A ski resort, a dream and greed

No one would have recognized the man with icy eyes and a military bearing who drove through rural Vermont in 2007 with his lawyer in tow.dfsd : https://m.vlive.tv/post/1-20495721
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ook off and money flowed in abundance, until it all crumbled in the largest fraud the state had ever seen.

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In anonymity, Ariel Quiros brought his real estate attorney, Fred Burgess, on a tour of the mountainous area near the Canadian border that’s known as the Northeast Kingdom. Laced with lakes and expansive forests, the Kingdom, as locals call it, is a silent fortress of natural beauty, hardscrabble dairy farms, and people eager for a return to prosperity.

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https://m.vlive.tv/post/1-20495824

Few people would know the Floridian’s name years later, even when his plans t

Quiros had been buying property here for years. He drove, showing Burgess farmland and a parcel where he planned to build a house for himself overlooking a picturesque valley.

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Jay Peak Resort had ambient air temperatures as low as 30 degrees below zero during Christmas week.COURTESY

Quiros was an extraordinarily private person, Burgess recalls, but shared with his attorney that some of his fondest memories were of childhood summer vacations in Vermont. Quiros, semi-retired and approximately 50 years old, still knew the area well.

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The main event was a tour of Jay Peak ski resort, which was up for sale after the previous owner’s death. A buyer would get more than the land and buildings: When the deal finally closed in 2008, the resort came with $18 million in the bank, earmarked for planned expansions.

Quiros didn’t have the funds, government officials would later conclude, but found a way to buy the resort through a shell game that took investigators years to understand.

But the theft didn’t stop there. Before investigators woke up to what was going on and spent months tracking the missing money, Quiros went on a buying spree.

Twelve years later, Quiros pleaded guilty to federal charges including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, admitting one piece of what investigators say was a scheme to bilk $50 million out of a federal economic development program while convincing Vermont’s poorest region that it was all for them.

Burgess has not been in touch with Quiros for years but has watched the case unfold from Florida.

“I can’t imagine that there was this whole master scheme,” Burgess recalled in a recent interview. “I don’t know what happened.”

This report draws on more than 155,000 documents that were released by the state of Vermont upon the conclusion of civil court cases. Together with interviews, the documents create the most detailed picture to date of how Quiros built an illusion that left locals with a hole in the ground.

Quiros, Stenger partnership started with handshake deal

It was winter, and there was a power vacuum at Jay Peak. The previous owner, a Canadian, had died. The ski resort was poised for expansion, but his family and business partners weren’t up for the project. They wanted to offload the ski resort, their only American property.

Southern Florida resident Ariel Quiros had for years traveled north to enjoy his ski-in, ski-out condo at Jay Peak and had long been friends with the ski resort’s general manager, Bill Stenger.

He first offered to help find a buyer for the resort. But while Quiros grew more familiar with Jay Peak, including the resort’s $18 million in investor funds already in the bank, Quiros and Stenger decided his Korean business contacts wouldn’t be a good cultural fit.

“We scrapped that idea and we ran with it ourselves,” Stenger told the Free Press in 2013.