Paradise Road

I mean, there was a pig farm that what I understood was that it was not actually being used for that purpose and it was just sort of not maintained and not worth the deed that was printed for it.

I could be very well mixing it up with the pig farm, but there was mention of some kind of property that they did want to have seized. But my recollection is once they actually peeled the layers of that onion, they decided they didn't want to deal with it.

worth the deed that was printed for it.

I live here in Industry on Paradise Road, close to the property that we'll be discussing today. And lived here for the last, bought the property in 2013. So we've had it for 13 years and lived up here for about the last 11 and a half years.

And you obviously like it out here.

I love it out here. I mean, as you… people can't see it, but as you can see from the property up here, there was almost nothing up here except for the house. So we've done a lot of upgrades to make it something special for us and built it into a small farm and we really enjoy it up here.

Yeah. How many acres are you on?

So we have 80 acres total.

80 acres. Oh my gosh. That's awesome. This is basically like a full-time job though, keeping it up.

It is. That's why my dad's here helping out for the last three weeks.

Got to like having that free labor there, right?

That's right.

You can see, they can't, but I work out here and this is a much better place to work in a pavilion outdoors looking over a field. I have cows that come down during the day. I mean, you don't get that in an office.

I mean, like you said, paradise in paradise.

That's right.

So when Stacey became your neighbor, what was that like day to day?

So let's go to just before she became my neighbor. So there's a piece of property right next to us. I can't even remember exactly anymore. Around six acres or something like that on it. And I wanted to purchase it because it had an old trailer on it and it abutted my property and I just didn't really want somebody right against my property. So the price was right. They were selling it originally I think for around $15,000 or $18,000.

Well, it so happens that Stacey got her bid in the day before mine. So they accepted her bid. So then she moved in and started seeing a lot of activity there. Stopped by and said hello to her. She was really nice.

So when I first wanted to buy it, I was just going to leave it as it was. It was really nothing. I was going to clear off the trailer on it and then eventually maybe put something on there like if my dad wanted to move out or put a rental thing down there. But it was really an old trailer and it was a pretty thin piece of property. Most of it was unusable because it was all woods and very steep. So that was my original plan was just to keep it as part of our property, not have a property on it. It would cost me a couple hundred dollars in taxes.

Stacey ended up buying it, and she brought in heavy equipment for months on end and moved so much dirt, and then ended up building up into the back and put a barn up there and had animals up there and things like that.

So she spent the better part of, I would guess, a year. I mean, I was amazed at the heavy equipment that was up there and the amount of dirt they were moving and just a lot of the things that they were improving up there that seemed really excessive for, especially around here, especially for part-time. And then she started putting buildings on it and like I said, a barn and things like that.

We were just wondering. We were like, wow, how's somebody… first of all, why would somebody spend this kind of money?

And also, a lot of us around here, as you saw on my driveway today, you know, I've got a neighbor that has helped build all this stuff. He's helping working on the driveway. You do a lot of this stuff yourself because it is extremely expensive to hire somebody with a heavy piece of equipment. You can be paying anywhere from $500 to $1,000 a day.

And to see somebody up there for three or four months, we were just amazed. We're like, "How is somebody able to afford all that?"

Did you ever have any conversations with her when she was owning the property?

Yeah, we had several conversations, but it was always about what are you putting up here? What's the purpose behind it? She said that she had a house someplace else and this was really kind of her getaway… she just continued to build up there and then would spend a lot of time up there.

You and your neighbors were all kinda sitting back wondering… you all had seen the same thing when it comes to the property and seeing the improvements and saying, "this math just isn't mathing."

Well, exactly. We're like, "Wow, this lady has a lot more money than we realized." And look, that happens… So people do that sometimes. But no, I mean, we just thought it was crazy, but we didn't think there was anything more to it and she was up there for a while.

Just because somebody's wasting money, maybe they have the money to waste it. But there was nothing that pointed to that there was any kind of illegal activity.

She was nice to everybody. You could have conversations. She was approachable. Like I said, sometimes she would sell and buy animals and ask my opinion about some of that. There was nothing that was a concern other than the fact that she was spending money like she was just loaded.

So again, there was no character flaw. None of us were like, "Oh, we can't stand this lady."

Talk about how the sale came about, like the timing, the conditions, all of that.

Yeah, again so I can't remember all of the timing because it's been a few years but it's gotta be five, five years ago or so… I mean, again, it's all on record when I purchased it.

She said she was putting it up for sale and contacted me. And again, don't hold me to this, but what I recall she said she was going to sell it for around $200,000. And I was like, "That's crazy. I mean, you paid $15,000 for it just because you put a lot of money in doesn't mean you're going to get it out of it."

So I went up and I took a look, and there were four buildings on the property. They were converted shelters, like sheds. But when I say "converted", I mean they had electricity put in them, they had insulation put in them, sheet rock, flooring, you know, fans…

And then there was one that was like a communal where there was a shower and stuff like that in it. Then they had a barn up top.

And I just said, "Look, I'd love to purchase the property, but $200,000 is just totally crazy." So she said, "That's fine. We have a lot of people interested." So I kind of backed off for a little while and then probably about a month or two later she contacted me again and kept trying to bring it down in price. And I just said, "You know what? It's just not worth it to me."

And so was that like in 2020? Was that in 2021? Like, the date range?

I wish I could look it up, but yes, it's around then because I think it was right around when COVID was going on.

And then she just became more… I don't want to use the word desperate, but she came more excited about needing to sell it. And I was like, "Well, what's the big hurry?" And all that kind of stuff…

And we just kept negotiating it down further and further. It got to the point where I would say to her, "Look, I'll do it for X amount of dollars." And she would say, "No way. I can get it for a lot more." And I'd say, "Well, look, this offer's good for the next 48 hours." And 48 hours later she'd say, "Well, okay, we can consider." I said, "No, that's not the offer anymore."

So I had no idea there was anything else going on, but I knew that she wanted to sell it and I wasn't going to pay more than I needed to for it.

I said, "Look, I offered you more money a month ago and you didn't take it because you were sure you had people to come in and buy it." I was like, "What's that? What happened with that?" "Well, it fell through and I'm trying to do some other purchases and my kids and I want to do some other things with vacations…" So she had reasons why.

And they were all plausible reasons, but I still felt like there was something behind it. But honestly, I didn't care. I was wanting to pick it up years before that… I did, for a little while, rent out the property to somebody wanted to do some animals on one part of it, and then rented out the other part for people who were looking for just month-to-month rentals.

Now the interesting thing, and I'm not trying to get myself in trouble, this is what happened, but… uh, she… when I was writing her checks for some of this stuff, she didn't want it in her name. She wanted it in [redacted] and she had a whole reason why.

So I do believe some of the checks went to her and I think some of them went to [redacted].

So that struck you as odd though, right?

Well, it did. Yeah. I was like, why is anybody giving [redacted] something like this?

So this is 100% speculation, but she obviously knew something was happening. I can only go off of what I read in the article. And from what I read in the article, the way she was caught was because somebody did an audit. I don't know who that somebody is. I don't know how often. I think banks… I would have thought it would have been caught a lot sooner, but supposedly there was an audit done that raised some flags.

I'm assuming that was when she started looking to sell and liquidate everything. And I think that as it got more and more serious, is that she got more and more desperate.

I do know she did sell all of the equipment. She even sold the barn. Somebody came and took it out in pieces. She sold a whole bunch of the stuff. Don't know to whom.

But there was a ton of equipment that had been purchased. Trailers, quads, side-by-sides. And she sold all of that before I ever bought the property.

So there was a mutual friend who called me and said, "Hey," because I had called them before and said, "Hey, is there anything I need to worry about here?" And they're like, "No. I mean, she's running a credit union. It's been in the family. She's making good money. I don't see anything there."

And then about maybe a month after, within a month of me selling it, I get a phone call from this friend saying, "Did you see the news?" I'm like, "No." And then they sent me some stuff and she was being investigated at that time. And I was like, "You've got to be kidding me"… [A]nd for the first time, I understood where all this money was coming from that she was using to fix this place up.

I took over 65 garbage bags of trash that I couldn't burn or anything, like contractor bags.

I probably found 200 to 300 gift cards. So she was obviously buying gift cards. You could ask me for a list of where… any place you list, there were gift cards in there. And they were all used because of course I'm finding some other stuff that was brand new. I'm like, maybe some of these gift cards are not used. They were all completely spent, but hundreds and hundreds of gift cards.

So I can tell you right now, there had to be anywhere from tens of thousands to much more just in gift cards that I found, because some of them had dollar amounts on them and some of them were $500, $1,000. And like I said, I found hundreds of those.

I have months where I've put $20,000 or $30,000 on my credit card. Now the difference is I pay it off every month. But there have been circumstances where if I'm going to buy a big piece of equipment, I do everything I can to use my credit cards.

We had a place that we converted into an apartment. I spent $60,000 on my credit cards so that I could get points. And guess what? I bought… I went to Giant Eagle and I bought Home Depot gift cards. So I was getting points for my credit card. I was getting free gas. And so it didn't surprise me at all that it would be done that way.

I would not be surprised if she spent well over a half a million dollars improving that property, which is why we were all, as neighbors, like, "What is this woman doing? It's never going to be worth anything like that."

When we talk about how much money was spent up there, I mean, she had a security system up there with cameras that I would not be surprised if she spent less than $40,000 or $50,000 on. Not needed; like I said, with all the equipment that was bought, she had two tractors or multiple equipment.

It was immense for what people would think for a property like that. You could almost see it up here, but not down there where you have about an acre and a half of usable land.

Okay. So I'm going to pull on this thread here for just a second.

Sure.

Why would… in your experience, again, I realize this is speculation. Why would someone have that high end of a security system for a property that's relatively small with relatively modest amounts of furnishings?

So I'll answer by, and I'm not looking… it's rhetorical, I'm not asking for an answer from you. But if you had the means to buy [a] camera system, do you buy the cheapest one or do you buy the best one you can buy? You're going to buy the best one you can buy because it's clearer. It has more features. It's recordable. So in the situation like that, everything that was purchased up there was top line. So it doesn't surprise me at all.

And again, if I had unlimited funds up here, I'd spend a whole lot more money on things and I wouldn't have a 15-year-old tractor and things like that. So again, I don't think that's an issue of what was purchased. It was just if you had the means that were "endless", then you're going to buy the best of everything.

Fully intended to hear from somebody to ask me questions about it, which I still have never to this day been approached by anybody.

So when you say you're expecting questions from somebody, who were you naturally expecting to get questions from?

So the first thing was in the article, they said the FBI was investigating it because it's a federal crime, because it's a federal credit union. And so I expected somebody to contact me and say, "Can you at least tell me what happened here? Or what was your participation?"

Findley doesn't always go with us. It's kinda fun that he's been running around, too.

So we'll probably get somewhere in the neighborhood of, I don't know, 10 to 15 gallons of honey.

Gallons?!

Yeah.

Holy crap.

But they flattened all this here, and they had a barn, and animals. They had horses, they had pigs, they had sheep, they had chickens, they had dogs, they had everything. But they had all this fenced in. You could see all the fencing, going down behind you to the left. I mean, this was not a simple, quick task. This took a very long time, and the fencing goes all the way around the property.

Everything that you see down below here, where it's all been flattened out and everything, there was a barn right there. And then they had animals sheds and stuff all over the place. You can kinda see a red building down there. Then a little bit further, a metal roof to the right, that's where she was living. That's still there, that's where the person who bought it…

Based on your perspective, because you literally have been right next door to this story… is there anything you want people to know or things I should ask about?

So I'm not sure what you should ask, but I mean, people just need to realize that things like this happen and nobody has any clue.