Judge sends Jeremy Hare, banned Philly stockbroker, to prison and fines him $411,000

Jeremy Hare, the banned Philadelphia stockbroker who reinvented himself as the president of a staffing company, was sentenced Tuesday by a federal judge in New Jersey to three years in prison and ordered to pay restitution of $411,838 to a California lender.

Hare, 48, who faced a 20-year maximum sentence, is to surrender to the Bureau of Prisons. U.S. District Judge Renee Marie Bumb included three years of supervised release.

Hare pleaded guilty last September to one count of wire fraud for submitting bogus invoices through his staffing company, Apollo Search Partners LLC, with offices in Philadelphia and Cherry Hill, to the California lender.

Hare’s lawyer, Ronald L. Greenblatt, said Tuesday that Hare got behind on his child support and “fell into a lifestyle that he could not support and then he committed this crime. He feels terrible and that’s why he pleaded guilty.”

By the time regulators banned him as a stockbroker in 2013, Hare had left behind a trail of upset investors who said Hare had churned their accounts to gain the trading fees.

The largest investor dispute was settled for $1.1 million.

A Florida lawyer who specializes in investment-adviser disputes nationwide looked at Hare’s record at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority — 19 complaints over about a decade — and called him a “rogue broker.” The lawyer, Jeff Erez, added that Hare “was off the rails.”

Blocked from a stock-trading career because of repeated investor complaints, the telegenic Hare — who had appeared as an expert on the stock market on the Fox Business cable channel — reinvented himself as a high-end recruiter of financial executives and accountants through Apollo Search in September 2015.

Flexible Funding Ltd., which funds payrolls for the temporary staffing industry, has claimed breach of contract and fraud against Apollo and Hare in a separate lawsuit in the San Francisco federal court.

Between June 20 and Aug. 15, 2017, Flexible Funding wired money to Apollo for staffing employees at the Results Cos., Harbor Linens, and Boyds LP, according to the suit. The money was not paid back.

On Aug. 24, 2017, John Villanueva, Flexible Funding’s director of account services, told his colleagues by email that “it appears that Jeremy Hare is … providing us with bogus invoices.”