News

Neill restitution varies widely

The sale of a strip center on South Grove Street at Spartanburg Highway produced $700,000 for the Henderson County Community Foundation and Four Seasons Compassion for Life.

By Bill Moss, Published: November 27, 2015

Before he died in 2009, Barry E. Clemo signed his name to a will that would help take care of the people and creatures he and his wife, Tracy, cared about the most.

By now, the Clemo trust, divided equally between the Community Foundation of Henderson County and Four Seasons Compassion for Life, should have delivered about a quarter million dollars to help dying people in hospice care, poorer patients in need of health care and dogs and cats. Instead, it’s delivered nothing. The Clemo estate was one of four estates that attorney Sam Neill stripped of their value when he was duty-bound to protect the money and channel it to heirs and beneficiaries.
Sam Neill is shown at a sentencing hearing in Henderson County in 2013.Before he was sentenced to prison in April 2013, Neill made a series of promises of restitution. Not all have produced money for the estate victimized by his theft but some have.
Neill and his brother, Roy, owned the old Joy Drive-In property on South Grove Street at Spartanburg Highway. Sam Neill had offered the sale of the property as restitution for the Clemo estate. It had not sold. After the Neills divided it in half, the property sold last month for $700,000. The Clemo estate was supposed to deliver $884,000 to the two nonprofits, although with interest that amount would have grown by now.
“We’re certainly glad to get something,” Chris Comeaux, CEO of Four Seasons Compassion for Life, said Monday. “It’s with mixed feelings. It doesn’t make us whole and it doesn’t make the Community Foundation whole.”
After attorneys’ fees and a broker’s commission, the two nonprofits should get around $300,000 each. The bequest is timely, Comeaux said, because Four Seasons is launching a new fundraising foundation on Jan. 1.
“We think it’s a great way to honor what Barry Clemo originally intended,” he said. “We won’t put it specifically in an endowment. The foundation does have endowment-like qualities. We want to build the corpus and draw the interest from it.”
“We are happy to finally have gotten something out of it,” he added. “It’s still very unfortunate for not-for-profits doing the right thing to have gone through this.”

Helping animals

The Community Foundation, too, was glad to see some money from the Clemo estate. Barry Clemo had been a devoted volunteer at hospice, which helped care for his two wives in their last days. He also wanted the trust to fund services for animals, a priority for his wife, Tracy.
“It yielded about half of what Sam’s indebtedness was,” McCray Benson, president of the Community Foundation.
Once it gets the money, the Community Foundation will look at requests and needs and decide how to spend the money.
“For us it is health care and animal care,” Benson said. “Part of that was in recognition of his wife’s interest in the Humane Society and animal care. He was interested in health care and he volunteered a large amount of his time at Four Seasons and he thought health care was important in general.”
Benson said the Humane Society and spay and neuter programs are two possible beneficiaries. “There’s at least one new program coming into our town that wants to rescue wildlife,” he added.
Even though it’s glad to have the money now, the delay means the wishes of the donor really were not fulfilled as he intended.

Any other assets?

“It’s like I told the judge during the sentencing. It’s not only that the funds are not there,” Benson said. “It means all the things that could have been done during this time have gone without and those type of needs have generally gone unmet during that time period. … We would be interested in knowing if there’s other assets that would help fulfill the trust’s intent. We know there are others in the same boat.”
Among those in the same boat, some have done better than others.
The sale of Neill's house and land at Lake Summit produced money to pay a contractor who had sued Neill and partially pay an estate that Neill had stolen from.
“He made everything right with me,” said Paul Taylor, who sued for $149,059 Neill owed for renovation work at the Lake Summit house. “The bank insurance took care of part of it and he paid the rest of it. We’re all settled up. He done me good. I’m happy that everything is settled. He wanted to make sure that I got paid so everything is settled. His lawyer and my lawyer are all paid….I’m happy with the settlement.”
The sale of the home in 2014 for $1,275,000 produced a partial restitution for the heirs of the Ruth Danis estate. The Polk County estate lawyer for the trust distributed $260,000 to beneficiaries. (Most of the proceeds went to pay off a mortgage.)
Neill had pledged his interest in the old Flight restaurant property to the Irene Meinke trust and his half-ownership of undeveloped land to the Edna R. Davis trust. But the Flight property was underwater because of mortgages, and he lost that in a bankruptcy ruling. The undeveloped land has not so far produced money for the Davis trust.
Neill, 65, pleaded guilty in federal court to tax evasion charges and pleaded guilty in state court to embezzling $2.4 million from the estates. He began serving a concurrent 6- to 8-year term in prison in June 2013. He is scheduled to be released from the Federal Correctional Institution in Jesup, Ga., on Jan. 19. At that time he will be released to the custody of the N.C. Department of Correction for incarceration of the remainder of his term, court officials said.