The Prince of Paragould
Although it contains things from the world in which we live and references actual places, this story should be read as a work of fiction. All characters are fictional and not based on any actual living person. The characters and events that take place are entirely the product of my imagination.
He had always felt like it was a fluke of sorts, the fact that he’d been born in such a small town. If one considered it, it was kind of random. The family lived in Little Rock and that was where he had grown up, but that wasn’t where he was born. What they were doing in Paragould was still — all these years later — a mystery to him. And yet, that’s what his birth certificate proclaimed and it was what he had to put down as his birthplace when it was required, even though he hadn’t spent a day in his life living there, nor did he or his family know a single resident of the town.
The story he had always been told was that his parents were just “driving through” when his mother suddenly went into labor and his panic-stricken father sped headlong off the bypass through several red lights to the nearest emergency room in town. A doctor his mother had never seen before delivered him. The only visitors were the nurses and strangers in the hospital. No family was close enough to be there. But the senior nurse had been the one to first call him what he would eventually be dubbed by the regional media. “He’s as handsome as a prince!” she had gushed as she handed the newborn back to his mother.
After two nights in the hospital, they were released, the little family now numbering three, and they got back on the road, this time, headed home. And he’d never been to Paragould since. His parents thought it was a romantic story, and for some reason unknown to him, they loved telling it. And he would smile when they told it, because that’s what everyone expected him to do.
But secretly, he had always wondered what might’ve happened if they hadn’t been so lucky to have been that close to a decent-sized hospital. What exactly had his father been thinking, taking his eight-months pregnant mother out on some scenic joyride anyway? After all, it was 1971. There were no cell phones. Help was not a minute, or a call, or a text away. There was no calling 9–11.
It had been reckless, pure and simple. There was no other way to put it. And recklessness, he would eventually come to realize, seemed to be in the family blood.
When I first met him, after his arrest, the things that I had been told and the stories that I had heard did not seem to connect up with the man. I found him intelligent, engaging, well-read, humble, articulate, soft spoken, and honest. He didn’t seem like the evil villain in an expensive suit who had once been the new young rock star of the real estate industry, and who had allegedly brought down the real estate market in the northwest part of the state, the one who had “popped” the proverbial bubble, that everyone had told me so much about.
After the first few proffer sessions, I still wasn’t really sure why exactly we were going after him as opposed to a number of other people who had struck me as much more sinister; bankers, contractors, closing agents, real estate speculators, home builders and even a few lawyers.
I hadn’t yet developed the cynicism I would later have after working on cases where the well-connected got a pass and people looked the other way. It happened. And it still happens. Maybe he just didn’t have the right connections.
But at the time, something was missing in all of this.
Of course, I had just joined the office and I was only a few months in. I hadn’t been living with any of this during a relevant time period like the other prosecutors in my new office. But I had just come from spending a few years in small conference rooms sitting across tables just like the one at which I was now sitting across from him, talking to some very definitely evil people who had helped murder 3,000 of my fellow citizens in September, 2001. I had learned to size people up pretty quickly. I could tell the difference. And the so-called Prince was nothing like any of them.
He had the look of a guy who was worn out and had gotten in way over his head. Each step he took trying to get out of the hole had just dug the hole even deeper. And now, he was answering my questions, connecting all the dots, and explaining to me what a paper chase and shell game the entire industry was. It could’ve been a microcosm of the entire facade that was the real estate industry in the early 2000s, before the bottom dropped out in 2008.
It was a story of crooked bankers who would extend millions in loans when they had no business doing it; of giving people mortgages on homes they had no business buying; of “business men” who would purchase a million-dollar property and sell it to another, sometimes three or four times in a single day, the property changing hands as many times, and each seller and buyer making a few hundred thousand dollars off of each transaction — the ultimate “flipping” scheme out of which everyone lined their pockets; of home builders who would buy up parcels of land and throw up neighborhoods full of new homes, pricing them well above what they worth and knowing the shifty bankers would give unsuspecting buyers the big loans and mortgages with ridiculously high interest rates, never caring that the buyers would usually default; and of lawyers willing to provide the legal means to accomplish all of the foregoing, what I called “the cloak of legitimacy.”
Indeed, it was a story with dozens of people involved, scattered all over the area and in different industries and positions. Their schemes had worked for nearly a decade when greed was rampant and the market was booming. After all, nobody was looking.
And when it finally came crashing down, it became the story of how they tried to hang all of it on him.
To be continued.
Glen Hines is the author of the Anthology Trilogy of books — Document, Cloudbreak, and Crossroads — and Bring in the Gladiators, Observations From a Former College Football Player Who Was Never Able to Become a Fan, all available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. His forthcoming book, Cathedrals in the Twilight, will be published later this year. His writing has also been featured in Sports Illustrated, Task & Purpose, the Human Development Project, and elsewhere.
