It’s been 10 months since my friend’s parents, Tom Roach and Melinda Starba, were evicted from their home in Southwest Oregon by a SWAT team. According to my notes, that means it’s been nine months since I learned of the apparent injustice, and took my first trip to examine the scenario up close.
Moving forward … it’s been roughly five months since a mortgage fraud examiner named Susan Decker produced evidence of the hoax that resulted in Tom and Melinda losing their property, and nearly three months since I started publishing this series on the terrible continuing scam.
But despite my articles reaching tens of thousands of readers and growing an audience through social media, Tom and Melinda still have no place to live. Furthermore, while the warrant used to remove them appears to have been forged, the couple still faces trespassing charges stemming from their eviction.
And so, with countless questions remaining, earlier this month I returned to the southern edge of Oregon, this time along with a supporting researcher. We flew out of Boston between snowstorms and arrived in Portland late on Super Bowl Sunday, just in time to catch the wrath of sour Seahawks fans. The next morning we gassed up a Subaru Outback that we rented on the cheap, and motored south toward Josephine County.
I’ll spare readers the details of our journey back to Grants Pass, other than to mention that we stopped by the Oregon state capitol in Salem, where legislators were returning for their 2015 session on the same day we visited. Since nobody in Josephine seems to care that people have been scammed, I figured senators and reps ought to hear the story. I left messages with aides for a few lawmakers and will follow up with them shortly, but before I veer any further off course …
Having already become familiar with Josephine on my trip last year, I dove right into interviews, no less than a dozen of which I planned ahead of time. My focus was on old-timers, or more specifically anyone who can explain the type of thievery that was prevalent in Grants Pass back when Melinda and Tom were first screwed. With one source after another, in coffee shops and restaurants and bars, as daytime meetings unwound into dinners and eventually nightcaps, a familiar picture emerged …
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, and well into the early aughts, Southwest Oregonians frequently pursued home loans in one of two ways: They could apply through an accredited bank, or alternatively seek a private lender who had lower qualifying thresholds and charged higher interest rates. As explained in a previous installment of this series, Tom and Melinda secured their loan through the latter means; the arrangement seemed legitimate, but after their moneyman turned out to be a con artist, and pleaded guilty to state racketeering charges, no one at the local level acted on behalf of the victims.
In searching for answers, I interviewed current and former bank employees, a mortgage broker, some property owners, past and present public officials, and a couple of activists. To each of them I posed some form of the following questions:
- Why are politicians so damn hostile toward homeowners?
- How did land scams come to be so prevalent in Josephine?
- Why is the justice system reluctant to acknowledge the legacy of known scammers?
My sources offered names and dirt on local honchos, helped navigate some crucial backstories, and provided enough data to keep my team busy for weeks. As for notable land shams, a few people pointed to one property with a particularly seedy past. Located south of downtown Grants Pass in the unincorporated community of Selma, smack between rambunctious waterways that scissor across the Illinois Valley, the 6,000-square-foot Deer Creek Ranch is best known as the former seasonal retreat of John Wayne, a vaunted hero of innumerable locals since he filmed the 1975 flick Rooster Cogburn nearby on the Rogue River. What’s less common knowledge, however, is that the legendary movie cowboy’s 1,000-acre getaway became embroiled in the same sort of slippery subterfuge that socked Tom and Melinda.
That’s right. On Cowboy Wall Street, even the Duke’s flat felt the lasso.
“Rattlesnakes may be found in this area … Please give them distance and respect.”
The warning has me questioning my decision to drive out to Selma; I’m already in sufficient fear of being shot or bludgeoned by someone who disapproves of my reporting, and the added threat of snake bites spreads a wave of throbbing goosebumps from my neck down past my beating chest. My gut instinct tells me to immediately scan the area for rattlers, but instead I can’t help but stare at the magnificent ranch before me, its fertile purple-green fields emerging from enormous brick and maple molars to consume the valley before vanishing between ridges.
The Deer Creek Ranch is where John Wayne came to be John Wayne, and the specs fit the billing. Everything is Cowboy Big, from a protective Douglas fir that stands more than 100 feet above the angular fortress, to pinecones wider than pigskins, to swimming holes on creeks that thrust into conjoining riverways like turbines. Sprawling car ports. Stone pillars. Inside is something of a luxurious bucolic tribute to the Playboy Mansion, with ornate slabs of burl fixed atop artisanal bookshelves animated with wildlife carvings.
Thanks to an anonymous $3 million gift nearly 10 years ago, Deer Creek currently belongs to the Siskiyou Field Institute, a nonprofit science and educational facility in service of one of the most biodiverse regions on earth. Between its current incarnation and serving as a retreat for the Duke though, the ranch became a veritable home base for a major Pacific Northwest property theft ring. According to the United States Department of Justice, owners of Deer Creek in the wake of Wayne used the land, among other properties in Southern Oregon, to screw more than 250 investors out of $20 million.
In what prosecutors described as a “Ponzi scheme,” Leroy Fritts and Roderick Prescott pocketed about $3.5 million from “the nationwide promotion and sale of abusive trusts.” Furthermore, through an operation called Fountainhead Global Trust that they ran out of the Selma ranch, Fritts and Prescott reportedly taught others how to rig their own bogus tax rackets. In the end, investigators estimated the duo evaded at least $550,000 in their own income taxes, and cost the U.S. Treasury $135 million by teaching others their methods.
The drama at Deer Creek seems oddly familiar. Like Dennis Lloyd, the cheat who initially sold Tom and Melinda their timebomb, Prescott and Fritts absorbed cash through a pyramid, and paid investors at the top until the fountain ran dry. For his sins, Lloyd served 30 days in county jail and paid $750,000 in restitution to select victims, while Prescott was sentenced to a mere 46 months behind bars and ordered to pay $1.43 million. In both cases, the relatively light sentences were secured by the same defense attorney: Pat Wolke, who in 2004 went on to become a circuit court judge in Josephine County. In addition to his pre-judicial practice representing hucksters, Wolke also owns a real estate title company on the side.
I guess I should have known. There I was suspecting that the courts got something wrong, or that officials missed the details of Melinda and Tom’s case, but in fact one sitting judge defended the same criminal who set the couple’s hell in motion, as well as another like-minded crook, Prescott, who opened offshore accounts in the Caymans under fake names to conceal income from the IRS. As for Judge Michael Newman, whose name appeared on the warrant used to evict Tom and Melinda — they weren’t likely to win any sympathy from him either. Newman worked under the Josephine district attorney back when state investigators cornered Lloyd for racketeering. Asked why the county wasn’t pursuing its own charges at the time — and seeking restitution for all residents who were defrauded, a group that would have included Tom and Melinda — Newman’s boss blamed the victims. “We’ve never even been contacted,” the DA told reporters. “Nobody’s even called me.”
Over beer and pizza I ask Tom and Melinda to retrace the hustle that duped them, and they guide me through the memories. After leaving Southern California and falling in love with the Grants Pass area, in early 1990 they spent several hours daily for three months with a realtor, searching for properties near waterways, until finding their 60-acre Shangri-La on Slate Creek.
“We wanted room,” Tom says with a smile more than two decades later. “We had animals, and we wanted to get out of the rat race of California. We just wanted peace, quiet, and tranquility.”
“It was a different lifestyle,” Melinda recalls. They lacked electric utilities, and she says they lived modestly, heating their home with wood in the winter and using propane for refrigeration and hot water. She continues, “It wasn’t easy, but we got used to it, and we came to love it.” Melinda remembers her real estate agent saying, “One day, this place is going to be worth a lot of money.”
Fast-forward 25 years, and Tom and Melinda aren’t alone in holding an empty bag. According to RealtyTrac, in 2014 foreclosures in Oregon rose sharply, largely due to an aggressive push by lenders to take properties where borrowers had fallen behind. It’s par for the course; while the rest of the country had an 18 percent decline in such filings, last year Oregon saw default notices, bank repossessions, and scheduled auctions rise 5.4 percent.
Josephine is at the bottom of that barrel. Whereas the overall foreclosure rate in Oregon for 2014 was one in every 154 housing units, in Tom and Melinda’s county, one in every 118 units was in trouble, roughly double the amount from a year earlier. All this as economic strains have applied negative pressure to the county’s tax base and impacted Josephine’s already strapped safety apparatus. As even national news outlets have noted, a lack of funding has resulted in severe cuts to rural patrols and other basic services. Still, despite those shortcomings, sheriffs are required by the State of Oregon to process evictions.
The whole thing seems absurd — that authorities would pursue foreclosures, erroneous or otherwise, when they can’t fund nighttime patrols. So I’m excited when a source in Grants Pass tells me that Gil Gilberston, the now-former Josephine County sheriff who evicted Tom and Melinda, is willing to give me an interview. Since his office brought a SWAT team to arrest them, I’ve painted Gilbertson as partially responsible for the loss of their home. Nevertheless, he sympathizes with their plight, and claims to have tried everything in his power to help them before encountering the same unbending legal beast that’s choking my friend’s parents.
“I went to the DA’s office to look into this,” Gilbertson says in a phone interview. “I also spoke to the attorney general and asked them to look into this, so I never was comfortable with how this thing happened.” It’s strange hearing a former sheriff openly regret an action that so drastically affected someone’s livelihood, but his sentiments sound genuine. Gilbertson continues: “I dragged my feet as long as I could. I even went and talked to two judges about this … I wish the Roaches all the best. Personally I believe they were cheated.”
Which leaves us with a former sheriff who admits there shouldn’t have been an eviction in the first place, and with a search warrant that appears to be a forgery. To further check out that latter revelation, which was already verified by a forensic document examiner, my researcher stopped in at the Josephine County Clerk’s Office to see if the required paperwork was filed in conjunction with the April 2014 SWAT raid on Slate Creek. It was not, yet Melinda and Tom still face misdemeanor charges from their forced removal.
Meanwhile, the couple continues to strengthen their claim. They frequently communicate with Decker, the mortgage fraud researcher, and with the public defender assigned to their trespassing case. They’re also representing themselves in a federal lawsuit to retrieve their home, and are seeking an attorney to assist on that front. At this point, with a pile of evidence behind them but nobody in power willing to listen, they’ll take any help they can get.
“I’m the organizer,” Melinda says. “I stay up all night making lists of where we have to go, what we have to do, what we have to bring, what we have to mail, when we have to rush.”
“It’s not a situation, as an American, you expect to find yourself in,” Tom adds. “That’s the hardest part — when your own government turns against you. It’s been a Kafka novel … No matter what you do, they make it harder and harder.”
NEXT: Timber farming is more than merely business in rural Oregon. It’s everything. An economic backbone. A lifestyle. And like the homes of middle class people in Josephine County, the industry is facing a peculiar extinction.
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