Why a grown man would be slinking out from behind an abandoned house on a sunny Thursday afternoon was anyone’s guess until a woman stumbled after him from the brush.
“You still have to pay me!” she hollered and straightened a bra strap. The teens at a nearby house raised their phones to film them, and she grumbled about an act that is unmentionable in polite company.
The teens pointed and laughed as the couple scrambled into a pickup and drove off.
“I told you there were prostitutes,” one of the teens said to me. She didn’t mean to scold, but that’s what it felt like. I had spent a week trying to find whoever actually owned 1045 Ashby Grove and all I turned up was a hooker and john.
Commerce interruptus, courtesy of the home’s owner, a shell company listed as Ilimite LLC.
I started looking into Ilimite after a massive document leak known as the Panama Papers, which revealed how world leaders, Russian money launderers and others create shell companies in far-flung countries to hide their assets. What’s less well known is that in the U.S., there’s often no need to go overseas to do business in secret. Opening a type of business entity known as a limited liability company, or LLC, like Ilimite can do the trick.
With the support of business and government leaders, state legislatures across the nation have passed laws that make it harder for the public to identify the people behind LLCs — and who to blame when these companies do wrong. In New York, Miami and Los Angeles, the super-wealthy use LLCs to purchase posh homes for the purpose of dodging taxes, laundering money, or breaking building codes.
Closer to home, profiteers use LLCs to buy up derelict houses and dodge penalties when they’re deemed unsafe. It costs $100, payable to the Secretary of State, to start one in Georgia. No ID required, and no need to disclose a responsible party such as a CEO or partner. In 2015, 84,000 LLCs filed registrations in this state, up from about 57,000 10 years earlier.
An office, but no company
The Roswell address was a 45-minute drive from Ashview Heights in a well-landscaped cluster of suburban office suites with pleasant views of the woods. I had no appointment, but real estate litigation attorney David J. Reed didn’t seem to mind. He told me he never owned Ilimite or visited 1045 Ashby Grove, but he did represent the company “years and years ago.”
Code enforcement citations had been arriving at his office for years, sometimes in his name, he said. At one point, he threatened to sue the city.
“It should not be possible to charge an individual for a crime committed by a company,” Reed told me. “An individual has a fundamental right not to be charged for something they did not do.”
I didn’t expect this. Most lawyers argue that their clients aren’t guilty. Reed was trying to convince me that no one was, and we were all better off for it.
“One of the great drivers of the U.S. economy is limited liability,” he said. “Why are we the most successful country in the world? Freedom, much more than other countries, and that encourages risk taking and rewards it.”
Attorney-client privilege barred him from disclosing Ilimite’s ownership, but in general, it’s hard for him to remember who owns any of the dozens of LLCs that he’s set up, he told me. Sometimes he registers them without meeting the owners, and if he’s in a pinch, he uses his office’s address as a placeholder for the company’s principal place of business.
I asked him to pass on a message to Ilimite.
“It’s not something I’d do,” he said. I thanked him for his time and left. If I was looking for someone to take responsibility for the house on Ashby Grove, I wouldn’t find him there.
Finally, a response
The address for Bristol was now an insurance office, and the man who answered the door said he’d been there for years. The home address Dick submitted in bankruptcy filings was a $500,000 house in a shaded cul-de-sac in northwest Atlanta, owned by yet another LLC.
The North Druid Hills Road office listed on the website of Dick’s lending business was actually a UPS store in a strip mall next to a Great Clips. Its “Suite 106” was a mailbox about the width of a pack of playing cards.
No one responded to any of my calls, notes or emails. Whitmore gave me a tip that someone in her volunteer group thought Dick had been in Ashview Heights to recruit real estate investors, but I could find no proof. The teens who filmed the hooker on Ashby Grove said they hadn’t seen anyone matching the man’s description.
Eleven days into my search, Dick finally picked up his phone. He didn’t want to talk about Ashby Grove.
“That was a long time ago. I had a lot a lot of houses but I don’t own it,” he told me, adding that he doesn’t know who owned Ilimite. When I replied that the $1 million loan made that hard to believe, his story began to shift.
“I had a friend say they will buy it and that’s what happened,” he said. So who was Ilimite?
“I don’t know.”
Dick also told me he was a lender, not an owner, for Ashby Grove. Then he said Bristol might have foreclosed on the loan and taken ownership of it. He added that he sold the house in 2011.
“There’s no ownership by David Dick. Bristol was a lender. And beyond that it was sold to another company that I have no affiliation with.”
Then: “I don’t recall if Bristol did own it.”
This was probably my only chance at getting answers from Dick and I was getting nowhere. I tried a new approach and told him about the hooker I found.
“That’s not good,” he said. “I would find the owner and talk to them. Because it’s not me.”
My chance was slipping away. I blurted out about Whitmore and her team of volunteers, and how she said people in Ashview Heights are humans and need compassion. I told Dick that kids live nearby and there’s a school a block away.
“I’m trying to be cooperative,” he said. He apologized, said he was busy and then got off the line.
Presentation by Kiersten Schmidt
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