Clarence Thomas at the wheel of his luxury R.V.
It has been established since early April that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas likes to travel in style, especially when the luxurious accommodations involve aircraft and yachts belonging to Thomas' "dear friend," Texas billionaire Harlan Crow. The New York Times (NYT) now has uncovered evidence that Thomas' taste for "the good life" goes beyond Crow to include another conservative pal who just happens to be mega-wealthy.
In this case, the Thomas saga intersects with a story we've been reporting since 2011. That's because Thomas' latest benefactor, businessman Anthony Welters, is a member of the Horatio Alger Association and has a reported net worth of about $80 million. And that ties the latest Thomas episode to an Alabama divorce case that I long have called the "worst courtroom cheat job" I've encountered (as a litigant or a reporter) in a civil matter. We will take a deeper look at that case in a moment, but first, let's examine the new investigative work of an NYT team that includes Steve Eder, Abbie VanSickle Jo Becker, and Julie Tate and is looking at multiple angles to the Thomas story -- including its connections to Alabama and the ugly secrets tied to one of the Deep South's wealthiest families
As we prepare to dive into the NYT's deeply sourced work, let's consider these questions: (1) Has Clarence Thomas acted as a berobed grifter for so long that he can't help himself when another opportunity comes along; (2) If Clarence Thomas essentially is a con man while sitting on the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), which receives by far more media scrutiny than any court in the land, how bad must lower federal judges be, considering they mostly operate in the shadows and receive relatively little media attention? Is the Clarence Thomas story a sign that our courts (both federal and state) are awash in ethically challenged fraudsters?
For now, let's turn to the story of Clarence Thomas and Anthony Welters, the man with deep pockets who just happened to help the justice obtain an uberpricey recreational vehicle (R.V.) From the NYT report:
Justice Clarence Thomas met the recreational vehicle of his dreams in Phoenix, on a November Friday in 1999.
With some time to kill before an event that night, he headed to a dealership just west of the airport. There sat a used Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon, eight years old and 40 feet long, with orange flames licking down the sides. In the words of one of his biographers, “he kicked the tires and climbed aboard,” then quickly negotiated a handshake deal. A few weeks later, Justice Thomas drove his new motor coach off the lot and into his everyman, up-by-the-bootstraps self-mythology.
There he is behind the wheel during a rare 2007 interview with 60 Minutes, talking about how the steel-clad converted bus allows him to escape the “meanness that you see in Washington.” He regularly slips into his speeches his love of driving it through the American heartland — “the part we fly over.” And in a documentary financed by conservative admirers, Justice Thomas, who was born into poverty in Georgia, waxes rhapsodic about the familiarity of spending time with the regular folks he meets along the way in R.V. parks and Walmart parking lots.
“I don’t have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States, and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States,” he told the filmmakers, adding: “There’s something normal to me about it. I come from regular stock, and I prefer being around that.”
That's where the story is just beginning. The rest of it has stayed mostly in the background -- until now:
There is an untold, and far more complex, back story to Justice Thomas’s R.V. — one that not only undercuts the mythology but also leaves unanswered a host of questions about whether the justice received, and failed to disclose, a lavish gift from a wealthy friend.
His Prevost Marathon cost $267,230, according to title history records obtained by The New York Times. And Justice Thomas, who in the ensuing years would tell friends how he had scrimped and saved to afford the motor coach, did not buy it on his own. In fact, the purchase was underwritten, at least in part, by Anthony Welters, a close friend who made his fortune in the health care industry.
He provided Justice Thomas with financing that experts said a bank would have been unlikely to extend — not only because Justice Thomas was already carrying a lot of debt, but because the Marathon brand’s high level of customization makes its used motor coaches difficult to value.
In an email to The Times, Mr. Welters wrote: “Here is what I can share. Twenty-five years ago, I loaned a friend money, as I have other friends and family. We’ve all been on one side or the other of that equation. He used it to buy a recreational vehicle, which is a passion of his.” Roughly nine years later, “the loan was satisfied,” Mr. Welters added. He subsequently sent The Times a photograph of the original title bearing his signature and a handwritten “lien release” date of Nov. 22, 2008.
But despite repeated requests over nearly two weeks, Mr. Welters did not answer further questions essential to understanding his arrangement with Justice Thomas.
He would not say how much he had lent Justice Thomas, how much the justice had repaid and whether any of the debt had been forgiven or otherwise discharged. He declined to provide The Times with a copy of a loan agreement — or even say if one existed. Nor would he share the basic terms of the loan, such as what, if any, interest rate had been charged or whether Justice Thomas had adhered to an agreed-upon repayment schedule. And when asked to elaborate on what he meant when he said the loan had been “satisfied,” he did not respond.
“‘Satisfied’ doesn’t necessarily mean someone paid the loan back,” said Michael Hamersley, a tax lawyer and expert who has testified before Congress. “‘Satisfied’ could also mean the lender formally forgave the debt, or otherwise just stopped pursuing repayment.”
Justice Thomas, for his part, did not respond to detailed questions about the loan, sent to him through the Supreme Court’s spokeswoman.
Why are Thomas and Welters being tight-lipped about the transaction? The NYT provides background:
The two men’s silence serves to obscure whether Justice Thomas had an obligation to report the arrangement under a federal ethics law that requires justices to disclose certain gifts, liabilities and other financial dealings that could pose conflicts of interest.
Vehicle loans are generally exempt from those reporting requirements, as long as they are secured by the vehicle and the loan amount doesn’t exceed its purchase price. But private loans like the one between Mr. Welters and Justice Thomas can be deemed gifts or income to the borrower under the federal tax code if they don’t hew to certain criteria: Essentially, experts said, the loan must have well-documented, commercially reasonable terms along the lines of what a bank would offer, and the borrower must adhere to those terms and pay back the principal and interest in full.
Richard W. Painter, a White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, said that when it comes to questions of disclosure, the ethics treatment of gifts and income often parallels the tax treatment. But those intricacies aside, he said, “justices just should not be accepting private loans from wealthy individuals outside their family.” If they do, he added, “you have to ask, why is a justice going to this private individual and not to a commercial lender, unless the justice is getting something he or she otherwise could not get.”
The Times’s unearthing of the loan arrangement is the latest in a series of revelations showing how wealthy benefactors have bestowed an array of benefits on Justice Thomas and his wife, Virginia Thomas: helping to pay for his great-nephew’s tuition, steering business to Mrs. Thomas’s consulting firm, buying and renovating the house where his mother lives and inviting the Thomases on trips both domestic and foreign that included travel aboard private jets and a yacht.
Justice Thomas has pointed to interpretations of the disclosure rules to defend his failure to report much of the largess he has received. He has said he was advised that the trips fell under an exemption for gifts involving “personal hospitality” from close friends, for instance, and a lawyer close to the Thomases contended in a statement that the justice did not need to disclose the tuition because it was a gift to his great-nephew, over whom he had legal custody, rather than to him.
The Thomases’ known benefactors include wealthy men like the Dallas real estate developer Harlan Crow, the conservative judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and several members of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, which honors people who succeed despite adversity. Among them: the longtime Miami Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga, who flew the justice around on his jet.
Mr. Welters, while also a Horatio Alger member, stands apart. For one thing, the two men’s friendship predates Justice Thomas’s time on the federal bench. They met around 1980, when both were members of a small, informal club of Black congressional aides to Republican lawmakers — Mr. Welters worked for Senator Jacob K. Javits of New York and Justice Thomas for Senator John C. Danforth of Missouri.
They stayed close after Mr. Thomas joined an appeals court in Washington in 1990 and Mr. Welters left government service to found AmeriChoice, a Medicaid services provider that he sold to UnitedHealthcare for $530 million in stock in 2002 and continued to lead until retiring in 2016. Mr. Welters and his wife, Beatrice, named Justice Thomas the godfather of one of their two boys, according to The Village Voice.When Justice Thomas’s 1991 Supreme Court nomination ran into trouble after a former subordinate, Anita Hill, accused him of sexual harassment, Mr. Welters stood by his friend, providing behind-the-scenes advice, according to a book on the hearings written by Mr. Danforth.
And in 1998, the year before the motor coach purchase, Justice Thomas returned the favor. That is when Mr. Welters and his wife, through their foundation, started the AnBryce scholarship program, which gives underprivileged students a full ride to New York University’s law school, along with networking opportunities and career support. Justice Thomas lent his considerable imprimatur to the program, interviewing applicants in his Supreme Court chambers, mentoring scholars and later hiring one graduate as a clerk.
By that point, the justice had become fixated on owning an R.V., and not just any R.V., but the Rolls-Royce of motor coaches: a custom Prevost Marathon, or as he once put it, a “condo on wheels.”
“It wasn’t exactly fashionable to be a Black person working for a Republican, and it was comforting to meet others in the same boat,” the justice wrote in his autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son.
They had much in common. Like Justice Thomas, Mr. Welters was raised in poverty, sharing a cramped tenement in Harlem with his parents and three brothers and, after his mother’s death when he was 8, shining shoes under an elevated subway to help make ends meet.
How did Thomas become so interested in R.V.s? Like so many elements of this story, it goes back to the Horatio Alger Association. From the NYT:
Justice Thomas was turned on to the luxury brand by Bernie Little, a fellow Horatio Alger member and the flamboyantly wealthy owner of the Miss Budweiser hydroplane racing boat. Mr. Little had owned 20 to 25 custom motor coaches over the years, Mr. Thomas told C-SPAN in 2001.
Back in those days, a basic Prevost Marathon sold for about a million dollars, and could fetch far more depending on the bells and whistles. It was a rich man’s toy, and the company marketed it that way.
“You drive through a neighborhood in South Florida and you see these $10-million homes,” Bob Phebus, Marathon’s vice president, told The South Florida Business Journal in 2006. “You condense that down, put it on wheels and that’s what we have. It’s the same guy that will have a 100-foot yacht and a private aircraft. They’re accustomed to the finer things in life.”
At the time, the Thomases’ primary source of income was the justice’s salary, then $167,900. He had yet to sell his autobiography, and property and other records show that the couple had significant debt: They had purchased their house in 1992 for $552,000 with 5 percent down, then refinanced it two years later, taking out a 15-year mortgage of $496,000. Plus, they had at least one line of credit of between $15,000 and $50,000.
So, in Justice Thomas’s telling, he began searching for a used Prevost at Mr. Little’s suggestion, one with enough miles on it to depreciate the value. “The depreciation curve — it’s very steep,” he made a point of saying in the 2001 C-SPAN interview.
All these years later, he still hasn’t told some of his closest friends how he was really able to swing the purchase.
“He told me he saved up all his money to buy it,” said Armstrong Williams, a longtime friend who worked closely with Justice Thomas in the Reagan administration.
The title history documents reviewed by The Times show that when the motor coach was sold for $267,230 to the Thomases in 1999, it had only 93,618 miles on it, relatively few for a vehicle that experts say can easily log a million miles in its lifetime. It came equipped with plush leather seating, a kitchen, a bathroom and a bedroom in the back. In addition to its orange flame motif, it had a large Pegasus painted on the back, according to Jason Mang, the step-grandson of the previous owner, Bonnie Owenby.
“It was superluxury, really bougie,” he recalled.
On Nov. 19, 1999, after spotting the motor coach on the lot of Desert West Coach in Phoenix and putting a hold on it, Justice Thomas attended a dinner at the conservative Goldwater Institute. In a speech that night, he said he had never yearned to be a federal judge. “Pure and simple, I wanted to be rich,” he said.
Wayne Mullis, the owner of the now-defunct Desert West, said in an interview that Justice Thomas never discussed obtaining traditional financing with him, and that “as far as I know, he paid for it.”
Indeed, Justice Thomas would have been hard-pressed to get a loan from a traditional lender. Banks, and even finance companies that specialize in R.V. loans, are particularly reluctant to lend money on used Prevost Marathons because the customized features are hard to value, according to three leading industry executives interviewed by The Times.
“As a rule, the majority of buyers are cash buyers — they don’t finance the Prevost, generally,” said Chad Stevens, owner of an Arizona-based dealership specializing in high-end motor coaches, whose clients include celebrities and politicians. “In 1999, you would need a very strong down payment and a strong financial portfolio to finance one. It is a luxury item.”
While the terms of Mr. Welters’s loan to Justice Thomas are unclear, rules governing loans of more than $10,000 between friends and family are not.
Loans can be reclassified as gifts or income to the borrower, either of which would have to be reported by the justice under court disclosure rules, if any portion of the debt is forgiven or discharged as uncollectable. But even if a lender does not take those steps, a loan can still be considered a reportable gift or income if it doesn’t meet certain standards.
Loan terms should be spelled out in a written agreement, with a clearly defined, regular repayment schedule, tax experts said. Lenders must charge at least the applicable federal interest rate, which was a little over 6 percent in December 1999, when the deal to buy the motor coach closed. And if a borrower is in arrears, lenders must make a good-faith effort to collect, even to the point of going to court.
“Absent that, it’s more of a gift,” said Rich Lahijani, tax director of Edelman Financial Engines, an independent wealth planning and investment advisory firm.
The title history records held by the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles do not contain detailed information about the loan itself. What they show is that when the Thomases drove their motor coach back home to Virginia, they registered it in Prince William County, which does not charge personal property tax on R.V.s stored there, unlike Fairfax County, where they live.
As of late last month, when The Times reviewed the records, they still listed Mr. Welters as the lien holder, notwithstanding the signed release he said he gave Justice Thomas in 2008 so he could obtain a new, clear title.
As details about Justice and Mrs. Thomas’s subsidized trips to vacation homes and resorts have become public in recent months, his professed preference for traveling by motor coach has become something of a “yeah, right” punchline.But by all accounts, he loves the anonymity, the freedom and the community it affords. He has hosted at least one event at the Supreme Court for a Marathon owners’ club.
What about that divorce case that connects Clarence Thomas to Alabama's dysfunctional court system? We have reported on the Horatio Alger Association because not only are Thomas and Welters members of the exclusive society, so are members of the Rollins family, who reportedly are the second largest landowners in the Southeast, behind Ted Turner -- with bases in Georgia and Delaware and wide-ranging business interests that include Orkin Pest Control, Rollins Inc. Dover Downs, Rollins Jamaica Resorts, Rollins Ranches LLC, and more.When Thomas hits the road, he often goes unrecognized, which at times has allowed him to travel without a U.S. Marshals’ security detail. Chris Weaver, who worked at Desert West Coach, said the justice had frequently gotten his motor coach serviced there before it closed. “Nine out of 10 times, he was just wearing sweats and a T-shirt,” he said.
Traveling largely through red-state America has also meant that when he is recognized, more often than not it is by fans. Juan Williams, a Fox News commentator who has known Justice Thomas since the Reagan administration, said the motor coach was both the fulfillment of a boyish fantasy and a metaphorical “womb.”
“He talked about the R.V. a lot,” he said. “It was a warm, safe place where he didn’t have to be attacked by liberals and Blacks on the left. What he liked about it was not being pilloried.”
Over time, Justice Thomas made the motor coach his own. In a photo The Times obtained that appears to date back to the early 2000s, picturing his great-nephew as a child, the motor coach no longer sported the sizzling orange flames and Pegasus logo. Instead, it was painted in an elegant black-and-gold geometric pattern.
But if the custom coach changed, the justice’s friendship with Mr. Welters endured.
While Mr. Welters was an executive at UnitedHealthcare, Justice Thomas twice recused himself from cases involving the company, in 2003 and 2005. As is the general custom of the court, he did not explain why.
In 2010, Justice Thomas traveled to the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, Port of Spain, at the invitation of the Welterses. By then, the couple had become major Democratic fund-raisers and President Obama had named Ms. Welters ambassador to the island nation. Local newspapers captured the justice and Mr. Welters talking to students at a school.
We have written almost three dozen posts about the Rollins family because they were at the heart of what I have called "the worst courtroom cheat job I've encountered in a civil matter." The case involved an Alabama woman named Sherry Carroll Rollins, who married the late Ted Rollins and filed for divorce in Greenville, S.C., where the couple and their two daughters lived when Ted Rollins failed to make court-ordered mortgage and insurance payments on the marital residence. Sherry Rollins and the girls fled to the Birmingham area (where she had family) to avoid homelessness -- only to discover Ted Rollins somehow got the divorce case moved to Shelby County Circuit Court. Can such a switcheroo lawfully happen? Nope, but Shelby County Judge Al Crowson apparently was not one to take the law too seriously, as we reported in March 2017:
The grossness of the Rollins v. Rollins divorce case does not end there. Ted Rollins proved to be a monstrous deadbeat dad, as we reported in December 2011:How horrible a judge was Al Crowson? Learning the details of just one case -- the Rollins v. Rollins divorce -- will tell you all you need to know. Here are some of the basics from the Rollins case:
Ted Rollins, the head of Charlotte-based Campus Crest Communities, helped his company complete a $380-million IPO late last year. And a South Carolina divorce-court judge found that Rollins belongs to one of the nation's wealthiest families and has the use of multiple private aircraft. But Rollins managed to get the divorce case unlawfully moved to Alabama, and the resulting judgment means that his ex wife and two daughters qualify for food stamps.
Sherry Carroll Rollins said she and the girls now are on food stamps--and have been for some time. That's because Alabama Circuit Judge D. Al Crowson ordered Ted Rollins to pay only $500 in alimony and $815 in child support--a monthly total of $1,315. Our research indicates that is a shockingly low level of support for a man of Rollins' means, a CEO whose family owns Orkin Pest Control and other highly profitable enterprises.Yes, Al Crowson caused a woman and her two young daughters -- who were connected to one of the nation's wealthiest families -- to wind up on food stamps. What a prince of a guy! What a responsible use of public resources. . . .
The case was heard in Shelby County, Alabama, and Mr. Rollins received an extraordinarily favorable judgment, even though Mrs. Rollins had sued him for divorce some three years earlier in Greenville, South Carolina--where the couple had lived and where numerous court orders already had been entered. Simple jurisdictional law--call it Law School 101--shows that such a judicial heist cannot be done. But Alabama Circuit Judge D. Al Crowson did it anyway, violating all sorts of law that perhaps is best explained in a case styled Wesson v. Wesson, 628 So. 2d 953 (Ala., 1993). Here is the key finding:Yes, the case had been litigated for three years in South Carolina, jurisdiction had been established there, and it could not be moved elsewhere -- in South Carolina and certainly not to Alabama. But Al Crowson essentially stole the case and robbed Sherry Rollins of marital assets that lawfully were hers.
"Once jurisdiction has attached in one court, that court has the exclusive right to continue its exercise of power until the completion of the case, and is only subject to appellate authority."
Legal doctrine doesn't come much shorter or simpler than that. Based on the clear language in Wesson, Sherry Carroll Rollins and the two daughters she had with Ted Rollins (now teens and living with their mother in Alabama) received a "shaft job" that would make Isaac Hayes blush.
Documents from the Rollins' divorce case show that he stiffed his own children on support payments over a 33-month period from 2002 to 2005. . . .
Judges in the divorce action found that Ted Rollins owns multiple private jet craft and belongs to one of America's wealthiest families--the folks behind Rollins Inc., the parent company for Orkin Pest Control and other profitable businesses.
Why would a man of such means be a deadbeat dad? Why have support payments that were due more than six years ago still not been paid? We will put those questions, and others, to Ted Rollins in writing--although he has a tendency to not respond to our e-mails.
How ugly did Ted Rollins' actions get? As we reported in April 2012, they included the brutal beating of his stepson, Zac Parrish, who now manages a building company in the Birmingham area.
Ted Rollins was convicted of assault in the Zac Parrish beating, as we reported in May 2012. But he still received highly favorable treatment in Alabama courts. Rollins family money apparently speaks with serious volume in Shelby County.
Is it possible Clarence Thomas' influence also spoke loudly in the Rollins v. Rollins case and related matters?
As we reported in March 2018, Thomas is assigned to oversee the Eleventh Circuit (covering Alabama, Georgia, and Florida). We also noted Thomas' close ties to the late John Rollins (Ted's father) and Michele Rollins (Ted's stepmother):
Michele Rollins, John Rollins' widow, ran as a Republican in 2010 for a Delaware Congressional seat, narrowly losing to Glen Urquhart. Before becoming a corporate attorney and marrying John Rollins, Michele Rollins worked for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Justice Department, Environmental Protection Agency, and Department of Interior.
During her time in D.C., Michele Rollins got to know Clarence Thomas--and the Supreme Court justice served as master of ceremonies at John Rollins' 80th birthday party and roast at the Dupont Circle Hotel. In his opening remarks, Thomas talked extensively about his friendship with Michele and John Rollins.
After I was beaten by Alabama Sheriff's deputies inside my own home and unlawfully incarcerated for five months -- from October 2013 to March 2014 -- my wife, Carol, and I filed a federal lawsuit alleging violations of the First Amendment and other civil rights. The case originated with a defamation complaint from a lobbyist and Rob Riley, the son of former Gov. Bob Riley and a rumored candidate for Congress at the time. The plaintiffs sued Carol, even though she had nothing to do with my blog at the time of filing, and they sought her arrest, along with mine.
Defendants in our subsequent lawsuit included Michele Rollins, Ted Rollins, Zac Parrish, and other family members. Given that, and the Rollinses' close ties to Clarence Thomas, it was no surprise when the trial court in the Northern District of Alabama repeatedly violated black-letter law to rule against us. And given that the 11th Circuit comes under Thomas' direct purview, it was no surprise when much the same result came on appeal.
Longtime readers probably remember that I was the only journalist in the western hemisphere to be incarcerated in 2013, putting Alabama in the company of rogue states like Iran, Russia, Egypt, China, and Uganda. That I would be jailed for practicing journalism -- and essentially be the victim of a state-sanctioned kidnapping -- made the case so unusual and wildly unlawful that it received national and international news coverage, in The New York Times, Russia, and the Middle East. As part of the coverage, Rob Riley did prove in an interview with Sara Rafsky that he has a tortured relationship with the truth.
For the record, the series of posts that prompted the Rob Riley lawsuit against me never were found to be false or defamatory by a jury, as required by First Amendment law, and the plaintiffs did not even seek to have the case heard by a jury. (Also, I've never been found liable by a jury in any case of alleged defamation.) Instead, the plaintiffs sought remedies that have been unlawful prior restraints under more than 200 years of First Amendment law. It's almost as if someone knew Clarence Thomas was going to provide cover in a matter that eventually would involve members of the Rollins family, "so why bother with a jury?" Could that really happen in America's "justice system"?
The more we learn about Clarence Thomas and his utter lack of ethics, the more I'm convinced the answer to that question is "yes."