WHO IS PENNY PRITZKER?

John W. Courtney's world collapsed at dinnertime on a Friday in July 2001. That's when he learned from a television newscast that much of the $200,000 that he had saved from his construction job over a 30-year period was lost when his Chicago-area bank was shut down after pursuing a failed strategy of subprime loans.

Seven years later, the Vietnam War veteran has yet to recoup $85,000 of his uninsured losses from Superior Bank's failure. And he watches in disbelief as one of the bank's former top officials, billionaire hotel heiress Penny Pritzker, leads the record-breaking fundraising machine of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama.

Mr. Courtney, now 63, wonders aloud how Mr. Obama could rail on the campaign trail against the national financial crisis started by subprime lending while allowing a former advocate of the practice to hold the senior position of finance chairwoman in his campaign. The candidate has even lauded Ms. Pritzker's business practices as a model for an Obama administration.

"He knows the Pritzker family. He knows what happened in Illinois. He knows that Superior Bank was one of the first to securitize subprime mortgages," Mr. Courtney said. "He talks about change and helping people find a better way of life, but he has distanced himself from the fact that Superior helped ignite the nation's subprime crisis and that Penny Pritzker and her family walked away from it and us."

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