When con artists become predators

The best hustlers, as described in my last post, are the smooth-talkers—the enormously sincere and effusive spinners of all the marvels that can be yours if you would but set aside your critical faculties and nagging suspicions and buy The Dream. The very best hustlers even believe their own stories, and are as shocked and dismayed as anyone when The Dream crashes on the reefs of financial or political reality. How could that be? We’re all victims here, the smooth talkers will tell you, of small minds or insufficiently committed investors or an ignorant public that simply doesn’t get it.

But then there’s the other kind. The predators for whom there is no pretense of fair-dealing, the con men whose only purpose is to separate you from your bank account as quickly and ruthlessly as possible. And it’s unfortunately true that the RV park and campground industry, by becoming such a hot sector of the commercial real estate market over the past three or four years, has attracted both dream-weavers and pickpockets at an unprecedented rate. A key difference? The dream-weavers spin their magic around an entire community, which at least distributes the inevitable pain. The pickpockets’ victims are fleeced individually.

Take Duane and Stephanie Smith, of the Twin Lakes area in Arkansas. According to Duane Smith, a school teacher in Mountain Home, Brian “Eddie” Sides approached him two years ago with a proposal that he invest in a new RV park. At that point he had known Sides a couple of years, Smith told a local reporter, with Sides and his wife coming off “as a respectable Christian family that lived their lives with Christian values and that had done reasonably well for themselves,” owning an upper middle-class home and several expensive boats and vehicles.

Sides initially emphasized that the Smiths would not need to put down any money, but that he needed their good credit scores and financial credibility to obtain the financing he needed. That right there should have rung an alarm bell and convinced Smith to back the hell away, but Smith didn’t hear it. Perhaps he was reassured by Sides’ share of the deal, which was to kick in an initial $200,000 in proceeds from the sale of his home, which he had put up for sale.

Although that wasn’t quite what it seemed.

First, because he needed bridge funding until his house was sold, Sides prevailed on the Smiths to put up an initial $25,000 to get the ball rolling. Then it turned out that the home didn’t actually belong to Sides personally, and when it was sold, the proceeds made it into anything other than the RV park account for which they had been promised. Meanwhile, with Sides having blown through the $25,000 start-up fund, a resulting deficit in the RV park account was jeopardizing the bank loan that had been obtained through the Smiths’ good credit . . . and you can see where this is going.

Long story short—and it is a very long story indeed, meticulously documented by the online Mountain Home Observer—the Smiths got cleaned out to the tune of $334,384. That’s how much they recently won in a civil suit against Sides, but Sides already had a string of judgments and court orders against him dating back more than a decade, for various grifts and scams that netted him tens of thousands more—none of which, it seems, he has coughed up. And despite a nearly year-long effort by the Smiths to convince the Baxter County prosecuting attorney to bring criminal charges, no charges have been brought and Sides continues to skate. The Smiths, meanwhile, are teetering on the financial brink.

“The prosecutor keeps making excuses and keeps making a point to say that if he decides to file charges it’s not going to help people get their money back,” Smith recently told the Observer. “Yes, but what about holding people accountable for alleged crimes they commit—especially when it involves numerous victims and large sums of money? . . . I talk and communicate frequently with many of Mr. Sides’ alleged victims, and most simply want him to be held accountable for his actions at this point, and for closure.”

You could argue that even the skimpiest due diligence should have discouraged anyone from getting into a business relationship with Sides, so maybe Smith is undeserving of your sympathy. Putting that aside, however, there’s also unmistakable evidence that Smith didn’t have the slightest understanding of the business itself—of what it takes to build and run an RV park, much less one that was promoting itself as a “luxury” campground. As I wrote more than a year ago, the new venture was flashing warning signals right out of the gate, proclaiming that a $500 deposit would be sufficient to reserve a site—or “lock in the full year for the low price of $3100.”

“Low,” indeed.

There were lots of other disturbing clues that this was a doomed project, from Sides’ willingness to forego getting required construction permits, to the incredible amount of rancor he provoked among the project’s neighbors, to the absence of any of the numerous amenities the luxury RV park would supposedly provide. In the end, all that Sides had to show for his efforts was a dead-ended gravel road bulldozed the length of a small peninsula, flanked by a series of gravel RV pads. By the end of last summer, the whole venture was shut down. As the Observer reported, “Today, the park sits abandoned, with trash strewn about and equipment sitting out in the elements to rust. Felled trees mark the landscape alongside empty travel lots. The park is silent.”