KEY DATES IN THE SAGA
December 2010: An investment group affiliated with Aubrey Lee Price takes a majority stake in troubled Montgomery Bank & Trust in Ailey.
June 2012: Price disappears. His family and some business associates receive letters saying he was responsible for defrauding clients, and authorities say Price informed relatives he planned to jump off a Florida ferry to end his life. A note is found, bearing Price's name but not his signature, confessing to concealing losses.
July 2012: Regulators shut down MB&T and Price is indicted in Savannah on a federal bank fraud charge. Regulators freeze his assets. Former clients file complaints for damages from an Atlanta firm where Price once worked. The FBI says it is enlisting the help of counterparts in South America and with Interpol to find Price.
January 2013: Justice officials announce a separate indictment in New York charging Price with securities and wire fraud. It alleges Price unsuccessfully invested about $40 million from 115 investors, losing the money and trying to cover up the losses with fake account statements.
February 2013: The FBI said all vehicles and watercraft believed to belong to Price had been accounted for, except a 17-foot Sea Ray fiberglass boat.
Tuesday: Glynn County sheriff's deputies pulled over a pickup Price was driving near Brunswick. Authorities said they found multiple IDs and later determined Price's real identity.
Thursday: Price appears before a federal magistrate judge, with another hearing scheduled for Monday. A police report in Florida lists Price as a suspect in a marijuana grow house on property rented by a man believed to be Price.
HOW THE STORY BEGAN
In December 2010, Price led an investor group to save Montgomery Bank & Trust in Ailey, about 170 miles southeast of downtown Atlanta. The bank was on the brink of failure, and the cash Price invested convinced Ailey locals to contribute some of their own money to help save the bank.
Federal prosecutors say Price gained control of the bank’s accounts and suffered heavy losses on investments while providing doctored financial statements to clients and the bank. MB&T failed in July 2012, not long after Price went missing.
He was indicted that month for embezzling more than $21 million from the bank and millions more from investors. He also faces federal wire fraud charges in New York, as well as civil suits from the Securities and Exchange Commission and jilted clients.
Log on to MyAJC.com to read Aubrey Lee Price’s confession letter and see video of what was found in Price’s truck.
How we got this story
AJC reporter J. Scott Trubey first reported on Aubrey Lee Price three years ago, when Price led an investor group to save the troubled Montgomery Bank & Trust in Ailey, Ga. In summer 2012, when Price vanished, Trubey wrote a series of stories about his disappearance and the havoc left in his wake, including allegations of fraud against clients. In the course of reporting these stories, AJC reporters interviewed bankers, investors and law enforcement officials and dug through thousands of pages of court filings, personnel and property records and other documents. The trail took us from the front door of the now-closed Ailey bank 170 miles from Atlanta to the latest court hearing in Brunswick. The AJC committed a team of reporters and editors to pursue angles in a story that keeps growing. Along the way were late-night interviews with unnerved investors and the first up-close media look at the truck Price was driving when authorities came upon him. Digging for the truth continues.
HOW THE STORY BEGAN
In December 2010, Price led an investor group to save Montgomery Bank & Trust in Ailey, about 170 miles southeast of downtown Atlanta. The bank was on the brink of failure, and the cash Price invested convinced Ailey locals to contribute some of their own money to help save the bank.
Federal prosecutors say Price gained control of the bank’s accounts and suffered heavy losses on investments while providing doctored financial statements to clients and the bank. MB&T failed in July 2012, not long after Price went missing.
He was indicted that month for embezzling more than $21 million from the bank and millions more from investors. He also faces federal wire fraud charges in New York, as well as civil suits from the Securities and Exchange Commission and jilted clients.
How we got this story
AJC reporter J. Scott Trubey first reported on Aubrey Lee Price three years ago, when Price led an investor group to save the troubled Montgomery Bank & Trust in Ailey, Ga. In summer 2012, when Price vanished, Trubey wrote a series of stories about his disappearance and the havoc left in his wake, including allegations of fraud against clients. In the course of reporting these stories, AJC reporters interviewed bankers, investors and law enforcement officials and dug through thousands of pages of court filings, personnel and property records and other documents. The trail took us from the front door of the now-closed Ailey bank 170 miles from Atlanta to the latest court hearing in Brunswick. The AJC committed a team of reporters and editors to pursue angles in a story that keeps growing. Along the way were late-night interviews with unnerved investors and the first up-close media look at the truck Price was driving when authorities came upon him. Digging for the truth continues.
On New Year’s Eve three years ago, Aubrey Lee Price was hailed as the savior of a troubled small-town bank.
Two years later, on yet another New Year’s Eve, a court declared him dead. By then, his bank had failed. He lost perhaps $25 million of his investors’ money, including, apparently, his parents’. And his disappearance the previous June set off an international manhunt and made national headlines.
This New Year’s Eve, the indicted banker was found — alive — in an unlikely traffic stop in coastal Georgia. His dinged-up truck held a propane tank, a sleeping bag and fake IDs. Days later, in another twist, authorities in Florida said Price, who was once a minister, is suspected of growing more than 200 marijuana plants.
It’s a far fall for the 47-year-old Price, and those three New Year’s eves are like chapters in a bizarre financial thriller that seems to have no end.
Still to be discovered is where he spent the last 18 months and how much of the missing millions will ever be returned to battered investors.
Rick Smith, 63, retired early from Lockheed Martin in 2007 on Price’s advice. But now the Dallas, Ga., man said he and his wife have gotten part-time jobs and sold a boat and RV to make up for losses investing with Price. They don’t know whether they’ll see their missing money again.
“It helps a whole lot just knowing where he is,” Smith said. “Maybe he’ll pay for what he did.”
But Price’s reappearance raises issues, such as what happens to the nearly $2 million in life insurance payouts meant for jilted investors after he was declared dead — at his wife’s request — by a Florida court.
Also to be sorted out: Who is the real Price? The hapless investor who got in over his head, as he portrays himself in a rambling confession letter, or the cruel manipulator who let family and friends believe he had killed himself by throwing himself off a Florida ferry?
The same man who defrauded those who trusted him and deceived clients — as described in a letter Price purportedly sent before he disappeared in June 2012 — also painstakingly indexed where he had property and assets so that his alleged victims could recoup some of their lost funds. He even suggested strategies for clients to get tax relief for monetary gains that never really existed.
“Most of what he wrote in that letter was true,” said Kenneth Murena, the lead attorney for the court-appointed receiver. The receiver’s job is to preserve as much money as possible and return it to Price’s investors.
Price’s life on the lam ended Tuesday when he was arrested after a traffic stop near Brunswick for having windows that were too dark. He eventually identified himself as one of the FBI’s Most Wanted fugitives. He told a federal probation officer he was homeless and lived as a migrant worker.
Local and federal authorities have said little about what Price had with him at the time, but an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter observed a pair of blue jeans, pliers, a notebook and a propane tank in the cab of his 2001 Dodge Ram pickup, and a sleeping bag and gas can in the bed.
Glynn County Sheriff E. Neal Jump said federal officials executed search warrants for the truck and a computer in the vehicle.
Florida sheriff’s officials on Thursday listed Price as a suspect in a marijuana grow house on rented property near the city of Ocala. There, a man believed to be Price was known as Jason, and neighbors described him as a helpful person who drank beer with them in the front yard.
Though there has been heavy speculation Price might have squirreled away millions of dollars in investor and bank cash when he first vanished in South Florida in 2012, Murena said his team’s forensic evaluation shows that the money Price mismanaged was poorly invested, not pilfered.
“I can only imagine there was hope that he did have a lot of money,” he said. “I don’t think that was the case.”
Price’s once-respected investing business ended in a yearlong frenzy of panicked stock trades. How it began and where it went wrong is more hazy.
In his confession letter, Price said the fraud he committed started small and quickly compounded. Murena said there are falsified returns dating to 2009, but he suspects the fraud began in 2008 — well before Price got involved in small-town banking.
Price, who previously worked for Banc of America Investment Services, among others, started putting money into two funds — PFG and PFGBI — eventually funneling in $50 million from investors. Some went into real estate in Florida, Georgia and South America, including corn and sugar cane farms in Venezuela. Price also made an investment in radio towers in Guatemala.
He also made a big bet on a small Georgia bank: Montgomery Bank & Trust, a more than 80-year-old institution in the tiny town of Ailey, 170 miles southeast of downtown Atlanta.
‘FOOLISH AND HASTY’
In December 2010, Price and his investors put up $10 million to buy a majority stake in the troubled bank. Locals in Ailey chipped in another $4 million. Price was hailed for his bold move. Georgia had suffered more bank failures than any other state, and Price’s bet was a rare dose of optimism.
But eight months after the initial investment, Price wrote, he “should have just called it like it was.”
The bank’s position was worse than he had anticipated, he said, with loans more deeply troubled than he had realized. Price was losing money, but instead of disclosing the problem, he falsified earnings reports as he tried to buy time to bolster the bank, according to the letter.
Instead, he made it worse. The anxiety about continued losses, he said, “made my decisions more irrational, foolish and hasty.”
“I never once had in my mind, heart or being to engross and make myself better off or to take, steal or benefit from other people’s money,” he wrote.
In all, the convoluted fraud Price is alleged to have committed involved 150 investors and about $50 million between the bank and Price’s investment companies. Investors, as a whole, got only half their money back, mainly as false profits in Price’s scheme, Murena said. Old investors were paid as new ones were added, he said. The receiver, Melanie Damian, found the other $25 million had been lost to bad investments.
Most of the losses were tied to money Price pulled out of the bank and day traded away — making constant, rapid trades before the stock market closed — to try to recoup the money he was losing, Murena said. Instead, Price lost all of it in the course of a year.
“It’s astounding,” Murena said. “He just seems like someone who was desperate.”
In his letter, Price repeatedly said that he intended to make restitution to his clients.
“I know I have lost all integrity, but if for some reason, God spared my life, I know I have a moral, spiritual and ethical obligation to return funds to clients and I would work til my death on this one thing that integrity might be restored,” he wrote. “I feel a deep sense of obligation to make things up and to make things right.”
An FBI spokesman said he could not comment on whether he expects Price’s cooperation. But Murena is betting Price will.
“His being alive should help us,” he said. “I suspect he is going to provide key testimony.”
RECOVERING FUNDS
So far, the receiver has collected nearly $3 million from the sale of property, some loan proceeds and life insurance claims. Of the total, $1.75 million came from three life insurance policies that Price had changed specifically so that payouts would be funneled primarily to his investors.
The fact that Price was declared dead, though he is not, is “somewhat of a unique circumstance,” Murena said.
There is some case law that supports the receiver not returning the life insurance money, despite Price being found alive, Murena said. Even so, the future of that money is at issue.
Two ongoing lawsuits could garner $4 million each, Murena said. One is against three former insiders of the failed bank — former CEO Trae E. Dorough, one-time chairman and well-connected lobbyist Pete Robinson and CFO Dee Ann McDaniel — whom the receiver accused of hiding the poor condition of the bank’s loan portfolio before Price and his clients invested. Another is against a homebuilder that borrowed $2.77 million from one of Price’s funds.
An attorney for the bank directors and officers declined to comment, and a representative of KM Homes couldn’t be reached.
Damian, the receiver, filed a preliminary plan to distribute $800,000 to the hardest-hit victims, but it isn’t clear if Price’s capture will affect it.
Price’s actions hurt a lot of people — including, apparently, the indicted man’s father, who Price said invested in the bank.
The younger Price wrote in the purported confession letter that his father, Jim, never had access to bank or investment accounts, had no reason to ask about them and lost his entire investment.
Still, there are some people who believe Price when he writes that he never meant harm.
“There are a lot of people who believe he didn’t intend to commit fraud, that he just got in over his head, and scrambled and panicked,” Murena said.
Then, there are those who just want to see Price brought to justice.
Smith, the Dallas retiree and one of Price’s investors, said he wants to see the adviser stand trial. Smith traveled to Venezuela with Price to do mission work and considered him a friend.
If Price had come clean to clients early on about his troubles, Smith said, “I believe we would have worked with him.”
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