[U]ntil last Thursday, the general manager of Berlin City Kia had no idea he was employing a fugitive from justice.
The employee, William McKibbin, had been a sales manager at Berlin City Kia since 2017. During his tenure, he commuted from his condominium in Stowe to the dealership in Williston every day. He appraised cars. He helped customers. He came home for dinner with his family — a wife and a 17-year-old son — every night.
His co-workers had no idea about his past, which authorities said included years of operating a fraudulent auto loan scheme coast to coast.
On Thursday, as torrential rain pounded against the dealership’s roof, general manager Dedrick Casab said he had no clue about McKibbin’s back story.
McKibbin had passed a background check with the car dealership, administered by an outside firm — Shield. He did good work and had no access to loans or finances. Casab, sitting perched on a chair inside his minimalist glass office, said that there were no signs McKibbin might be hiding something.
Casab talked easily about his daughter, who recently asked for a bike for her birthday. On McKibbin, however, his answers were more measured; he appeared more confused than angry. As of last Thursday, Casab said he hadn’t heard from McKibbin since his arrest. By Tuesday, McKibbin’s name had been removed from Berlin City Kia’s website.
Following a decision in Franklin County criminal court on Monday, McKibbin will soon return to Michigan to face 21 charges of usury, racketeering and false pretenses. Judge A. Gregory Rainville gave him 30 days to fly to Michigan, and the midwestern state is also issuing a governor’s warrant to come and collect him.
“It’s basically a race as to whether the governor’s warrant gets here first or Mr. McKibbin goes back and answers to the court,” Rainville said in his decision. “I’d rather see him do it of his own free will.”
In the meantime, McKibbin has been released. He is living at home, out on $50,000 bail, and his passport has been surrendered.
No matter how he gets to Michigan, though, McKibbin will soon be living under a legal cloud — an abrupt change from the quiet Stowe days he kept until last week.
While Michigan is the only state to file criminal charges, McKibbin’s past includes a paper trail of court cases against him dating back to at least 2012. He has repeatedly been accused of inflating loan interest rates beyond legal limits, cheating customers out of tens of millions of dollars. He and his colleagues have faced fines and cease and desist orders in several jurisdictions. Washington, for example, demanded $110,000, an amount that McKibbin never paid.
The alleged scam depended on operating outside U.S. jurisdiction. McKibbin and his partners first tried to establish their company under Native American tribal law to avoid action being taken in U.S. courts; later, they relied on offshore locations. McKibbin repeatedly told employees that the enterprise was not a U.S. company, and therefore was not subject to the U.S. legal system.
But court records reveal interest rates — applied to exclusively American clients — that ranged from a little more than 100% to 571%. Most estimated that the rates exceeded 200%. According to the Federal Reserve, the average credit card interest rate in 2018 was 16.5%.
How did McKibbin end up working a 9-to-5 job, qualifying for Medicaid, and living in Stowe?
The story is long and occasionally blurry. It detours through the Cook Islands, Panama and Florida. It contains many lawsuits and no clear end.
But it starts, according to wife Carolyn McKibbin’s court statements, in Virginia.
In sometimes emotional testimony, she insisted no wrongdoing had been done, spoke about the hardship of raising a son with medical issues and described her family as strong and cohesive.
“He’s home every night, family dinners — we’re a family,” Carolyn McKibbin told the court.
“I believe in my husband,” she added.
William McKibbin married Carolyn 15 years ago, and they began dating four years before that. The family started out in Virginia, where Carolyn performed background investigations for an electric company. She eventually decided to become a stay at home mom with their son, who has two serious liver conditions.
The earliest date associated with William McKibbin’s auto loan enterprises is July 8, 2011.
That July, the Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians (LVD) created Sovereign Lending Solutions LLC to “diversify the economy of the Tribe’s Reservation in order to improve the Tribe’s economic self-sufficiency,” according to the enterprise’s founding document. The project was headed by tribe member Craig Mansfield, who worked in partnership with McKibbin and two men named Mark Weiner and Kevin Cronin.
While Mansfield was the only partner who was part of the Lac Vieux Desert Band, the whole enterprise fell under tribal sovereignty laws — protecting it from outside lawsuits.
But as the company’s interest rates skyrocketed and its online reach spread across the country, at least two Pennsylvania citizens tried to sue the company anyway. Both lawsuits listed McKibbin, Weiner and Cronin alongside Mansfield. The cases allege that Sovereign Lending Solutions LLC inflated its interest beyond what is legal.
A flood of lawsuits
According to the lawsuits — both the ones in Pennsylvania and those from subsequent years — the fraud asked customers for 11 months of payments followed by a final “balloon payment,” which often exceeded the amount of the original loan. A North Carolina suit claimed that the first 11 installments were just paying off interest, often at usurious rates. Loaners were not informed of the terms before signing, and all business was conducted over the internet.
If customers were not able to pay the exorbitant prices, the enterprises would repossess their vehicles using a GPS tracking device attached to each car and resell them. A Michigan lawsuit claims that some of the cars were then transported to the Cayman Islands to be given as bribes.
Mansfield is one of the only people associated with the enterprise to have responded to a lawsuit. In both cases, Mansfield plead tribal immunity. He was successful in one suit but not in the other.
Both lawsuits came years after Sovereign Lending Solutions LLC closed its doors.
In September 2014, the LVD posted a consumer alert to its website announcing that the enterprise had dissolved. It said that Sovereign Lending Solutions had assigned its assets to Car Loan LLC, and directed any questions to a phone number and address in the Cook Islands. Authorities in North Carolina said the new location was fictitious.
Craig Mansfield has not been formally associated with the company since it ended its association with the Lac Vieux Desert Band. He is currently listed as a gift shop employee on the Northern Waters Casino Resort’s website.
Meanwhile, the McKibbin family moved to Florida.
Business location unclear
After the Lac Vieux years, McKibbin’s business becomes harder to pin to a specific location. The enterprise acquired more names: Auto Loans LLC, Management Solutions LLC, Liquidation LLC. It operated from addresses in the Cayman Islands, the Cook Islands, Delaware, Indiana, Nevada and Florida, shrouded by the ocean and the internet.
As customers nationwide filed complaints with their state offices, the lawsuits piled up, too. Colorado, Massachusetts, Oregon, Michigan, Washington, North Carolina and Pennsylvania all asked the enterprise to pay restitution and barred it from operating in their states.
Jay Adkisson, a lawyer who specializes in asset protection, called the Cayman and Cook islands “two of the most notorious jurisdictions” for debtors and those in search of tax breaks. The Cayman Islands invites the reputation: the website for LLC companies on the islands lauds its lack of taxation, flexible laws and anonymity. The Cook Islands are perhaps better known for ignoring U.S. lawsuits.
Adkisson said that it is normal for large corporations, such as Exxon, to have subsidiaries in offshore locations. For a smaller business owned by an individual to do the same thing, however, is less typical.
“Usually, [it] tells you that they’re doing something because they want to take advantage of the country’s laws,” Adkisson said.
He added that offshore businesses are not get-out-of-jail-free cards for those avoiding lawsuits. The laws around online companies with offshore addresses are nuanced — but in general, if a fraud or crime affects citizens of a certain state, then that state can hold the offenders accountable.
“You can’t just go set up a Cayman company and circumvent U.S. laws,” Adkisson said.
The enterprise operated out of Boca Raton and the islands for several years. The McKibbins lived in Delray, Florida; McKibbin’s only remaining partner, Mark Weiner, stayed nearby. The civil lawsuits continued to increase, but McKibbin and Weiner did not face criminal charges.
In 2016, according to the Michigan lawsuit, McKibbin ordered an employee to delete the loan files regarding customers in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Oregon — all states that were “pursuing enforcement” against the enterprise. Authorities also said that McKibbin was known to say investigating authorities could “pound sand.”
On to Panama
Then, in early 2017, the business appeared to vanish. The McKibbins moved to Panama.
There is no paper record outlining the enterprise’s downfall. Seemingly overnight, the lawsuits just stopped. In February 2017, the Better Business Bureau reported that company’s mailing address was returning letters.
In her testimony, Carolyn did not explain why the family moved to Central America. They were, she said, living off of their savings.
Adkisson noted that it is common for people in similar situations to flee the states.
“If people do leave the country, it is beneficial to them — which is also why, if people have a bunch of offshore accounts, they’re typically known to be a flight risk,” Adkisson said.
He added that Panama has had “no shortage of difficulties with money laundering.”
But because McKibbin had no convictions or outstanding warrants, there were no legal problems that barred him from moving back to the United States. McKibbin was not formally a “fugitive from justice” during his time in Panama. Despite the spate of civil lawsuits, he had a clean criminal record.
In other words, McKibbin could pass a background check — and that’s how, from a legal standpoint, the McKibbin family wound up living a quiet life in Lamoille County.
The family lived in a condominium near the top of the Mountain Road, in a complex of buildings offering ski-in and ski-out amenities and mountain views. Amid the scenery, the McKibbins kept a low profile during their Stowe years.
There are no maintained Facebook or Instagram accounts, no online photos or shoutouts from family members. An acquaintance of McKibbin’s son, who asked not to be identified because of the current legal cloud, said that the 17-year-old didn’t share much about his family, whom she described as “pretty private.”
His parents, she added, didn’t want him to have social media.
But the McKibbins weren’t recluses, either. In March, they went on a vacation to Mexico. And last weekend, they went to Montreal for a Father’s Day dinner — the trip that ended in McKibbin’s day in court.
Michigan first in pursuit
On April 25, a month and a half before McKibbin’s detainment and four years after the allegations in question, the state of Michigan became the first entity to issue a warrant for McKibbin’s arrest. Where other states pursued civil action, Michigan alone filed a criminal charge that would be visible to a border officer.
A spokesperson for the Michigan Attorney General’s Office said that he could not speak to why the investigation took several years, although he did call the proceedings “thorough.”
“Our priority was making certain that we could provide restitution to the victims,” he said.
University of Michigan law professor Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor, said there could be any number of reasons behind Michigan’s unique decision to file criminal charges, from lawyers “viewing the evidence a little more aggressively” to discrepancies in state-specific rules. The Michigan Attorney General’s Office declined to specify their reasoning beyond a desire for “restitution.”
But whatever the office’s reasoning was, its decision to press charges brought McKibbin’s small-town life crashing down overnight. He was stopped at the border at around 4 p.m. and was in court by 11 a.m. the next morning. McKibbin claimed in court that he did not know the warrant had been issued, and given that no one in Michigan had his contact information, it is likely that he didn’t.
On Monday, five days after the first part of the hearing, Judge Rainville affirmed that McKibbin would have to face his charges in Michigan. There, McKibbin will join his longtime colleague Mark Weiner, who was found in Palm Beach in May and chose to waive extradition.
If McKibbin chooses not to venture to Michigan alone, then Deputy State’s Attorney and prosecutor Ashley Harriman said that Michigan is “happy, willing and able” to come pick McKibbin up. Regardless, McKibbin will soon see his business days examined in court.
Customers awaiting closure
More than three years after the end of the loan enterprise, some of his customers are still waiting for closure, too.
The most recent complaint for the enterprise on the Better Business Bureau website dates to February 2019. It’s from a customer who got a loan five years ago and still can’t get the lien removed from the vehicle title.
The other complaints on the website, and the complaints from the years of lawsuits, tell similar stories. Vulnerable customers, desperate for fast cash, lost their cars and their money. They fought back for a while, usually via complaints to state governments — but McKibbin and his colleagues were off in the Cayman Islands, or Florida, or Panama, or Stowe.
McKibbin’s businesses allegedly loaned out tens of millions of dollars and charged far more back. Many of their customers are never going to see that money again.
“I just want my title back, I paid more than what they loaned to me. I think I am in the same boat as many others; they prayed upon us in a time of need, and that keeps on giving,” a customer wrote on the Better Business Bureau website in 2017. “Help please.”
