BankUnited is making a bold grab for Florida banks' star executives -- and their customers.

John Kanas -- BankUnited's new top dog and the man who led an investor group in acquiring the bank after federal regulators seized it in May -- has created full-page newspaper ads and launched a website, UnhappyFloridaBankers.com, to lure away competing banks' top performers.

BankUnited, Florida's largest home-grown bank, launched the cheeky website Monday, inviting bankers with ``a solid book of business, strong relationships with commercial clients and a proven track record in Florida banking'' to submit their résumés online. The promise: a happier and more profitable future.

The offbeat pitch by the Coral Gables-based thrift shocked South Florida's staid banking community.

``I've never seen anything like this before,'' said Fernando Capablanca, president and chief executive officer of Union Credit Bank in Miami, who called the recruiting move ``drastic.''

The website even provides a taunting resignation letter for successful recruits to download and send to their bosses. It suggests they resign over ``the fact I am not able to provide my customers with the services they need.'' And it ends with an invitation for their old bosses to follow them to BankUnited.

Kanas' blunt come-on ran this week in print and Web versions of The Miami Herald and American Banker, the industry's top trade publication, and on WSJ.com. The online ads continue through the end of next week, and the print ad will appear in American Banker one day next week.

``I'm chuckling looking at it,'' says Stacy Ethun, an executive recruiter for banks who runs Park Avenue Group executive search firm in Orlando. ``I do think he [Kanas] will be touching a nerve at banks. Bank employees are frustrated and customers are scared.''

Ethun added: ``One of the most common comments I hear from bankers these days is `I'm not having any fun.' '' Instead of focusing on serving customers as they once did, she said, ``they're having to do offensive things to them. Now their job, in many cases, is to kick the clients out of the bank.''

``Banking is a people business,'' says the silvery-haired Kanas, who is working to rebuild and expand the bank, which had suffered an exodus of employees as it bled red ink before the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. took it over and sold it to the Kanas-led group. ``We're reaching out to star performers. In the banking business, talent is concentrated with a few people, and they have the relationships, often ones brought with them from one institution to the next.''

Why not rely on executive recruiters, like other banks? ``I never thought subtlety was very profitable,'' said Kanas, an industry veteran who built a tiny Long Island bank into a financial powerhouse.

Although he is chairman and chief executive officer of BankUnited, Kanas remains largely an outsider to the Florida banking scene. He isn't living in Florida, but rather commuting from Long Island, where he lives on the duck farm where he was born. Asked if he worries about stepping on his peers' toes, he replied: ``No. It's a free market.''

But in the clubby world of Florida banking, many local bankers are wincing at such a frontal assault. Some even have cordial understandings with their peers that they won't raid the other's institution to tap rising stars.

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