Terrorized by criminals, victimized by police investigators andprejudged by people in his community, the media and the creditunion industry, Matthew Yussman lived under constant stress andsuspicion for more than a year.

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

Ironically, what led the two men to commit this crime was to getcash to support a floundering national company they operated, whichprovided financial services for inmates, giving them access tomoney 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, ofWaterville, Maine, were charged with multiple felonies includingarmed bank extortion of the $929 million Y-12 Federal Credit Unionin Oak Ridge, Tenn., SmartBank in Knoxville in July and the $106million Northeast Community Credit Union in Elizabethton, Tenn., inOctober.

The victims, Mark Ziegler, president/CEO of Y-12 and BrookeLyons, a teller at Northeast Community, declined to comment becauseof the pending legal process. In both cases, the suspects didn'tget any money and no one was physically harmed.

Although Witham agreed to plead guilty to six felony charges,Benanti pleaded not guilty and may go to trial.

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

He explained, Yussman, who doubles as Achieve Financial'ssecurity trainer, shared how he managed the eight-hour hostageordeal, the grueling police investigation and the constant stressof suspicion.

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

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

After his car was surrounded by police, he had to strip down tohis waist in February's frigid temperatures for several hours untilthe bomb squad determined the device was fake. After being treatedfor hypothermia at a local hospital, he went to the police station,where investigators grilled him with questions until he finallyagreed to take a lie detector test, which he failed. Thatinformation was later released in public court documents, puttinghim under a cloud of suspicion in his community and the media.

His lawyer, Richard Brown of Hartford, Conn., dismissed thatpolygraph test as totally unreliable and inaccurate because Yussmanwas traumatized for hours.

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

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

“When police asked my mother how she knew I didn't do this, mymother said, 'Because if he did do it, he's be sitting on a beachright now and you wouldn't know where he was.'”

Even his good friends thought the robbery plot was too stupidfor Yussman to be involved with, he said. Nevertheless, some ofYussman's friends were harassed by others in the community.

“My friends were getting abuse from people who didn't know meand said, 'Oh, your friend is guilty. Why haven't the policearrested him? What are the police doing? How did he get away withthis?'” Yussman explained.

What the CFO also took exception to was when people and themedia described the crime as bizarre.

“Everybody has used that expression that it was bizarre,” hesaid. “I looked at it as not so much bizarre, but that I was avictim of a heinous crime. To take somebody in the middle of thenight at gunpoint, to strap on what I was told was an explosivedevice, it was an act of terror.”

Yussman was also temporarily suspended from his job with pay forabout three months so state regulators could conduct a thoroughaudit and background check of Yussman's activities. A clean auditand background check allowed him to return to work by the end ofMay 2015.

“I was just chomping at the bit to get back,” he said. “I wasnot happy sitting at home, especially since I was just watchingcooking shows and gaining weight. Despite everything that was beingprinted about me, my CEO and board stood by me 100%. They made sureI still had my job. They made sure I was still getting paid. Therewas nothing but complete and total backing of me, which I willalways be grateful for.”

To understand how and why these armed bank extortion crimesoccurred, one must go back to the late 1990s, when Witham andBenanti met in federal prison.

When Benanti was released after serving 16 years for conspiringto rob a bank, he began a business called Prisoner Assistant Inc.,which helped inmates set up bank accounts, establish credit andmove money for inmates or their supporters.

His business was featured in a Jan. 30, 2014 article in theWall Street Journal in which Benanti said he believedpeople who leave prison with a banking relationship are less likelyto return to prison.

After Witham was released from the federal pen, he joinedPrisoner Assistant as director of special projects.

David P. Lewen Jr. and Steven H. Cook, U.S. assistant attorneysin Knoxville, Tenn., wrote in court documents that because PrisonerAssistant was floundering and the money belonging to inmates wasbeing mismanaged, Benanti and Witham planned to rob People SecurityBank and Trust in Clarks Summit, Penn.

On the morning of Sept. 12, 2014, they hid in the woods adjacentto the bank, rushed the tellers and bank manager when they got outof their cars, and threatened and forced them to open the vault atgunpoint. They stole $156,000, which they used to keep PrisonerAssistant operating and to replenish inmate accounts.

The business continued to experience financial shortfalls,however, and Benanti and Witham moved to Connecticut, where Benantihatched the idea to kidnap a bank executive and force him to robthe bank for them, federal prosecutors said.

Using their cell phones, they began researching Connecticut bankexecutives and focused on those and their family members who wereon Facebook and LinkedIn. Somehow, they decided to targetYussman.

Court documents revealed Benanti and Witham had about 13 otherdossiers on bank executives throughout Georgia and SouthCarolina.

Interestingly enough, Prisoner Assistant's sites on Facebook,LinkedIn and Twitter are still live, in addition to a website witha photo of Benanti.

Shortly before midnight on Feb. 22, when Yussman arrived at hisBristol home after playing in a hockey game, he parked in hisdriveway to put some stuff away in his garage. At that time,Benanti and Witham rushed him with guns drown, shouting, “Police!Get on the ground!”

“I knew right away they weren't police officers,” Yussman said.“I could tell by the way they were dressed. And my first thoughtwas, all right, this is a robbery, a home invasion. This isn'tgoing to be good, but my training kicks in right away. The firstthing I thought of was what are they wearing, and I tried toremember details for the police. That actually kept me calm duringthe night.”

When Yussman landed his first job at a bank, he was part of theinternal fraud team that worked on security issues and was trainedby police officers. Yussman also provided security training foremployees at Achieve Financial.

While in the home, Benanti and Witham tied up and blindfoldedYussman and his mother with duct tape around their ankles and a ziptie around their wrists. They put his mother in her bedroom, placedYussman on the couch and told him to get some sleep.

“I thought that was the dumbest thing I ever heard with two guyswalking around my house with guns,” Yussman said.

Over the next tense eight hours, Yussman said there wasn't muchtalk between him, Benanti and Witham.

“They were not very talkative,” he said. “I basically just gavethem whatever information they asked me for and I tried not to getinto any kind of other conversations with them. I didn't want themto be able to use anything against me or for me to try to get intotheir heads. I just wanted to do exactly what they were telling meand try to keep my mind focused on what I needed to do.”

Before getting into his car, Benanti and Witham duct taped toYussman's chest what they told him was an explosive device, whichYussman suspected was fake.

“I was able to look down my blindfold and I could tell theydidn't stick any wires or anything like that in the clay part ofthe device,” Yussman said.

In the car, he called Achieve Financial President/CEO AndrewKlimkoski and instructed him to vacate employees from the NewBritain branch, close it, meet him there to provide the vaultcombination and not to call police.

“This is my life,” Yussman told Klimkoski in a cell phone call.“Please don't play with it.”

Yussman used those dramatic words to make sure Klimkoski knewthis was the real thing and not a security training exercise.

“He knew what to do, which was to get the police involved rightaway,” he said.

After Yussman arrived at the branch parking lot, he was soonsurrounded by local police, state troopers, FBI, firefighters andthe bomb squad. By the time the bomb was determined to be fake,Benanti and Witham managed to escape detection, drove to upstateNew York and later made their way south.

After the local police investigation yielded no arrests, theinvestigation was turned over to the FBI in May. Following a policechase in North Carolina on Nov. 25, Benanti and Witham werearrested, which led investigators to charge them with the armedbank extortion charges in December.

For about two months, Yussman went to therapy sessions, whichhelped him get over his trauma. The tab was picked up by workers'compensation insurance.

“I went to counseling for the first couple of months,” heexplained. “I had to get over the whole incident and my biggestthing was the guilt. Could I have done more to have stopped this?Would this all be happening if I had done more? And then, throughthe help of the counselor, I was able to accept the fact that I didwhat I was taught to do, trained to do. The thing that really gotme through everything was that my mother was safe, my staff wassafe, I was safe and they got no money. How could you ask forbetter results than that?”