‘American Greed’ Show to Portray Local Family’s Losses in ScamThe Rev. David Ash Found a Silver Lining in Sharing His Faith
Oct 29, 2015
Photo by: Maria Scandale
The Rev. David P. Ash Sr. of Stafford Township will tell of his and his wife’s experience as victims of an infamous Wall Street scandal that ended in the imprisonment of Sky Capital Holdings principal Ross Mandell. The story will air on the CNBC TV Show “American Greed” at 10 p.m. Nov. 6.
“American Greed” producers contacted Ash at the home he and his now-deceased wife, Meredith, shared, and then filmed his segment of the show last February.
The Ashes lost “more than $1 million” in the investment scam, which was prosecuted by the federal government. The exact amount is not disclosed.
A July 2011 Forbes magazine article that covered two of the victims’ court testimony portrayed Ash and a farmer/businessman as perhaps “unsophisticated” when they “relied on verbal promises that companies would eventually go public.”
But another Forbes article quoted the summary that Assistant U.S. Attorney Katherine Goldstein gave to the jury that convicted Mandell and Adam Harrington on counts of conspiracy, securities fraud, mail fraud and wire fraud. “… They promised investors companies were going to go public. That was lie number one. They guaranteed profits on those IPO’s, the sky’s the limit, double your money. And then there was the third lie ... the brokers lied to the investors about what they were going to do with their money.”
Mandell was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison; Harrington, to five years.
Indeed, Ash says today that one of the TV show’s achievements will be “to make everybody who’s watching aware of the fact that they better do their homework and due diligence before they give anybody large sums of money to invest that would be out of their own control.”
But there’s more to the retrospective than that for Ash, who has been a publicly devout evangelist for decades, even while he ran a highly successful construction business of upscale homes on Long Beach Island.
If he visited Mandell in prison, as he has done prison ministry locally, he’d tell Mandell he is forgiven. “I told him so right in court.”
Many viewers will see that as an unusual reaction, a different twist. In fact, the Chicago-based filming crew from Kurtis Productions asked Ash to explain.
“It’s about how the Ash family survived a terrible time in their life and what caused that to take place,” Ash said in a SandPaper interview.
“Even through it all, there was always hope against hope. The hope was our faith in God through Jesus Christ. And that’s what they wanted me to tell them, the Ash family story of how they survived losing multi-million dollars in investments.”
The “American Greed” show is giving Ash a hefty 14 minutes in the overall 45 minutes of air time on the Sky Capital Holdings story. They filmed for more than eight hours at his Village Harbour home, at Grace Calvary Church in Ship Bottom, and in Harvey Cedars, where Ash grew up, and where he saved lives in the March Storm of 1962 when the ocean met the bay.
Of Mandell’s reaction in court to Ash’s forgiving him, “there was basically silence,” he said.
Major television and print media ran with stories on the conviction of the self-described “Bad Boy” of Wall Street. At trial, prosecutors showed that Mandell had charged $162,000 on credit cards at adult entertainment clubs in London and New York from May 2001 through January 2006.
For his part, Mandell maintains that he never intended to defraud investors. His lawyers filed an unsuccessful appeal and followed that with a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court. The latter was denied on Feb. 23 of this year. Before he was imprisoned, Mandell went on YouTube and proposed a reality TV series called “Facing Time.” It has not been picked up.
The Ashes’ experience with Sky Capital Holdings started with a cold call from two representatives of Thornwater, a Sky Capital predecessor. The Thornwater deals included investment in Lanesborough Holdings LLC to fund activities at the firm for a startup called TicketPlanet.com (online travel booking). Others were for Chipcards (data storage on cards) and Lisa’s Incredible Edibles (caffeine-infused candy.)
The Ashes’ investment losses took place “over a 10-year period,” Ash said.
“It started in 1998 and went through until we went to court, 2010 or ’11, but the investment part went on eight to 10 years of being promised all these things and trying to convince us that we should give them more money to continue on because great things were going to take place,” Ash told The SandPaper.
The eventual losses were never recovered, even after a court order. But “at some point, we were able to pull some of the funds back out before it completely went down the tubes and was raided by the FBI,” Ash said.
“The FBI contacted me about a year prior to them raiding the offices of Sky Capital Holdings, and I was told by Sky Capital Holdings not to say anything because the FBI had the wrong information,” he added.
Asked whether, in hindsight, the family felt they had been too trusting of the firm, Ash answered, “We’ve always been trusting and believed in the best in people. At first glance, going up to the offices on Wall Street, it looked like a legitimate business. They were buying and selling and doing business like Wall Street businesses do.”
Sky Capital had offices in London, New York, Florida and New Jersey. Trades were conducted on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM.
Suspicion grew after the first of what would be two FBI raids, when company operators told the Ashes “that we need to come up there,” Ash recalled. “We did, and they tried to get more money out of us to keep their business going. At that point, we knew that things were awry. All I wanted to do was see more money coming back to the Ash family, which did not take place.
“And then within another six to nine months, the FBI raided it again, locked them up and closed their offices down and confiscated all the files and computer records and so forth.”
Ash terms the experience “upsetting” and “hard on all of us.” The family most recently lived in Colorado before coming back to Southern Ocean County, where he had retired from the construction business at age 42 to become a minister. He is proud to say today that he is debt-free.
“We once had the biggest piece of property on LBI, 2½ acres with a 10,000 square-foot home, a heliport, and a helicopter in the garage, but what does it all mean in the end?” he asks now.
For people to see the silver lining, he has been handing out business cards listing the time of the show, airing on cable channel 918.
It’s not about “the one with the most toys wins,” he said. “In all the funerals I’ve officiated, I’ve never seen a Brinks car behind the hearse going to the gravesite.”
His moral of the story is this: “No matter how much you lost financially, that really isn’t what life is about. You realize that your hope shouldn’t be in the things of the world. The bottom line is that I’ve found it’s more rewarding to help people and tell them about what has changed your life from years ago to what it has become over the years through Christ.”
— Maria Scandale
mariascandale@thesandpaper.net |
