A world apart

A world and a rock quarry away from the million-dollar-plus Brentwood estate once owned by admitted embezzler and Ponzi schemer Michael J. Park sits Martha Stinson in a single-wide trailer on a small patch of land in Bon Aqua.

Stinson, like so many others in the past year, lost everything to “financial advisors” who wanted to live the high life.

She and her husband of 41 years, Wash Walker Stinson Jr., had toiled to make ends meet and to save enough to travel a bit when he retired a few years back from Quebecor Printing in Clarksville. Every time he got a raise, they put it into retirement accounts in an effort to make sure that, when he finally put his lunch pail on the counter for the last time, they would be free of financial worries.

It never did happen that way.

Wash, who was known to family and friends as either “Junior” or “Peanut,” passed away in July 2007 from brain cancer. Doctors had told him and Martha that they expected him to live up to 18 months from when he was first diagnosed with an inoperable tumor. He made it just seven.

Now, all the money he and Martha had saved over a lifetime is gone, too. Not from stacks of medical bills or lost work, though. Their financial advisor, Michael Park, admitted in federal court on Feb. 27 that he had taken millions from clients that he was supposed to invest. Instead, he spent their money on cars, drugs, motorcycles, houses, and lavish dinners at expensive restaurants.

The painful thing for Martha Stinson was not so much that a lifetime of savings was stolen from her and her late husband, but instead by just who was involved.

Listed throughout Park’s indictment and plea is that he worked with — and executed a Ponzi scheme — a person identified by the government as “Individual A.” While the feds have yet to name that person, it isn’t a secret to those following the case. That person is likely to be revealed as Donna Jones of Dickson County.

Stinson believes that, too, which makes her loss that much harder. Jones is her daughter.

A blind date

Martha met Wash over the phone in 1966. She was 20 years old at the time and working in Nashville for the Tennessee Department of Revenue. He was working for Baird-Ward Printing Co.

She says that he called her up on the phone shortly after having left the Army and said that a friend had given him her phone number thinking they should meet.

“He got on the phone and asked, ‘Would you ever accept a date from someone you didn’t know?’ and I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I never have.’” Martha recalled. “‘I’ve got one question I need to ask you. If I accept this blind date, how are you going to treat me?’ and he said, ‘Just like I’d expect any man to treat my daughter if I had a daughter.’ ”

Apparently, Wash held up his end of the bargain. That night, he and Martha went to see The Couch at the old Crescent Drive-In on Thompson Lane. Four weeks later, they were married. Martha smiled and admitted that she knew that first night at the drive-in that she would marry him.

The match must have been a good one because a few years later Martha, who was one of 10 children, saw her sister marry Wash’s brother — which wasn’t so odd since Wash was one of 23 children.

Since her first child was born in 1967, a boy, Stinson has been a stay-at-home mom. She spent her life managing the family finances and raising two sons and daughter Donna. When Wash retired in 2006, he told Martha that she shouldn’t have to do anymore work and he would take over the finances. Martha said that she was glad to be relieved of the responsibilities, adding proudly that their credit ratings were 803 and 804 at the time.

Donna’s story

Meanwhile, Donna was raising two kids of her own and working part time at the investment firm Edward Jones and then Raymond James Financial, according to Stinson.

Park also had worked at both companies — until he was fired by the former after it was discovered that he had mismanaged client funds and had illegally made withdrawals from a client’s account.

Stinson says that when he left, Park asked her daughter, “Do you want to make some money?” to which she replied, “Yeah, I’d like to make some money.” He said, “Well, come with me. You won’t make any right off, but later on you will.”

The conversation would prove fateful as it led to the beginning of Park Capital Management Group.

“I don’t want to call it a company, I don’t want to call it a business,” said Stinson of PCMG. “It was just a scam.”

All of Park’s troubles at Edward Jones, and similar issues he had at Raymond James Financial Services, were unknown to both Wash and Martha Stinson when they turned over their finances to PCMG.

Unlike most of Park’s clients, they were not wined and dined at the Palm Restaurant, where Park had his caricature painted on the wall alongside the likes of Eddie George, Willie Nelson and any number of local celebrities. Nor did they get approached at any of the private golf courses, like the Governor’s Club, were Park was a member.

Of course, the Stinsons were not impressed with Park’s high-end Porsche that was sent to a shop in Texas to be modified to “make it go faster,” either.

Instead, it was Donna who convinced them that she and Park could make their money grow and it should be trusted with them.

In fact, they only met Park once and that was in 2006, before Wash got sick. Stinson said Park showed them a colored pie chart that explained where their money was being invested, stating “Don’t worry about this money — the next 10 years, the economy is going to be booming.” Martha said that they didn’t worry about it, based on Park’s comments and their daughter’s assurances.

“We thought he was a very intelligent and likable young man,” she said.

Red flags wave

Before Wash died, he would call his daughter every day, Martha said, and ask her how his money was doing. Her reply was always, “Oh, it is doing great.” Despite those assurances, suspicion in the family began to grow that all was not right in the world.

Donna Jones told her family that she was building an addition onto her house for her mother to live in. Wash was very ill at the time and she promised him that his wife, her mother, would live with her family when he passed away.

Construction began quickly so Wash could see that Martha would be taken care of.

‘Red flags’ were being raised, though — especially for the Stinsons' oldest son, who noted that the home addition costing $100,000 was being completely paid for by Park — at least that is what the Stinsons were told. And it was being built next to a $70,000 swimming pool also supposedly being paid for by Park.

The family asked why Park would pay for such things, but Jones gave no explanation.

It was during this time that Wash Stinson lost his battle with brain cancer. He had opted not to take the more expensive cancer treatments because he wanted to leave as much money as possible to pay for his wife’s health problems. She has diabetes, osteoporosis, diabetic neuropathy, vertigo and arthritis.

Not long after Wash was laid to rest, Martha moved into her daughter’s house. It was there she became even more troubled. She said that her oldest son was suspecting something was wrong when he learned that stocks had been bought and sold from his parents' account without consultation. But it was a conversation with her son-in-law that got her to thinking a bit more.

“We were sittin’ out there on the porch one day in the rocking chairs rocking,” Stinson said. “He begin to talk about Donna’s work, and he said, ‘Well, I hope they’re not kiting,’ and I said, ‘Kiting?’ Dumb me, I thought kiting was something you flew in the air, what kids did. He said, ‘Kiting is when you have two companies and you take one company’s money and you put it into another company that you own.’ He said, ‘That is what you call kiting.’ I don’t know if he knew that was what they were doing, but Donna said she had told Michael several times to stop putting money into PCMG Lending.”

PCMG Lending was a company on paper that was owned by Randy Wachs. Stinson says that it was really Park’s company and it was only registered in Wachs’ name because Park couldn’t get the license due to his previous troubles with Raymond James Financial and Edward Jones.

The unexpected

Stinson said she eventually decided to move back to land that was closer to her husband’s grave — land that they had worked for years. When she informed her daughter of the decision, the reaction she got was completely unexpected.

In need of approximately $82,000 out of her PCMG account because she wanted to get a trailer to move back, Stinson said her daughter was irate at the request. She slapped her hand down hard on the side of a chair and yelled at her mother, “My God, Michael has done everything to help you! And you’re going to do this?”

Stinson said that this conversation occurred about “four or five weeks” before news of the embezzlement broke.

Over the years, Stinson said that Park had paid for multiple down payments — $10,000 at a time — on vehicles for her daughter, and said that he had shirts specially tailored for her that he claimed cost $600 each, embroidered on the sleeves and collar. Anything her son-in-law wanted was purchased, too. Now, she couldn’t get the money that she had in her own account.

Before the news broke, Jones was trying to get her “Series 7” or stock broker/dealer license. Only a high school graduate, Stinson said that Park wanted her daughter to get the license so he could send her out on business trips. Park and Jones were in the process of trying to get an insurance license too.

Then everything fell apart.

It was just before the July 4 holiday weekend last year when Stinson's daughter came home unexpectedly.

“I walked out of my living quarters and down the hall,” Stinson said, “and she was standing there looking out of the sliding glass doors in the dining area part of the house. I said ‘What are you doing home? Are you sick?’ She said, ‘No, the Feds came in and closed us down.’ I said, ‘What do you mean the Feds came in and closed you down?’ She said, ‘There was some problems and they shut the office down and told us to take just our pocket books and not to come back, we didn’t have a job anymore.’ ”

“I said, ‘What about my investments?’ and she said, ‘There are no investments… You’ll be getting a letter.’”

Money is gone

Days went and Martha didn’t get a letter and it troubled her. She guesses for a few days she was ‘in shock,’ still reeling from her husband’s death, but had to talk to her daughter.

“I said ‘Donna, I want the truth and I don’t want anything but the truth. Tell me the truth. Where is my money and why haven’t I gotten a letter? You said I was going to get a letter.’ And she walked out very upset, comes back in about a minute or two later with the envelope in her hand and says, ‘Here’s your letter’ and walks out.

“I opened it and I read it and I couldn’t believe it, so I called my son. I said I needed to read him a letter and it said my account had ‘no legal value’ and he said, ‘Momma, your money is gone, you don’t have any.’

“He called me back that afternoon and said, ‘Mom, you’ve been taken in a Ponzi scheme’ and he explained to me what a Ponzi scheme was. I called my other son and told him, too, they were both very upset…very upset.”

While all this was happening, Park was caught by surprise as well. He was with friends at the Porsche Sport Driving School at Barber Motorsports Park near Birmingham, Ala. He had received a call from his office telling him that officials were there examining his papers. Sources told NashvillePost.com at the time that he all but vanished from the track and headed back to Nashville.

On Sunday, July 6, Stinson said she was looking on the Internet for information on Park. It was then she said that she found the NashvillePost.com story that detailed the early stages of the fraud. She called her daughter into the room and told her that “the news had broken on the Internet.” According to Stinson, “She acted like it was no big thing. She was getting paid with investor’s money.”

Just prior to the house of cards falling down, Stinson and her oldest son had been trying to get an appointment with Park but couldn’t. They wanted to see if the money Wash had worked for was safe, even though Jones kept saying not to worry, claiming that the money was insured.

It wasn’t, and the bad news for Stinson had only just begun.

'They took everything'

When she decided to move out of her daughter’s house, she needed to sell the home that she and Wash had built years before. Except for the frame, they had built it by hand.

Martha needed the money not only for a trailer home, but to pay for the nine different prescription drugs she has to take. It was then she discovered that Jones had put a quit claim deed on the home, getting her late husband to sign the paperwork while he was being treated for the cancer. Martha didn’t know anything about it and said that Wash wouldn’t have known what he was signing, either.

Jones, speaking through a real estate agent, refused to sell the house unless she got half the money. By this point, Jones was refusing to speak to any of her brothers or her mother — she has yet to speak to them to this day. Stinson, needing the money, relented and now survives solely on the proceeds of half a house and an IRS refund check.

Stinson says now that she and her sons believe that the only reason Jones wanted her to live with her was not to take care of her, but to keep her from asking questions about the money.

Asked about the thought that her only daughter could be headed to prison, Stinson reflected for a moment.

She said that she has been visited once by the FBI and has spoken to them on the phone on a number of occasions, adding that she knows that Jones has cut off conversations with them. When she last tried to call her daughter, she received a letter from an attorney that said if she called again, they would have her put in jail for “phone harassment.”

Then she allowed, “If it was just my money…just my money…but there are other people that are hurting, too. They don’t have a daughter involved in it and that is not their fault. These people are suffering, too, and I feel for them, too. There was a grandmother that was saving for her grandchildren’s education…I feel for her.

“I believe [my daughter] will serve time for it, and I believe she should, if she’s involved in this, which it looks like she is, she needs to be punished. You don’t do this to innocent people who believe in hard work and saving for their retirement and working to have something. You can’t just take everything away because you think you need fancy clothes, fancy cars, fancy houses to live in…

“That’s not right [that] you live high and the others suffered because of it. What they did, her and Michael Park, they took everything.”

Asked what Wash would do if he could speak to their daughter now. Stinson says he would “hug her by the neck and say that he was disappointed.”

Asked what she would do, Stinson replied, “I would hug her by the neck and say that I forgive her.”