The Colorado division of secrets
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For over a year, The Colorado Securities Commissioner Gerald Rome has been hiding the truth.
Enough is Enough.
Dolcefino Consulting has filed a lawsuit in Denver accusing Commissioner Rome of breaking Colorado open records laws and providing false information about his true success in protecting victims of fraud. We have been investigating the Rome record for over a year. In 2014, Rome bragged to taxpayers about how successful he was in collecting monies owed to taxpayers and victims by some of Colorado’s biggest fraudsters.
Talk is cheap. The truth is a lot uglier.
Since 2011, official records of the Colorado Securities Division show a truly dismal collection rate from fraud cases. 122 million dollars owed to the people of Colorado. A little more than 3 million dollars collected. What’s worse, our investigation has uncovered a bureaucratic nightmare, a systematic failure to properly collect from the crooks.
Rome now claims his office has never even communicated with the Colorado Collections Services – the state’s private collections agency – on any of the cases he prosecuted. Not one.
Rome doesn’t even count what the separate county collections agencies are doing. In fact, based on the few records we have seen, he doesn’t even keep up with their efforts. During review of courthouse records in early May, we asked Jefferson, Boulder, and Denver counties for the balances on several high-dollar fraud cases. We have learned the few documents Rome’s office provided are wrong, but there is one constant. Court collection officers say they aren’t receiving information from the Securities Division that could help find where the money is buried.
In Denver District Court alone, we examined the high-dollar fraud cases of Michael Marshall, Gregory Russell, Sean Michael Mueller, and Michael Mendenhall. Together those four defendants alone owe Colorado taxpayers $90 Million Dollars.
You know how much money has been collected of that ninety million dollars? Ten thousand dollars. Two cases in Boulder revealed the same pattern. Millions owed, pennies collected, in part because no one seems to be sharing information with anyone else.
“The taxpayers of Colorado deserve to know about this systematic failure to get the people the money they were promised,” says Dolcefino. “What makes this worse is that Rome refuses to provide evidence he even bothered to look for the records he now claims he doesn’t have.”
Dolcefino Consulting filed a request in February 2018 asking for documents showing any attempts the division made to communicate with the Colorado Collections Agency. It took the division five hours to respond and say they had nothing to show us, not a single e-mail. What kind of government agency-wide research can YOU get done in five hours? Exactly.
In response to a similar request last August, the division denied us public records unless Dolcefino Consulting identified who we were asking for. We believe that is a violation of the public right to know. It just doesn’t cut the legal mustard to tell a citizen “who wants to know?” You’d think Commissioner Gerald Rome, who used to be First Assistant Attorney General, would know that.
“We look forward to our day in court,” says Dolcefino. “The Colorado legislature should be asking some tough questions too. What’s the point of spending millions of dollars chasing fraudsters, bragging that you won all this money, and then never caring if a dime is collected?
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