The Paris News from Paris, Texas • Page 25

May 1. 1983 3C FBI says good-life devotee little bit crooked EDITOR'S NOTE: As a devotee of.the good life, Orrin Shaid Jr. shared a $400,000 East Texas lake home with his attractive blonde girlfriend and spent freely on boats, airplanes and luxury cars. He was big and flamboyant and, says the FBI, just a little crooked. By MIKE COCHRAN Associated Press Writer MELVIN, Texas (AP) Many of Meivin's 205 residents remember the tall, good-looking blonde in the sleek limo and recall the big, wavy-haired guy behind the wheel.

Some knew Lynn Carruth Maree as the absentee owner of the Ranchlander National Bank, and a few assumed the big guy was her chauffeur. They were wrong on both counts. The townspeople also remember a bank official named Jean Moon and a few even recall her boss, the bank president, Roger Pipkin Jr. But mostly they remember the men in the three-piece suits who showed up one day and closed down the Ranchlander bank. The men were federal bank examiners and the date was Nov.

19, 1982. So began another episode of Texas bank fraud and financial intrigue, one laced with scandal and suicide and a plot not unlike a prime time television soaper. From this tiny southwest Texas hamlet, the investigation spread across the state and into the phantom financial empire of a high-rolling, big-spending East Texan named Orrin Shaid Jr. FBI agents needed no introduction. A decade ago, federal prosecutors sent him to prison.

For bank embezzlement. No one knows for certain how Orrin Shaid even found Melvin, a quietly crumbling little village in sheep and goat country a mile off Texas 87 between San Angelo and San Antonio. was merely one in a series of economic.disasters that has reduced Meivin's population from a high of perhaps 1,000 to 205. "Losing the school affected us worse than losing the bank," said Wilkerson, referring to the incorporation of the town's school system by the Brady school district. At any rate, Melvin was on the ropes long before Orrin Shaid and Lynn Carruth Maree rc-lled into town in mid-1981 and bought the Ranchlander bank from Brady businessman Doyle Todd.

Presumably to avoid questions about Shaid's checkered banking career, Ms. Maree was shown to be the owner of record. At the time, investigators said, the couple was living in a luxury home on the shores of Lake Palestine south of Tyler. Unlike her boyfriend, Ms. Maree has never been charged with any wrongdoing.

Prior to her association with Shaid, she reportedly was a $600-a- month Dallas secretary. Reporters later wondered why that fact alone didn't lift regulatory eyebrows when the bank charter was approved. Investigators contend Shaid took control of the bank well before any money changed hands and that he named Roger Pipkin of Houston as president and one of Pipkin's mortgage company employes, Jean Moon, as vice president. As chief operating officer, Ms. Moon said, Shaid offered her $1,900 monthly plus expenses, a car and a home in Brady.

"I didn't know that much about banking and banking regulations, but Orrin assured me he would be available seven days a week to help me," she later said under oath. "He fulfilled that promise." In addition to her banking duties, Mrs. Moon also managed the Ranchlander Steak House, a restaurant- club conveniently housed under the same roof as the bank, a modern glass and Bypassed by the highway. native stone building, and with rail service Townspeople referred to ed, Melvin today is a'her generally as "nice "but grocery store, a feed store, a welding shop, two service stations, a post office, a flood of memories and, up on the highway, a bank manned by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. "We used to have a pretty nice town here," recalled Mrs.

Raymond Cook, whose husband runs the welding shop. "That was a long time ago when Melvin was on the map. We had an undertaker's office, a drug store, a hotel, a picture show, a Piggly Wiggly, two or three cafes and a barber shop." Leaning on a pump outside his Gulf station, Walter Wilkerson recalled the days of lumberyards and cotton gins and said: "On Saturday, you couldn't hardly find a parking place here. People would come to town from the farms." Thus, the closing of the Ranchlander National Bank, while unsettling, said they saw little of her outside the bank and even less of Ms. Maree and Shaid.

"I met Shaid at the bank," recalled Mayor Shields Norwood, "and he and Mrs. Maree and Mrs. Moon came to a community supper once." Allen McCann, who runs the general store with her husband, said Ms. Moon "came in the store a time or two didn't fool around Melvin much." She indicated Ms. Maree made more of an impression: "She'd come over here in that big car, a limo of some type, probably a Cadillac, and he (Shaid) would be driving.

We thought he was her chauffeur." Such misconceptions ended abruptly on Nov. 19, 1982, although quite a few residents suspected something was amiss before the bank failed. "Some people were saying, 'No, it can't Others would say, 'Yes, it's going recalled Mrs. Cook. On a Friday morning in November, Ross McSwain, a reporter for the San ngelo Standard-Times, got change from a Ranchland bank teller to make a telephone call.

Seconds later, at 10:10 a.m., the bank was closed. Unnown to Shaid, Jean Moon went to the FBI several days before the closure and it was her revelations and allegations that brought the examiners pouring into the bank. She would say later that Shaid instructed her in early November to destroy Ranchlander microfilm records and that she told him she had done so. Instead, she said, she went to the FBI "because I felt if I destroyed those records, there would be no evidence left. I'd be killed and everyone would think I took the money." Subequently, Mrs.

Moon, in a deal with the government, pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to make a false statement in connection with the Shaid case. Investigators, meanwhile, found her story compelling. "Through a number of fraudulent loans and false statements made to other banks, Shaid has embezzled and stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars," she told FBI special agent Larry Tongate on Nov. 17. She identified Shaid as the actual "financial owner" of the bank and explained the technique he allegedly used to finance the purchase.

She told Tongate that Shaid bought two $1,000 certificates of deposit from the Ranchlander bank and then, as she looked on, altered the face value to $10,000 each. He then used the forged documents as collateral for a $200,000 loan at the Chandler State Bank in East Texas. Although he eventually repaid that loan, Shaid had acquired controlling interest in the Ranchlander bank at a personal expense of only $2,000. 'Shaid was arrested Nov. 29, 10 days after the bank closed and only about a month away from completing his parole on the 1972 bank embezzlement conviction.

He had served five years of an eight-year sentence in federal prisons. That case stemmed from a $900,000 loss at the Chireno State Bank in Nacogdoches County, where Shaid was bank chairman. After the latest arrest, the FBI accused Shaid of defrauding Texas banks in Kilgore, Corpus Christi, Abilene and Melvin of slightly more than $900,000, in addition to the Chandler bank caper. Reportedly, the biggest loser was InterfirstBank of Abilene, formerly the Citizens National Bank, with an unpaid loan of more than $311,000. Authorities put the known Ranchlander losses at nearly $277,000.

Shaid was jailed in lieu of a $250,000 cash bond. Meanwhile, FBI agents from Dallas, Tyler, Corpus Christi and San Antonio looked deeper into Shaid's banking and non-banking activities and the extent of his association with Mrs. Moon, Roger Pipkin and others. The FBI said Pipkin had bought a bank in the tiny East Texas town of Wells and the agency wondered if Shaid might be involved there. Of special interest was an October 1982 civil suit accusing Shaid of defrauding a Brownsville television station of tens of thousands of dollars.

The suit alleged that Shaid and Mrs. Moon, do- ing business as Central Texas Factors defrauded KVEO-TV through a scheme involving the sale of uncollected advertising revenues. Also named as defen 7 danls were Brownsville attorneys Lawrence M. Ludka and Peter Dean, their wives, Susan Ludka and Paulette Dean, and the Ranchlander bank, through which Central Texas Factors was funded. The Ludkas, Dean, Pipkin, Shaid and Mrs.

Moon were once linked in attempts to purchase radio stations in San Angelo and Brownwood and television properties in Tyler, Kerrville and Laredo. The KVEO-TV suit also named Dean as a principal in Summit Financial Services among other things, reportedly operated out of the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean. Investigators recalled that Mrs. Moon spoke once of a purported meeting at the Ranchlander Steak House in which Ludka explained to Dean and Shaid how money could be moved outside the country without taxes being paid. She also quoted Shaid as saying that if ever "things got too hot" they'd flee to the Bahamas.

Four days before Christmas, the case took a chilling turn. Peter Dean was found dead in a vehicle parked on his father-in- law's ranch near New Braunfels. The Corrial County Sheriff's Department said the 35-year-old lawyer apparently killed himself with cyanide-laced cola but that a garden hose also was attached to the vehicle's muffler. In early April, Shaid went on trial in Tyler, charged before U.S. District Court Judge William Wayne Justice with bank fraud and mail fraud.

Testimony indicated that $500,000 in loans secured by Shaid had been traced to the bank accounts of Peter Dean and his Brownsville law firm. van and several other vehicles. She said he just recently traded in his yellow Rolls Royce convertible for a newer $165,000 model. As she spoke, Shaid was being represented by a court-appointed attorney. He claimed his cash assets totaled $400.

Mrs. Moon indicated her relationship with Shaid had been most cordial until she told him of a $200,000 loss the Ranchlander bank suffered because of checks she'd approved for a former oil and gas land- man named Charles Moore. "I think we can eventually prove that Shaid took well over a million dollars from several banks," assistant U.S. Attorney Chris Harrison told the San Angelo Standard-Times after the Tyler trial. "We know where the money was going overseas.

Now we have to tie all these things into place." He said the government will take at least 41 additional charges to a grand jury in May and indicated that several other persons may be indicted. In the meantime, Shaid awaits sentencing on 19 counts of mail fraud, bank fraud, giving false statements to secure bank loans and bank robbery. He faces a maximum 125 years in prison and fines totaling more than $50,000. In 1955, when it cost three cents to mail a first-class letter, it cost $14.54 and took 375 seconds for large IBM computers to complete a fixed amount of data processing. Today, the same work takes one second and costs seven cents.

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As expected, the star witness was Mrs. Moon. She told at length of Shaid's peculiar business activities and his luxurious lifestyle. She described the split level lake home he shared with Ms. Maree as "palatial" and said he owned four boats, one yacht, two airplanes, three Cadillac limousines, an Excalibur convertible, a rare Cadillac station wagon, a She denied that her approval stemmed from a "romantic attachment" to Moore but she did testify to a visit she and Moore paid on Shaid at Lake Palestine after the $200,000 loss.

"Mr. Shaid was very violent," she recalled. "He threatened to kill us. I've never seen him that mad." Moore, incidentally, has been indicted in Brady on three charges of theft over $10,000 from the bank and Mrs. Moon, who by then had been elevated to president and chief executive officer.

Pipkin, Ranchlander's original president, said he was chosen by Shaid because ''I had the credentials." Said Pipkin: "He was not listed on the application as the intended purchaser. Lynn Carruth Maree was." Pipkin admitted he knew a felony was being committed and had failed to notify authorites. signed a plea agreement with federal prosecutors acknowledging he was aware of the infraction. Newspapers. So many ways to go There are few limitations on what an advertiser can do in newspapers.

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