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Two masked gunmen strapped a fake bomb to Achieve Financial Credit Union chief financial officer Matthew Yussman during a February 2015 home invasion in Bristol, Connecticut, in a scheme that later led to a 2017 conviction and federal prison terms for two men.

Yussman, then 46, was confronted in his garage after coming home from a hockey game, according to police and federal court records. The intruders bound him and his mother, Valerie, who was tied to a bed elsewhere in the house, and told him a second bomb had been placed under her bed. They warned that removing his device or calling police would set it off.

The next morning, Yussman phoned the credit union's chief executive, Andrew Kimenski, and told him to clear out the New Britain branch before the gunmen arrived to empty the vault. Kimenski called Berlin, Connecticut police at 8:20 a.m., saying one of the credit union's vice presidents was 'the victim right now of a home invasion overnight' and had been told not to contact authorities. The call was transferred to Bristol police, who learned a device had been strapped to the executive and a second one left under his mother's bed.

Officers surrounded the credit union and the Bristol home. Yussman was found still wearing the device and taken to a hospital as a precaution. His mother was freed unharmed. Investigators determined the device was fake, fashioned from modeling clay and wire, and turned it over to the FBI.

For months afterward, investigators viewed Yussman himself as a suspect before identifying Michael Benanti, of Lake Harmony, Pennsylvania, and Brian Witham, of Waterville, Maine, as the men behind the scheme. Federal prosecutors said the pair had run similar hostage extortion plots against bank and credit union employees in Tennessee, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, choosing targets they researched on social media. They were captured in November 2015 after a police chase in Buncombe County, North Carolina.

Witham pleaded guilty in 2016 and was sentenced to 42 years in federal prison after testifying against Benanti. A jury convicted Benanti in 2017 on 23 counts, including armed bank extortion, kidnapping and carjacking, and a judge in Knoxville, Tennessee, sentenced him to four consecutive life terms plus 155 years. Yussman told the court he had asked for the maximum, 300 years, and said he still struggled with having believed he was minutes from being killed.