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Table of Contents June 2012

June 2012

Cover story

Solid as a rock

For decades that described Bank of Granite. Here's what caused it to crumble.

By Edward Martin

In September 2008, 102 years after it was founded, Bank of Granite was so close to collapse the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. warned that it would have to, as regulators say, “cease and desist” operations unless things got better in a hurry. Staggering under bad loans, its death march stumbled through three years of recovery attempts. “Bless our investors,” a board member prayed at a 2010 shareholder meeting, as the stock price plunged to less than a dollar a share.
The prayer went unanswered.

Features

Independent production

A successful business lawyer teams up with a tattoed dissident to save a video store but finds a happy ending is hard to come by.

By Spencer Campbell

Mickey Aberman will probably work 60 hours this week at his law office. He’ll work two more each night after he gets home. Right now, on this weekday morning, his desktop is buried under thousands of pages of case files that he should be scrutinizing, but he’s seated at a conference table, trying to explain why he spent $100,000 to buy a video store. Finally, he gives up. “I’m not sure why I did that. It was pretty stupid.”

Too big to fell

It's been trimmed, but BofA still towers over the Financial 100 , where its sheer size makes it a sequoia surrounded by saplings.

By Erin Dunn

BB&T Corp.’s name might soon appear on a sports venue in downtown Charlotte, not far from Bank of America Stadium and the banking behemoth’s 60-story headquarters. That Winston-Salem-based BB&T has naming rights to a ballpark the local minor-league team hopes to build and BofA’s emblem is on the home of the NFL’s Carolina Panthers seems only fitting. Though they’re first and second on this year’s Financial 100, our yearly ranking of the largest North Carolina-based banks, thrifts and credit unions, their relative size sets them leagues apart.