"That's nonsense, what you just said," Judge Hughes replied. "I just feel like I want to mention it so nobody thinks that I believe that."
Hughes ordered Culwell back to prison, and gave him a fresh sentence totaling six years. (It's a little unclear when he got out; a government document lists his release date as January 22, 2009, but either he or his wife told the Houston Chronicle that he was out starting Gold and Silver Buyers four months before that.)
Barry Sigman
In 2004, attorney Sylvester Anderson filed suit against Brian Culwell and diamond-seller Uri Cohen after Culwell misused his power of attorney over an elderly lady to partially settle a debt with Cohen. Culwell would have a large judgment go against him and go to jail for that misdeed, and in 2007, the elderly lady finally got her property back.
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The State of Texas had another case against Culwell. On April 27, 2005, Culwell was sentenced to two years in state jail after he was found to have essentially stolen a Heights property and deeded it over to a diamond-seller to whom he was in debt. (Culwell was on the losing end of a civil judgment in that case as well.)
But before the DreamKids affair was all over, Culwell would drag the names of a veteran cop — Edward "Skip" Oliver, then a Harris County sheriff's deputy and now a captain in the Harris County Precinct 4 Constable's Office — and one of Houston's most sacred sports legends through the mud. Although well-known attorneys Rusty Hardin and Dick DeGuerin would make appearances on his behalf and the two men are usually media magnets, the case (and the Heights property case) attracted minimal media attention. And hundreds of people would allegedly get ripped off, many of them even after Lemerond's squad raided Culwell's FM 1960 lair.
"I guess everybody has one of those times in their lives that makes 'em cringe. That was mine," says Oliver, the cop who then helped run the Houston Rockets' security detail and who introduced Olajuwon to Culwell.
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Whether he got out of prison in 2008 or the following year, by 2009, Brian Culwell would be back in business, bigger and richer than ever. He had walked out of prison and straight into the largest and most lucrative gold rush this country has seen since California in 1849. In August of 2008, the very first Gold and Silver Buyers location opened in an H-E-B.
By the company's own reckoning, as of this writing there are 75 Gold and Silver Buyers locations across Texas, from the unofficial flagship in the Galleria to the Rio Grande Valley, Longview to San Antonio, many inside or next to H-E-B, Kroger or Randalls supermarkets. They've brought in celebrity endorsers Mickey Gilley, Spanish-language talking head Jose Luis, Anglo KTRH talking head Michael Berry, and Sunny 99 radio personality Dana Tyson.
In an interview with the Houston Chronicle in March, Culwell and his wife and business partner Amelia reported gross revenue for 2010 of approximately $16 million, and they said that they expected to nearly double that amount this year. Today this three-time felon is living in a $1 million Tomball manor that looks a lot like the Ewing family's Southfork ranch. Motor vehicle records show that he owns three BMWs, a Yukon and a 2011 Cadillac Escalade.
Earlier this year, on our Hair Balls blog, I wrote about Culwell's previous life as a burglar, fraudster, con artist and thief. As with this feature, the blog post was based on official documents, interviews with law enforcement officials and attorneys, and other sources close to the case.
Gold and Silver Buyers responded on multiple fronts to the blog post. Odd anonymous comments appeared on our blog, some very much like the five-star reviews his gold business almost unanimously receives from commenters on the Internet. And then I got a hot letter from his attorney, Chris DiFerrante, basically telling me to zip it and accusing me of collaborating with one of Culwell's competitors, someone who had bought an ad in the Press.
I denied that allegation — it was not true — and continued work on this feature. And then Gold and Silver Buyers bought a full-page ad with the Press, one that you might have perused before you read this. After my repeated efforts to speak with the Culwells were rebuffed, I was instructed to direct our questions through a local public-relations firm, to whom I sent several questions.
"Gold-buying is a business that relies on trust," I explained to the PR people. "Why should Texans trust a man who has been convicted of three felonies relating to theft, burglary and fraud; who spent all but 30 days of the 1990s under the supervision of the criminal justice system, and who got out of prison about four years ago?"
I also asked about Culwell's relationship to Skip Oliver, his reaction to being accused of misusing the logo of the Houston Better Business Bureau, and if he would comment on another case he lost in both civil and criminal court.
The company stonewalled. Company Chief Operating Officer and President Larry Gray (also Brian Culwell's father-in-law) sent the following boilerplate statement:
"Gold & Silver Buyers, Inc. is honored that our customers have made us the largest precious metals buyer in Texas, in large part due to word of mouth referrals. Gold & Silver Buyers is very proud that since opening and servicing hundreds of thousands of Texans, we have never received a customer complaint to the Better Business Bureau. In reference to the other questions, they do not pertain to Gold & Silver Buyers, Inc. or its directors."
