East Texas bank president stole $11 million with fake loans. Now she’s going to prison.

The former president of a small-town East Texas bank was sentenced to eight years in federal prison Tuesday for her role in masterminding one of the most extensive cases of bank fraud in Texas history. Anita Gail Moody, 57, began working at Enloe State Bank as a teenager. The bank is in Delta County, 120 miles northeast of Fort Worth. After climbing the ranks to president, Moody quietly stole more than $11 million from her workplace using more than 100 fake loans to funnel money to friends and family, she admitted in court documents last year.

The scheme unraveled when Moody set fire to loan paperwork on a boardroom table of the bank in Cooper in May 2019, the weekend before Texas regulators were scheduled to conduct a routine exam of the bank’s books. Federal agents descended on Cooper, population 2,180, after the fire. The Texas Department of Banking soon closed the bank, which had issued cotton farmers loans since the Great Depression. For weeks, Texas regulators and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. investigators set up shop and pored over loan documentation between pews at a church next to the bank building, which quickly reopened under new ownership. Enloe became the first Texas bank to fail in five and a half years. It cost the FDIC’s insurance fund an estimated $21 million and left Delta County residents reeling. Federal prosecutors charged Moody with conspiracy to commit bank fraud and arson in April of last year. After a judge rejected an initial plea agreement in October, Moody’s eight-year sentence was handed down this week in Sherman by U.S. District Judge Amos L. Mazzant III, according to a U.S. Attorney’s Office news release.