More On The LaPierre $6 Million Mansion: Did It Involve Felony Mail Fraud?

When the financial scandals of NRA’s leadership started to get revealed, one of the last scandals concerned a Dallas mansion, which was secretly to be bought, using members’ contributions, as a home for Wayne and Susan LaPierre. We suspect as a retirement home, since he would be living on a golf course 1,200 miles from NRA headquarters. It was quite a place, especially considering they have no children. You can take a tour here, courtesy of a realtors’ publication. The Wall Street Journal first broke the story; here’s a summary that’s not behind a paywall.

The plan had been for NRA and Ackerman McQueen to create a company named “WWB Investments.” NRA money would fund the company, which would buy the mansion. The NRA treasurer Woody Phillips, who would take the Fifth Amendment when asked about his NRA career, signed the contract. So far is known, nobody bothered to tell the board.

NRA initially denied everything, telling the Wall Street Journal, “As we have said repeatedly, neither Mr. LaPierre nor the Board ever formally considered, much less approved, an investment in the house in question or the other properties shown by Ackerman McQueen’s real estate agent.” That didn’t hold for very long. The Wall Street Journal discovered a check from NRA to the mysterious WBB Investments, dated May 25, 2018, and transferring $70,000 of members’ funds as earnest money for the purchase. Our insider friends tell us the signatures on it appear to be secretary John Frazer and treasurer Woody Phillips. The Journal also revealed that Wayne and Susan had twice toured the house, with Susan wanting renovations such as larger closets, and Wayne wanting to know about joining the exclusive golf club.

WBB Investments–what was that? Research found it was a limited liability company, a simplified corporation, incorporated in Delaware on May 17, 2018. This had been thought through carefully. You can form an LLC in Delaware without leaving any record of its creators or owners, because that state allows a hired agent to sign the papers. The only record of ownership here is that a Delaware company, the Corporation Trust Company, created it, and who hired that company is CTC’s secret. A company suddenly appears on May 17, and eight days later headquarters sends it $70,000 of NRA money.

Go a step farther. If NRA was going to buy the place, why didn’t it just do so? Why create a shell company, WBB Investments, to take NRA’s money, buy the house, and own it? Just have NRA buy it and list it as NRA property.

There’s one obvious answer: to hide the transaction from the board, the IRS, and the members. It would be carried on the corporate books and on the IRS Form 990 as an investment in “WBB Investments.” Nobody would bother to ask just what this WBB invested in or what was the return on it.

The most logical explanation of the entire transaction is that the LaPierres, Woody Phillips, and Ackerman McQueen teamed up to misappropriate $6 million in members money and hide it from the board. If anyone has a better explanation, we’d like to hear it.

I discussed this with an attorney, and he said that there is a federal felony, called mail fraud or wire fraud. It’s committed by anyone who uses the mail or wire services (including telephone and email) to assist in carrying out a “fraudulent scheme or artifice.” The fraudulent scheme doesn’t have to succeed in cheating anyone; it just has to exist, and someone use the mails or wires to help it along in some way.

If this explanation is right, then everyone who touched this transaction — Phillips, Frazer, Wayne and Susan LaPierre, plus everyone who handled the Ackerman McQueen end, is open to federal prosecution for mail or wire fraud perpetrated against the NRA and its members. Their “fraudulent scheme or artifice” was to misappropriate $6 million from the nonprofit, turn it to private profit, and hide the entire sorry affair from the board and the IRS.