Developer’s Trial to Finally Begin in Desert Land Fraud

Ten years after Marshall Redman allegedly began swindling thousands of mostly Spanish-speaking investors in Antelope Valley land deals, and two years after charges were filed, the 69-year-old developer will finally go to trial.

Redman was held to answer Wednesday on 29 charges, including seven counts of grand theft, fraud and forgery at a preliminary hearing in Los Angeles Superior Court. He will be arraigned April 15.

The trial, when it begins, will cap years of investigation into land deals that authorities say involve 2,500 buyers, many of whom lived for years in makeshift homes with no water or electricity on raw land in the High Desert sold to them by Redman.

It took several years--and 100 complaints--before investigators began looking into the case. Even after criminal charges were filed in 1996, the process bogged down in procedural motions and other delays.

During a preliminary hearing held Tuesday and Wednesday, five alleged victims testified that it was not until after they bought land from Redman that they learned that it had not been properly subdivided or sold to them, and that it was illegal to build houses there because of zoning. Two notaries public testified that they had improperly notarized title documents for Redman.

“They picked new, Spanish-speaking immigrant . . . families where both the mother and the father are working two jobs to make a life for their children,” said C.M. “Bud” Starr, a Kern County prosecutor who filed a civil suit against Redman in 1994. “They took the best of that immigrant class and took their money and traded them a handful of sand.”

To make matters worse, legal action intended to help the alleged victims wound up costing them even more money. A receivership set up from the remains of Redman’s businesses lost $500,000 after the initial trustee hired by the court misspent $1 million. That receiver, Donald Henry, was only insured for half of that amount, and he is believed to be hiding in Australia.

County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who represents the remote community of Hi Vista, where Redman sold land, decried what he called the “pathetic snail’s pace of the courts,” which he said have doubly victimized Redman’s customers.

“I’m appalled that it takes years to have these cases adjudicated,” Antonovich said. “It adds to the victims’ plight when the court receiver rips off the same victims that Redman was alleged to have been ripping off.”

In response to the recent disclosures about Henry, the receiver, Antonovich said that at next Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting he will ask for an audit of the county court’s receivership programs.

“You have a victim who goes to court to have those issues addressed, and the court steps in with a person who perpetuates an additional fraud on these victims,” Antonovich said. “When he’s finally exposed he leaves town. The courts need to have an audit in place to ensure that receivers are doing their jobs.”

Redman’s attorney, Harland Braun, charged that Henry--not his client--was responsible for the victims’ losses.

“The only injury here,” Braun said, “was perpetrated by the court.” Redman, he said, was fully prepared to pay his victims back until the court took his money away and Henry misspent it.

Braun also accused Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti of engaging in a politically motivated prosecution of Redman, whom the defense attorney said had already reached a civil settlement with Kern County and the city of Los Angeles. That case, brought in 1994, was the one that resulted in the establishment of the receivership.

However, a source close to the current receiver, Richard Weissman, called Braun’s contention “a crock.” And a prosecutor on that original case said that Redman and his attorneys had requested that the receivership be set up in the first place, saying that it would vindicate the developer.

What the case is really about, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Sullivan, is fraud.

“It displays a serious pattern of defrauding mostly minority investors,” said Sullivan, who heads the district attorney’s major fraud division.

The alleged scam, Deputy Dist. Atty. Tom Wenke told Judge Stephen Marcus on Wednesday, was to sell raw unsubdivided land to victims without telling them that it was illegal to build there. In addition, he said, buyers were typically told that they owned all of a parcel, when they were really partial owners along with other victims.

Braun argued at the hearing--as he intends to charge in the trial--that Redman relied on his civil lawyer, who said that his method of selling the land was legal.

Redman’s lawyer, Braun said, erroneously advised the developer that he could legally avoid filing the disclosure document by selling just four lots at a time from a particular parcel. Redman’s reliance on legal advice, Braun argued, proves that he did not intend to commit a crime.

Wednesday’s hearing ended early, when Braun elected not to put on a defense.

“I’m not going to waste my time,” he told the judge.