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Swindle in Swanton, VT

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(page 6 of 8)

Later, in a court hearing, Wolfe asked Hearn how he had squared Byors's grandiose talk of Dubai with the fact that he couldn't pay his rent. Hearn attributed the incongruity to the typical travails of cash-starved startups. "What would you do if you found a diamond mine in your backyard?" Hearn testified. "Even though you don't have a track record of running a business, you oughta do something with diamonds in your backyard."

Wolfe asked the appraiser, Fred Blais, whether he'd been troubled by the discrepancy between the $75,000 that Oliver Danforth had paid for the quarry and the $130 million at which he'd valued it. "No, we were not troubled by that," he replied. "You buy a business, it's failing. Your name is Bill Gates, you just bought IBM [sic], and 20 years later you're giving away $38 billion. Not million, billion. That's the Great American Way."

Early in 2005, Hearn and Houghton attended a meeting of frustrated investors with the Washington consultants in Burlington. It was eye-opening: For the first time, Byors's creditors were realizing how many of them there were. Houghton says they identified more than 100.

Even more alarming were the reports that came that spring from a new consultant who had spent time with Byors, trying to sort out his books: Byors basically had no books. He didn't know how much money he'd borrowed from whom, no marble was being sold, and there were few assets. The chance of the Dubai deal going through, the consultant said, was less than 1 percent.

Byors had put at least $150,000 down on a Florida estate, furnishing it with a grand piano, and another $150,000 toward buying a $695,000 house in Ogunquit, Maine. He had also renovated the house he was leasing from Hearn, installing a Jacuzzi and redoing the kitchen with marble countertops. He'd purchased four horses for his wife, who liked to ride. He'd bought a Hummer and a Mercedes.

"I didn't know better than to spend company money on personal items," Byors told the consultant, according to court papers. Byors acknowledged that other consultants had advised him that his actions resembled a Ponzi scheme; he apologized, saying that it was unintentional. He wanted to pay everyone back, make everything right.

The consultant also visited the quarry, where frustrated workers said that hardly any marble was being quarried anymore. One stonecutter, 72-year-old Winton Patnode, who had worked at the Swanton quarry in the 1940s, had quit in disgust, convinced that Byors didn't know what he was doing. Workers said Byors had told them they needed to just hang around and look busy when he'd bring a potential investor by for a tour.

Houghton had heard enough. He and some other investors went to the FBI in Burlington.

Tatiana Bechard grew ill when she heard the news. But she still couldn't believe it -- she'd be admitting that her money was gone. Byors, who was calling her two and three times a day, fumed that the consultants were trying to discredit him so that they could steal his business, and that only he could save the company.

"I was hanging in there," she says. "I'm a very loyal person. When someone counts on me, I don't like to let them down -- until they take all I have, financially and emotionally." When the FBI came to see her, Bechard questioned why Byors hadn't fled, if he were really a con artist. But the authorities did worry that Byors might flee, and they arrested him on December 20, 2005. He was freed on bail, with the condition that he not try to borrow any more money.