Racist Former SCV Leader Gets 19 Years in $57 Million Ponzi Scheme
Imagine that, a right wing racist nut conning people out of their money - who'd of thunk it?
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http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2012/11/14/racist-former-scv-leader-gets-19-years-in-58-million-ponzi-scheme/
A man who was once seen as a genteel Southerner defending the “honor” of the Confederacy but who secretly lived lavishly on other people’s money now faces the next 19 years in a federal prison cell — possibly in solitary confinement.
The first jolt for 65-year-old Ron Wilson — former national leader of the southern heritage group Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) — may have come when he walked into a packed courtroom in Greenville, S.C., yesterday to be sentenced for the $57.4 million silver bullion Ponzi scheme he operated for more than a decade. There were so many victims who wanted to address the court that a lottery had to be held to determine who could speak, according to media accounts. Many of his 800 identified victims expect to get very little restitution, saying their lives are forever ruined by the swindle Wilson carried out.
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Wilson’s public life didn’t end there. In 2005, over the objections of the state’s superintendent of education, Wilson, then an Anderson County Council member, was elected to serve on the South Carolina Board of Education, weighing in on in the approval of textbooks and curriculum for the state’s public school students.
Meanwhile, at his Greenville-based business, Wilson told customers to give him their money so he could wisely invest in silver on their behalf — silver that he claimed was being held in a depository in Delaware. Charging documents say AB&C “did not purchase silver in sufficient quantities” to match his investors’ funds and “did not have silver holdings at a depository in Delaware.” As a further part of his rip-off, Wilson “created fraudulent account statements showing that [his] clients owned large quantities of silver when, in fact, no silver had been purchased” on their behalf.
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