Then Mom decided to get involved.
My mother and her husband had already invested in one of Corey’s properties and were receiving consistent monthly payments. I began wondering how deeply they were involved. She had told me about the Florida investment but not how much it was. I called her, and my worst suspicions were confirmed: They had invested their entire life savings in these developments.
More Bad News
“The odds are,” my attorney informed me, “that you and your parents are out all your money.” He offered to call an attorney in Mason City, Iowa, where Corey operated from. This lawyer promptly informed us that Corey was a client, and the discussion would be a conflict of interest. Subsequent calls to several attorneys in the area revealed that he had retained almost every notable attorney in the city for his various projects, thereby insulating himself from suits being brought by local attorneys. Here we see one more of his strategies: Legal insulation and maneuvering chews up valuable time against the statute of limitations.
My attorney then called a tenured banker in Mason City and brought up Corey’s name. We were greeted with derisive laughter. “I hope you didn’t give him any money!” the banker said.
Next, we called a reputable commercial developer in the North Iowa area and were told, “I gave him money 20-some years ago and never saw a cent of it again. Corey never has a penny on him, if you ask him.”
I began to push harder. My accountant told me the company name I should have the lien drawn against, so I had my attorney draw up promissory notes and liens against this entity, Recovery Energy-Danville LLC (which supposedly was going to be receiving multi-million-dollar grants to build tire disposal plants in Illinois). Corey grudgingly signed the promissory note to me, legally acknowledging his debt of $964,522 as of February 2010. Months of waiting have turned into seven years. No end is in sight because I am not the only victim. The last legal search we conducted on judgments against Corey numbered 120—and the number’s growing. The suits ahead of me were brought by banks including BNY Mellon and Norwest, municipalities, builders, contractors and investors.
None of them will ever see their money again, and none of them have any more recourse than my mother and I do.
One tragic judgment I discovered in my research was filed in Dubuque County, where an excavator named Jerome Simon filed suit against Corey and won a judgment for $671,000—which, as of this writing, is still unpaid. The judgment shows in heart-wrenching detail how Simon was bankrupted as he exhausted every resource to keep the work going. He was forced to move from his home of 28 years, where he owed only $11,000 on his mortgage. When I questioned Corey about this story, he did not dispute that he owed the money to Simon and then let loose with a soliloquy of self-justification.
Corey seems to be fully immunized from the pangs of having ruined another person’s life. He is utterly comfortable vaporizing savings that took a lifetime for honest, hardworking people to accumulate. He is not a convicted criminal; he learned deft skill sets in the paper-chase and litigation stalling game. As I sought counsel to sue him, I was told the same discouraging story again and again. Paraphrased, it goes something like this: