Here goes the story:
Land Scam Partners
Gardner-Webb and Cleveland County
Taxpayers foot the bill!
By Robert A. Williams
This must be the “worst” kept secret in Cleveland County history. Half a million taxpayer dollars went to political insiders on the sale of Gardner-Webb land and all the records were public and filed with the Register of Deeds. No “insider” feared the Cleveland County news media would tell this story. Until now, they haven’t!
First, a description of how land scams work. The multi-billion dollar rip-off the taxpayers took in the Federal Savings and Loan failures worked the same way, except some bankers were prosecuted and jailed in those deals. Will the Whitewater land deals involving President and Mrs. Bill Clinton be the next land fraud episode to hit Federal Court.
Anyway, this is how it works. A piece of land is identified. Purchases or options to purchase are made at inflated prices. Additional purchases or options to purchase are made to inflate prices even more. Loans are taken out using the inflated land prices as collateral. The sellers pocket the money and then don’t pay the S&L, which forecloses on the overpriced land. The land is worth much less that the loan value, so the S&L takes a loss. Enough losses and the S&L goes bankrupt. Taxpayers pay off S&L depositors and cover the loss. The land sharks who shredded the paper work laugh all the way to their Swiss banks. A few “sloppy” ones go to jail.
The Gardner-Webb land scam worked even better. The inflated prices went straight to the taxpayers and nobody asked any questions. The proposed taxpayer funded industrial park deal has some major similarities to this story.
For the Record:
There it was, officially recorded in the Register of Deeds office for anybody to see. Cleveland County Tax Map 3162-1-5. Cleveland County DEED BOOK 1079; pages 360, 364 & 580 and DEED BOOK 1080; pages 716 & 720. A quick trip to the library and the front page of the December 5, 1989 SHELBY STAR told the rest. County Commissioner Meeting Minutes Book #19 proves it all.
The county supposedly wanted to expand the landfill. Gardner-Webb University owned the land the County wanted. A member of the Gardner family had bequeathed the property to Gardner-Webb years before. The 1989 SHELBY STAR report said the County Commissioners went behind closed doors for 40 minutes to discuss Gardner-Webb and other issues. The SHELBY STAR did not report anything about the “wheeling and dealing.”
The DEED BOOK records show that 500 acres left Gardner-Webb’s ownership at 12:39pm on December 20, 1989. The tax stamps indicate a price of $425,500 was paid to Garner-Webb. At 12:40pm on December 20, 1989, Cleveland County took possession of 378.3acres of that land. The price paid was $568,000 according to the tax stamps.
The DEED BOOK records show that a person well known inside Cleveland County political circles, Robert F. Morgan, owned the 378.3 acres for that one minute interval between 12:39pm and 12:40pm on December 20, 1989 and picked up a cool $142,500 for his sixty seconds of ownership.
It did not stop there. Other DEED BOOK and County Commissioner records show a few weeks later about 37 more acres were needed to”square up” the property line. $55,000 more to the political insider. It didn’t stop there either. For the short period of ownership, Robert F. Morgan also got the rights to cut the timber off all the county property and he still had 85 acres left over.
LUCKY?
Let’s count up what Mr. Morgan got for being so “lucky” for being at the right place and at the right time. $142,500 plus $55,000 plus timber off 415 acres plus 85 acres. That pushes a half million dollars pretty hard. That’s more that Gardner-Webb got and they owned the property in the first place! The luckiest part about the deal is that the insider option was for only 180 days, yet the deeds were interred 211 days after the option was recorded. Why did the County Commissioners Joe E. Cabiness, Jack Spangler, Joyce Cashion, Coleman Goforth and Charlie Harry, who were in office at that time, seal a land deal that may have included an expired or soon to expire option? Was the County Commissioners gift of a half million dollars to Robert F. Morgan in the best interest of taxpayers?