destroy Elcon’s business operations,” Sternoff wrote.

KeyBank also contacted Umpqua Bank, demanding a seizure of funds in the Elcon bank account. Umpqua froze the account and initiated an investigation.

Just as Decker and Sternoff had warned, general contractors began to terminate Elcon projects, including a major contract for a bridge replacement on State Route 520 in Washington valued at $50 million; Elcon was relying on that revenue. With cash flow stopped, there was no path forward. Workers got the news the next day. “It was ridiculous what [KeyBank] did,” Martinez said. “They caused lot of harm to themselves, to Elcon, and the people. They created a mess.”

Decker paid Ron Luessen and others out of his own pocket to help with liquidation, working with a receiver that KeyBank appointed. “The amount of stuff I do know that was left out on-site, left uncollected, the dollars there alone is ridiculous,” Luessen said. “Other people who came on jobs as contractors cleaned us out … taking keys out of the trucks on the lot and cleaning the trucks out.” Luessen added that everything that didn’t sell at auction was just left at Elcon’s yard; Decker borrowed a forklift and a dumpster to clear the property.

“KeyBank has exhibited some of the worst business judgment I have seen in my 18 years in practice,” Sternoff wrote in an email to KeyBank that week.

ABILENE EPLIN HAD HER OWN decision to make. The merchant processing contract with Mills Automotive stipulated that she personally install payment terminals and train dealerships. Ten stores were ready to roll out, and she would have begun to generate revenue to fund installations at the other 24. But she had no near-term capital for travel and operations until Wells Fargo released her funds.

Eplin ultimately decided to unwind the contract. In a statement made later to financial regulators, Eplin wrote: “This withdrawal was not a reflection of insolvency, business failure, or lack of preparedness. It was the direct result of interference by Wells Fargo, which caused devastating disruption to a high-value, scalable, and imminently active business contract.”

Daniels has a different interpretation. “The business went down because she muddied the waters with the Mills Group, they got cold feet and decided to slow-walk the deal,” he said. He questioned Eplin’s ability to manage a business and held her responsible for the contract termination. But even with all that, he did say of Wells Fargo, “The fact that they’re holding her money is probably not right.”

The sudden end hit Eplin hard. Her mother, Kathy Cumber, flew down from Oregon to Los Angeles to check on her. “She was devastated,” Cumber said. “She could barely get dressed, could barely function. I was so worried about her, worried about everything.”

Eplin described the situation as paralyzing. She would call Wells Fargo; they’d say the matter was under investigation. She would call again and hear the same thing. Over time, the pauses between calls to the bank got longer and longer. Blocking it out of her mind made it easier to handle the pain. “It feels like when I was in an abusive relationship. This is triggering to me,” she told me.

“We trust financial institutions with our money … there’s something broken in the system when this can happen so easily.”

After months of anguish, Eplin recommitted to finding closure. This time, her mother and stepfather got on the phone as witnesses. According to a statement from Cumber and interviews with both Cumber and Eplin, a representative from the Claims Department named Ileana claimed on the February 19, 2025, call that Wells Fargo never received any records about the account—no proof of ownership, no business formation documents, no police or FTC reports.

Eplin explained that she had delivered all those documents to her local branch, and that the banker, Paul Sin Woo, submitted them to Loss Prevention right in front of her. Ileana told her to go back and resubmit. “I did everything right. I followed the law. I complied with every request,” Eplin said. “And yet, I was silenced and erased.”

Two days later, Eplin and Jenell Cabrinha visited the bank branch in Sherman Oaks. According to both witnesses, Sin Woo remembered Eplin coming in the year before, and when he was told that the Claims Department had no record of the documents, he confirmed that he personally submitted everything and was even thanked by Loss Prevention for the submission.

“He said he would escalate it to the executive office,” Eplin explained. “I said I would like the notes of the escalation report, the call logs. He said, ‘I can’t give that to you.’” When Eplin pressed him that she had rights as a consumer to transaction records and notes, Sin Woo consulted with his manager and informed her that the escalation report was an “internal document” and therefore classified.

I tracked down Sin Woo, who now works at a different Wells Fargo branch in Tarzana, and asked him about the situation. He said he was unable to give out customer information and referred me to Loss Prevention.

STEELE, THE FORMER TREASURY DEPARTMENT official, said that both cases were an inevitable consequence of big banks relying on remote functionaries and automated systems, rather than personal relationships, to deal with small-business clients. When business owners cannot get bankers’ attention to resolve desperate situations, they sit unprotected in an unforgiving economy. But cheap solutions make sense for big banks, since small businesses are at best a minor part of their balance sheets. “It’s not meaningful business in the scope of a bank with hundreds of billions or trillions in assets,” Steele said.

Sometimes this is reflected in by-the-numbers decision-making, like the rote acceptance of incorporation documents in Abilene Eplin’s case and the automatic freezing of her account. Algorithms rather than humans often dictate these kinds of choices, and they can be nearly impossible to countermand.

If KeyBank was angered by Elcon opening a second bank account to make payroll and took it out on the company, that could constitute a tying arrangement, where Elcon’s choice of deposit account was in some way tied to KeyBank’s decisions on the loan. Anti-tying laws go back to the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 and remain illegal today. (Banking-specific prohibitions on tying exempt traditional loans and deposits, but financial institutions are still barred from tying arrangements under the Clayton Act.) Yet banking regulators have failed to enforce this improper use of power for decades.

“[Banks can] say, ‘You have to keep money here, we’re going to call the loan or sweep the amount unless you work with us,’” said Steele, who co-authored a recent paper about banking and antitrust. “In that way, banks have leveraged these products by reading these competition concerns out of the banking laws.” Government need not tolerate this potential abuse of market power, but that’s how the system has been constructed, with bank regulators not seeing the tyranny of the money monopoly as part of their jobs.

Even America’s relatively meager safeguards are being radically dismantled. Both Decker and Eplin filed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau complaints, alleging misconduct at the hands of their banks. But under President Trump, CFPB is a Potemkin organization, with its 1,500-plus employees doing essentially nothing, exposing millions of customers to fraud and abuse.

This is not only bad for consumers, but bad for businesses. “We trust financial institutions with our money, our livelihoods,” said Cabrinha, Eplin’s best friend. “There’s something broken in the system when this could happen so easily.”

TO THIS DAY, DECKER STILL CANNOT believe what happened to Elcon. “I put so many years of my life into this,” he told me. “To just see it ripped away, that’s just destruction.” Not only has he borne an estimated $800,000 in Elcon wind-down and legal costs, but Travelers Insurance and Markel, two of Elcon’s bonding companies, have come after him for nearly $20 million in defaulted projects, because of the indemnity agreement he signed back in 2017. He and his wife are now looking at declaring bankruptcy.

For Peter Williams, Decker’s co-founder, the situation is even worse. He had signed a personal guarantee with KeyBank, making him liable for Elcon’s debts. While still battling Parkinson’s, Williams and his wife opted for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, where all nonexempt assets are liquidated. The family is in the process of abandoning their longtime residence. The Williamses’ bankruptcy attorney declined to comment.

Meanwhile, after two years of pursuit, KeyBank’s receiver has only collected $236,858 in Elcon invoices, according to a July declaration from ongoing litigation. Adding the proceeds from the auction of equipment and machinery and subtracting expenses, the receiver has brought in $464,862, around 6.7 percent of the $7 million line of credit. This doesn’t include legal fees, which could easily exceed the pittance KeyBank has recovered on Elcon. About $2.5 million from the Sound Transit job is still tangled in a battle between KeyBank and Elcon’s bond insurance company.

In the Travelers indemnity case, Decker enlisted an expert witness, a commercial banker who spent his career working with distressed loans, to assess KeyBank’s conduct toward Elcon. The witness concluded that KeyBank failed to “conduct itself in a commercially reasonable manner,” “meet generally accepted industry standards of good faith,” or “consider the unique aspects of lending to a construction contractor working on bonded projects.” The Travelers case is still pending in federal district court in Washington state.

Decker also sued KeyBank and its senior vice president Dale Conder, and for the last two years, he has been sending letters to KeyBank executives, board members, and investors, requesting a meeting, a review of the Elcon decision, an admission of the harms, and a meaningful show of support to those affected. He’s called KeyBank’s executive offices as well. “This wasn’t inevitable. It was preventable,” he wrote in one letter to board members. “All we needed was a chance to be heard. Why were we denied even that when others were not?”

A mediation session to resolve the lawsuit back in February was “a waste of time,” according to Decker; he characterized it as “let’s throw a few bucks at Decker to make it go away.” Conder emailed Decker a couple of days after mediation, referring to the many letters sent to board members. “Upon careful review of the letters received, we do not find any new or additional information that would cause us to reconsider our current path,” Conder said.

The last response was in May from a lawyer working for KeyBank, asking that Decker stop sending letters to KeyBank officials’ personal addresses. “Mr. Decker can rest assured that he has been heard,” the attorney said, adding that he and Conder would be willing to sit down with Decker at any time. Decker didn’t take that seriously.

“I know when to quit, but I’m a fighter,” Decker told me. “I can’t give up when there’s such an injustice as this.”

Abilene Eplin hasn’t given up either. She had a lawyer friend named Michele Gibson, who usually practices family law, compose a demand letter to Wells Fargo, alleging that the bank caused “extreme emotional distress, financial turmoil, and reputational harm by treating [Eplin] as a perpetrator rather than the victim of fraud.” Gibson’s letter alleged that Wells Fargo conducted no due diligence before allowing Ari Daniels to take control of the business account. It asked for $750,000 in restored funds, punitive damages, and legal costs, along with a written acknowledgment of wrongful activity.

An outside counsel for Wells Fargo, Mark Wraight, got back to Gibson. After a preliminary discussion, Wraight made a promise to return the $10,791 in frozen funds within two weeks. “I was like at least that’s a start … at least I’m talking to the right person,” Gibson said in an interview. But when Wraight contacted her in June, the deal had changed. Wells Fargo would agree to give the money back only if Eplin would drop all claims for a $1,000 settlement.

“It was a nuisance offer,” Gibson said. “They probably thought, there’s no resources to go forward, so we’ll give you a nice shiny $1,000 and thanks for playing.”

Eplin has had trouble finding any civil litigator to take her case. One attorney told her that because the business didn’t have any cash flow, just a promise of future earnings in a contract, it would be hard to establish the injury needed to bring a case.

Amid the chaos, Eplin leaned on the support of a boyfriend who recently proposed marriage. They moved to a beach community in the Florida Panhandle, and her Facebook feed is peppered with the kind of questions for neighbors associated with starting a new life.

“It was supposed to go this way, part of me says. The kids need a stable father in their life,” Eplin said. “It still stings though … My business was destroyed because my institution wouldn’t protect me.”