O’Fallon bank VP’s alleged ‘financial betrayal’ detailed in police reports
Police reports provide a deep look into the investigation of a metro-east bank executive who federal prosecutors have accused of defrauding his employer of nearly $2 million and stealing another nearly half million dollars from a Lebanon couple’s retirement savings.
The reports portray a man who borrowed from wealthy friends to support extravagant spending habits – including a $200-per-day allowance for a favorite waitress who called him “sugar daddy” – and out of desperation committed bank fraud when his debts came due.
Then, as investigators caught on to his alleged crimes and police closed in on the St. Louis hotel where he was hiding, the reports say, he attempted to commit suicide by stabbing himself in the stomach and neck with a serrated knife to avoid jail.
Andrew Blassie, 69, a vice president at Bank of O’Fallon, was indicted by a grand jury in the U.S. Court for the Southern District of Illinois on April 9 on two felony counts in connection with the check-kiting scheme and theft.
According to police reports, he is being held in the psychiatric unit at Mercy Hospital St. Louis in Creve Coeur, Missouri. Blassie is expected to appear at the federal courthouse in East St. Louis Monday at 10 a.m.
If convicted, Blassie could receive a sentence of up to 30 years in prison for bank fraud and another 10 for interstate transportation of security or funds obtained by fraud. It also would reveal an extraordinary “financial betrayal” of his own family, said U.S. Attorney Steven Weinhoeft following the indictment.
Bank of O’Fallon is more than an employer to Blassie — it’s a family-owned and operated enterprise founded by his wife’s late father.
Russell Thoman Sr. was one of nine business partners who established Bank of O’Fallon in 1959. Blassie’s brother-in-law, Richard Thoman, is the bank’s current president and two other brothers-in-law also are involved in bank-related operations.
Along with their two sisters – including the former Joanne Thoman, Blassie’s wife of 43 years – the Thoman brothers control the majority stock in Security First Bancshares Inc., the holding company that owns Bank of O’Fallon.
It was his wife’s shares of stock in Security First Bancshares that Blassie sold off to repay a $4 million loan from a friend in St. Louis, which Joanne Blassie told investigators may have triggered her husband’s alleged criminal behavior.
Joanne Blassie has not been accused of any wrongdoing. Her husband handled the household finances and she had no reason to doubt him, she told police.
“Andrew lied to her about their real financial situation throughout the past few years,” an O’Fallon police report stated, “but she did not know that prior to finding out about all of his fraud.”
ALLEGED CHECK-KITING
Check kiting is a type of fraud in which offenders write checks from an account at one bank and deposits them into the account of another. They rely on the lapse of time it takes for the check to be processed to artificially inflate the balance of their account, then use the money for their personal use.
According to the federal indictment, Blassie wrote checks from four accounts at three different banks – including his wife’s account at U.S. Bank – and deposited them into his own account at Bank of O’Fallon. The checks would eventually bounce, so Blassie would cover them with other checks from another bank.
“Because it was under the false impression that there were sufficient funds in the account, the Bank of O’Fallon paid these checks and debit transactions,” the criminal indictment alleges.
Charges also allege that Blassie used his position with Bank of O’Fallon to conceal the fraud by falsifying daily “kiting suspects reports” that were prepared to flag fraudulent activity. Blassie would intercept the reports, cut out the line that contained his name, and tape the severed halves of the page back together where his account information had been to conceal his activity from other bank officers, according to the indictment.
“While carrying out the scheme, Andrew typically increased the amount of each check written from US Bank to Bank of O’Fallon,” an O’Fallon police report added. “This increase represented the money Andrew could spend, as the rest of the money would go toward covering the overdraft of the Bank of O’Fallon account once the prior US Bank check would bounce.”
By the time U.S. Bank closed Joanne Blassie’s account on Sept. 24, 2024, and the last of the fraudulent transactions cleared, Blassie’s Bank of O’Fallon account showed a balance of negative $1,973,652.67.
THE SECOND CRIMINAL COUNT
The federal indictment also alleges that Blassie convinced a married couple from Lebanon to give him $429,000 from their retirement savings as an investment that was secured by 128 shares of Security Bankshares Inc. stock, most of which belonged to his wife.
From October 2023 to August 2024, Blassie made regular interest payments to the couple from his fraudulent checking account, according to the indictment. He later sold the Security First Bancshares Inc. stock and used the proceeds to repay a $4 million loan he received in October 2021 from an individual in St. Louis.
Then, in September 2024, Blassie stopped the interest payments to the Lebanon couple, told them that their principal was gone and that the stock certificates backing their investment were worthless, according to charges.
The federal complaint does not spell out a motive for the alleged crimes, but in an interview with investigators, Joanne Blassie said her husband told her he had borrowed money he couldn’t repay.
BORROWING BIG
But prior to the alleged bank fraud, Blassie secured large amounts of money by borrowing it from friends, according to four acquaintances who were interviewed by investigators.
That included a St. Louis man who told detectives he loaned Blassie $4 million in October 2021.
“He was willing to help Andrew because they were friends, but he never knew why Andrew needed the money,” he said, according to the police report from his interview.
The man asked for collateral on the loan, however, which Blassie then backed with $4 million of his wife’s Security First Bancshares Inc. stock.
The loan was paid back with 4% interest in August 2022, he said, but Blassie then asked him for another loan of $80,000 to help pay for his son’s wedding. The man did not loan Blassie the money.
In May 2023, Blassie turned to a friend of 30-plus years for a $50,000 loan, which he said he needed to bail his son out of a bad investment. Again, he secured the loan with “money locked up in stocks,” the police report said.
The friend told investigators he was suspicious of the reasoning, but made the loan anyway. He said Blassie was “four to five months” late with repayment of the loan but he returned the money with an additional $5,000.
“Andrew added the interest to the final repayment on his own due to feeling bad it took longer than one month to repay him back,” the friend told investigators.
In June 2023, Blassie contacted an acquaintance from St. Clare Catholic Church in O’Fallon asking for a personal loan of $25,000, again he claimed, to cover his son’s bad investment. Blassie called the man again “a couple weeks later” asking for an additional $30,000.
Both amounts were paid back in full, the man told police.
Finally, in Oct. 2023, another long-time friend received a call from Blassie asking if he could borrow $80,000, according to the police report. Blassie told his friend he needed the money to help one son out of a bad investment and the other to cover a wedding bill that came in “larger than expected.”
This time, Blassie said he needed the money that day and suggested the friend refinance his house to access the cash. After about nine months without payment, the friend got “stern” with Blassie, who again added in $5,000 of interest.
“He said Blassie just transferred the money in one lump sum into his Bank of O’Fallon bank account, and that is how he was repaid,” a police report said.
Then Blassie asked him for an additional $50,000 loan, which the friend refused.
The man told police he also was suspicious of Blassie’s reasons for needing the money because he had “felt bad for” the son and offered him a job, “but (he) said he was doing fine making $200,000-$300,000 a year.”
The friend also had personally observed Blassie’s generosity with waitresses at bars and restaurants they frequented.
‘SUGAR DADDY’
Police interviews with friends and acquaintances show Blassie to have been a big spender. So does a single credit card statement from September 2024, just as the alleged bank fraud scheme was reaching its end.
Over that single month, there were 84 payments ranging from $500 to $6,000 made off Blassie’s American Express credit card. And, over the same time period, he wrote 22 checks of unspecified amounts from his Bank of O’Fallon account and made cash withdrawals from the account using Venmo, according to an investigator’s report.
Some of his credit card payments were spent on “normal life” – like dining out, gasoline and car washes. He also had a history of entertaining friends at bars and strip clubs and giving generous “gifts” to women, according to friends police interviewed.
He just “liked pretty girls,” one of them said.
Police accessed Blassie’s Bank of O’Fallon email folder and discovered “a very large number” of messages concerning his accounts with OnlyFans, a subscriber-based website that includes hardcore pornography.
According to the O’Fallon police report, a waitress at Hot Shots told investigators Blassie tipped waitresses large amounts of money and gave her a $200-per-day “allowance.” The waitress told police her relationship with Blassie lasted eight or nine years, but was never physical, though he had wanted it to be. She admitted, however, that “early on” she would text him nude photos of herself “as a tradeoff” for the money he was giving her, the police report stated.
She wasn’t the only waitress to receive “gifts” from Blassie, she said. And another waitress “more than likely” sent him nude photos, too, she told investigators.
“Andrew was just a nice guy and helped out many other girls as well,” the Hot Shots waitress said, according to the O’Fallon police report.
Blassie also gave “gifts” to a woman who gave him hair loss treatments.
They initially met at Hans Wieman Hair Club in St. Louis in 2017, according to an interview she gave police over the phone, but he eventually began receiving treatments directly from her at a separate location.
The woman would not tell investigators how much she charged Blassie for the treatments other than to say they were “very expensive.”
He paid her in checks and Paypal transactions and tipped her generously, the woman told an investigator, according to the police report. She told investigators she never met with Blassie for anything other than the hair treatment.
After suddenly falling out of contact with him for about a month last fall, she told police, she wondered if he was dead.
CLOSING IN
The whole thing came crashing down in October when U.S. Bank closed an account in Joanne Blassie’s name after a check written on it bounced, according to court records. But according to reports from the O’Fallon and Shiloh police departments, the alleged fraud was discovered by bank employees which eventually triggered an internal investigation.
Pamela Owens, a 30-year employee of Bank of O’Fallon and its bookkeeping supervisor, said in the fall of 2023 she received a return deposit check for Blassie’s account due to insufficient funds. She couldn’t recall the exact amount, but told O’Fallon detectives it was”under $100,000, maybe $80,000 to $90,000.”
When she approached Blassie about it, he told her he was refinancing his house and that he would “cover it.”
But then returned checks became “normal,” sometimes up to twice per week, Owens told investigators.
“As time went on, more checks came back and they gradually grew in amounts,” an O’Fallon police report said. “Every check that came back, she brought to Andy’s attention.”
Blassie offered various excuses, she said, and sometimes seemed embarrassed. But a hold was never placed on his account, as the bank would ordinarily do if a customer had multiple returned checks.
Owens didn’t press the issue with Blassie because he was the vice president of the bank and she trusted him, she told police. And she didn’t alert Rick Thoman – the bank president and Blassie’s brother-in-law – because she “didn’t want to be the cause of family drama.”
Owens told police that, at one point, she received a call from West Community Credit Union about a check and, when she called back from Blassie’s office, he “coached her a little on what to say.” Later, Owens said, she overheard Blassie telling the person at the credit union to not contact law enforcement.
“She asked him why he was doing this and he blamed it on one of the boys who got him into this,” the police report said. “She has never heard that excuse before.”
Kevin “Kip” Adkins, also a vice president at Bank of O’Fallon, headed up the internal investigation and called police with his findings on Oct. 2. By then, Blassie knew his employer suspected him of fraud.
A week earlier, on the evening of Sept. 24, 2024, Joanne Blassie called Shiloh Police to report that her husband was missing. She had last spoken to him in the morning, when he told her he was headed to a meeting at the Boys and Girls Club of Greater St. Louis, for which he had served as board president.
“Joanne stated after calling around with others associated with the Boys Club, she learned there was no meeting today,” according to a Shiloh police report.
A Shiloh police detective initially looked for Blassie at the Horsehoe St. Louis casino in St. Louis, the report said without specifying why.
But the next day, at about 12:15 p.m., an officer with the St. Peters Police Department found Blassie’s BMW parked at a Holiday Inn & Suites on Richmond Center Boulevard after his cellphone was pinged in the area. Blassie didn’t immediately respond to the officer’s knock on the door of the fourth-floor hotel room.
But after speaking with a Shiloh police officer on the phone, Blassie allowed St. Peter’s police officers to enter. His abdomen and the base of his neck were bleeding.
“Andrew stated he injured himself by cutting and impaling himself with that knife within a few minutes after he saw me arrive and inspect his vehicle,” the Shiloh police report stated. “He said he did this because he was scared he was in trouble, so he attempted suicide, intending for the self-inflicted lacerations to be lethal.”
Officers later found a bloody serrated knife in the bathroom of the hotel room.
Paramedics treated Blassie at the hotel, then took him to Mercy Hospital St. Louis in Creve Coeur, where he was further treated and admitted into the psychiatric floor of the behavioral health center.
Blassie was still there on Oct. 7, when investigators served a search warrant to collect his cellphone. They also recovered a sheet of paper with his handwriting, the police report stated.
“While at St. John’s Mercy Hospital,” it said, “Andrew had phone contact with his wife, Joanne Blassie, in which he read her an apology note he had written regarding the things he had done wrong.”
This story was originally published May 16, 2025 at 5:30 AM.
