Federal investigators trying to squeeze the corruption out of Las Vegas Homeowners Associations are just dying (or at least their clients are). How can you run an investigation when your chief witnesses keep ending up drowning in bathtubs, hanging from barn rafters.
Suddenly, swindlers who agreed to rat out fellow conspirators are getting nervous. They’re telling their own attorneys to walk back previous confessions.
But a wilder thing happens when civil lawyers try to bully their way into the feds’ investigation. They start filing civil lawsuits against the chief witnesses in the federal investigation. Those witnesses realize for the first time they’ll be tied up in the courts for years. Offers from the feds to “protect” their witnesses start ringing hollow. And witnesses start acting like rats on the Titanic.
So much corruption. And any ability for the feds to prosecute Organized Crime in the HOA system, begins to fade. It just fades away.
All that work, and entire investigations can just turn to…dust.
It could be the first of many; but the first actual indictment for corruption in the Las Vegas Homeowners Association investigation was handed down Friday, December 9th.
Dax Lee Louderman, a former employee of a construction company, was charged with stealing more than a half million dollars in a construction defect case. Louderman was charged with 13 counts of theft from the Stone Canyon HOA.
Louderman was charged in state court rather than in federal. But it appears to be a spinoff from the massive federal investigation of fraud and corruption in more than a dozen Las Vegas Homeowners Associations. In recent weeks, ten targets of the federal investigation have pleaded guilty to theft and corruption, and the stacking of HOA boards with officers who would direct construction and legal expenses to certain lawyers and construction companies. Presumably, those ten suspects will now testify against other targets in the case.
