A Bank Wouldn't Take His Bias Settlement Money. So He's Suing.

But as he learned this week, it was too soon to celebrate.

When he tried Tuesday to deposit the money at his TCF Bank, a new lawsuit says, he met resistance that escalated with a call to the police and what amounted to a claim of racial discrimination against the bank. The lawsuit called it “banking while black.”

After the assistant branch manager called the police, it says, Thomas, 44, was detained by two Livonia Police Department officers in the lobby for hours. He was also accused of fraud, even after his lawyer, Deborah Gordon, texted screenshots of documents showing that he had just won the funds from the settlement, Gordon said.

“I have had this with black clients before,” Gordon said in a telephone interview Thursday. “There can be a lot of questions when they suddenly have money.”

Thomas, whose story first appeared in The Detroit Free Press, had collected the checks from the Jan. 13 federal settlement with his former employer, the rental car company Enterprise, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in Circuit Court for the county of Wayne.

On Jan. 21, Thomas went to the TCF branch in Livonia, Michigan, where he has had a checking account since 2018, it says. He asked to open a savings account, deposit the money and get cash back, the lawsuit says.

But he did not get far. The lawsuit says he was told by the assistant branch manager that the system was malfunctioning, that the checks had to be “verified” and “called in,” and that he needed to answer a question: “How did you get this money?”

TCF did not immediately reply to an email or phone calls seeking comment.

The Free Press quoted a bank spokesman, Tom Wennerberg, as saying that race was not a factor and that the checks showed a watermark that read “void” when scanned by the bank. Wennerberg said the three checks were for $59,000, $27,000 and $13,000. Gordon said she was unable to disclose the amount of the checks.

The lawsuit says that the assistant branch manager went into a back room and called the Livonia Police Department. After Thomas was questioned by the officers and they spoke to Gordon, he was allowed to go, but without depositing the checks, the suit continues. Thomas’ “race was a factor” in the bank’s decision to “treat him less favorably than other individuals,” it says.

The lawsuit, which alleges race discrimination and names TCF Financial Corp. as the defendant, is seeking a jury trial.

√Before he left, he closed his TCF account and then went to another bank, where he opened a new account and deposited the checks, Gordon said, adding that they had cleared by the next morning.

But TCF bank had filed a police report against Thomas, alleging check fraud, according to the lawsuit. On Jan. 22, a Livonia detective asked Gordon in an email for the name of the contact person at Thomas’ former employer, so that the officer could ask about the settlement checks and “confirm that they are not fraudulent,” the email says.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .