On November 15, 2001, an intern with the Harris County District Attorney's office handed veteran in-house investigator John Lemerond a file on a couple of seemingly shady travel Web sites called Myowntravel and Academy Travel. Both of those sites were run, in whole or in part, by a 29-year-old two-time ex-con by the name of Brian Edgar Culwell, who was then on federal probation after being convicted in 1995 of four counts of bank fraud.
A recent
Inc.com article identifies Brian Culwell as the CEO of fast-growing Gold and Silver Buyers, Inc. Culwell has claimed to the
Houston Press that he is neither an officer nor a director of Gold and Silver Buyers.
Barry Sigman
Brian Culwell has been a burr under Houston Better Business Bureau chief Dan Parson's saddle for years. Ten years ago, Parsons had bulging files full of complaints about Culwell's travel and jewelry sales businesses. More recently, Parsons says Gold and Silver Buyers attempted to claim BBB membership without bothering to join.
Details
Related Content
More About
According to a detailed report the district attorney's office later produced in the investigation, Lemerond Googled Brian Culwell and found a listing on Classmates.com. There he discovered that Culwell was also involved in a Web site called Olajuwon.com. Lemerond clicked on over, and was directed to an eBay auction page for a site run by Culwell under the user name DreamKids.
On the DreamKids page, Lemerond saw listings for purportedly valuable diamond jewelry at insanely low prices, the proceeds of which were supposedly going toward various charities run by then-fading Houston Rockets basketball great and rising real estate magnate Hakeem Olajuwon.
According to one of Culwell's employees mentioned in the report, terminally ill children were to be spirited to sporting events in limousines through the proceeds of these sales, but that same employee would tell Lemerond that he never saw these magical evenings transpire. But that revelation would come much later in the investigation.
Meanwhile, Lemerond contacted the Houston Better Business Bureau and asked it about the travel sites and the DreamKids page. The BBB files were bulging; there were approximately 15 complaints about the three companies, a remarkably high number for businesses that had been open for as short a time as those three — especially considering that Houston BBB president Dan Parsons says each complaint his office receives represents 20 rip-off victims who don't report to his group.
Lemerond next contacted an investigator with PayPal who told him that PayPal had been hit with numerous charge-backs from people who had attempted to buy jewelry through the DreamKids eBay site. (According to Lemerond's investigation, these charge-backs had run to "many, many thousands of dollars.")
Under subpoena, eBay sent Lemerond the DreamKids sales information from August 2000 to November 27, 2001. The investigator e-mailed a questionnaire to every customer he could find. He received no fewer than 270 responses from angry customers. At the same time, other complaints were streaming in to the BBB and the Harris County District Attorney's Consumer Fraud division, about both DreamKids and the travel sites.
Out of those complaints, the alleged DreamKids scam emerged as the largest. Lemerond successfully identified 215 people who paid a total of $54,879. In almost every case, they thought they were getting valuable diamond jewelry at a 90 percent discount. People saw pictures of glittering baubles reportedly valued at $5,500 but available through DreamKids at the low, low price of $500 or less. It would later come to light that Culwell would pay his Sharpstown Mall supplier $136 for the very same one-carat diamond solitaire rings he would tout as being worth more than $5,000. Layne Wehmeyer, an Anahuac man who purchased what he had hoped would be his engagement ring through DreamKids, told the Houston Press that what he received looked like it had come from a gumball machine.
In a sense, Wehmeyer was lucky. Lemerond reported that 183 people (who paid a total of $44,373) received nothing at all. Thirty-two other people (who paid a total of $10,506) reported that they got cheap, industrial-grade diamonds that they attempted to return for a promised 85 percent refund that was never sent to any of them. Culwell didn't simply ignore these returns, however. According to the report, Culwell's employees told investigators that Culwell would have them remove the returned jewelry and send it on to other customers.
Lemerond reported that many of these people had made their purchases with their credit cards and had successfully challenged the payments. That didn't mean Culwell didn't get the money, Lemerond reported. The investigator found that Culwell had already received payment of $67,833 from such customers, and by the time his merchant credit card company came calling, that money had been whisked away to shelters unknown.
On December 4, 2001, Lemerond had a search warrant and he and five other investigators raided Culwell's FM 1960 offices. Almost two years later, on September 11, 2003, the DA's office finally charged Culwell with second-degree felony theft on and ten counts of deceptive trade practices.
All those cases would be dismissed, thanks in large part to other criminal charges both state and federal authorities brought against Culwell.
In November of 2003, Culwell's federal probation was revoked. After serving 42 months for his 1995 bank fraud conviction, Culwell was on supervised release for the next five years. Under the terms of his federal probation, Culwell was barred from making cash transactions or issuing commercial paper over $200 without the written permission of his probation officer.
United States Judge Lynn Hughes ruled Culwell had done just that by endorsing a check for cash in the amount of $1,000. Hughes didn't restrict himself to just making a ruling, either, as a transcript of that proceeding attests.
At one point Culwell tried to say that the check he wrote himself for $1,000 cash was anything other than what it was. He attempted to claim that it was for expenses, payroll, whatever. He tried to blame his CPA and QuickBooks. He said he wasn't sure what that check was for because the DA took all his records. It might have been an "advanced compensation bonus," Culwell further told the court, and then after some prodding by Hughes about why he didn't make any such note of that in the memo space, Culwell charged ahead, claiming that he paid taxes on that money and that he had stopped compensating himself in that manner on the advice of his CPA, but only after it was too late.
