Trump Commutes 7-Year Prison Sentence Of Former Private Equity CEO From LI

LONG ISLAND, NY — President Donald Trump has commuted the 7-year sentence of Manhasset resident and former privacy equity CEO David Gentile, White House officials say.

White House officials said this week that President Trump had issued a commutation for Gentile.

According to the United States Department of Justice, Gentile began his sentence on Nov. 14, but with this pardon, Gentile will no longer have to serve time in prison or pay $15.5 million in restitution. He was convicted of wire and security fraud charges during the Biden administration, federal officials said.

Former CEO and co-founder of GPB Capital Holdings, Gentile, and former CEO of Ascendant Capital, Jeffry Schneider, defrauded thousands of individual investors in a $1.6 billion GPB Capital Funds scheme, according to Joseph Nocella, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York at the time.

Gentile and Schneider were convicted by a federal jury in Aug. 2024, after an 8-week trial of securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy, and wire fraud conspiracy, federal officials said. Gentile was also convicted of wire fraud, officials said.

Gentile was arrested back on Feb. 4, 2021. and on May 9, U.S. District Judge Rachel P. Kovner sentenced them to 7 years in prison and 6 years in prison, respectively, officials said.

The duo ran a multi-year Ponzi-type scheme to defraud more than 10,000 investors, the Department of Justice said at the time.

White House officials said this week that President Trump had issued the commutation for Gentile.

Gentile was the CEO and cofounder of GPB Capital Holdings, which pooled investors’ funds to acquire stakes in mature companies in the automotive, retail, healthcare, housing, and other industries, White House officials said. Following its founding in 2013, GPB collected more than $1.8 billion in capital.

Unlike similar companies, GPB paid regular annualized distributions to its investors, White House officials added. In 2015, GPB disclosed to investors the possibility of using investor capital to pay some of these distributions rather than funding them from current operations, those officials siad.

Even though this was disclosed to investors the Biden Department of Justice claimed this was a Ponzi scheme, White House officials said. The claim, officials said, was "profoundly undercut" by the fact that GPB had explicitly told investors what would happen. At trial, the government was unable to tie any supposedly fraudulent representations to Gentile; Gentile also raised serious concerns that the government had elicited false testimony and failed to correct such testimony, White House officials said.

According to the DOJ at the time of Gentile's sentencing, the company raised approximately $1.6 billion in funds from investors.

“The defendants built GPB Capital on a foundation of lies,” U.S. Attorney Nocella said at the time of sentencing. “They raised approximately $1.6 billion from individual investors based on false promises of generating investment returns from the profits of portfolio companies, all while using investor capital to pay distributions and create a false appearance of success. The sentences imposed today are well deserved and should serve as a warning to would-be fraudsters that seeking to get rich by taking advantage of investors gets you only a one-way ticket to jail."