George Hudgins' former girlfriend trusted him to pay off her mortgage and some of her debts, and now she claims she's on the verge of homelessness
By MATTHEW STOFF
Saturday, June 13, 2009
A couple of years ago, Wendy Silette was a successful entrepreneur in Naples, Fla. Then she fell in love with George Hudgins, and now her life is in shambles.
Unlike Hudgins, who was sentenced in March to 10 years in federal prison for running a $70 million investment fraud, Silette did not deceive anyone or commit a crime. And unlike Hudgins' investors, who will ultimately earn back about 38 cents for each dollar they lost, Silette has emerged from the ordeal with no job, no assets and no home.
Silette is one of a small class of individuals (including several former girlfriends) who were unwittingly caught up in the fraud and are now struggling to deal with the fallout from an investment blowup they were not involved with in the first place.
When she met Hudgins on MillionaireMatch, an online dating service, Silette, now 57, was charmed by his personality and their common interests. She knew only that he was involved in finance and that he was looking to retire — an appealing situation for her to ponder. As their romance proceeded, the couple considered marriage, and Hudgins offered to pay off the mortgage on her condominium, some student loans she had taken out for graduate school and some other debts.
"I thought he was just a magnificent man, and that we would make a very good couple," Silette recalled in a telephone interview from her Florida home. "He said he would like to spend his life with me."
In retrospect, taking the money — about $372,500 in total — proved to be a disastrous error. The law considers such a gift a "false conveyance," since the money was not actually Hudgins' to give away. Instead, that money belonged to the investors and became the target of an exhaustive recovery effort by Kelly Crawford, a court-appointed receiver whose job it is to track down every penny of the missing money.
In March 2008, when a federal probe started looking into Hudgins' investments, he disappeared, leaving Silette without a clue to what happened. But Silette felt more than the heartache of a jilted lover when Crawford contacted her in Florida and found her without any assets to return to the receivership except her condo. When negotiations stalled recently, Silette had spent most of her money on legal fees but still ended up with a court order requiring her to vacate her home so it could be sold off to pay back the investors.
"I never in a million years thought that a judge in Texas would take my only place to live away from me when I'm out of work and had used up my savings, without even considering my personal safety or my own rights as a human being," Silette said, her words echoing Hudgins' own comments on the surreal nature of the whole fraud.
"I never in my wildest dreams thought anybody would lose money in this investment," Hudgins told the judge at his sentencing hearing.
Silette's predicament highlights the complicated and far-reaching effects of Hudgins' scheme and its legal consequences, according to Crawford. "Unfortunately, there's long-reaching consequences to the fraud, and so she, in many respects, becomes a victim just like other people," he said.
But Crawford also detailed several offers he made in September to Silette and her attorney attempting to reach a solution, including the option to lease the condo or borrow money against the property and pay back a percentage of the money. That solution, Crawford said, would have essentially returned Silette to the position she was in before she ever met Hudgins in the first place.
Silette disagrees. On her own, she said, she would have been able to file for bankruptcy protection and keep her home. But now Silette, who volunteers as an advocate for neglected and abused children in the Flordia courts, believes the justice system has failed her.
"It's just a situation that does not seem to me to be fair," Silette said "I've been working through the court system to help people my whole life, and right now I'm going from that to being homeless myself."
While Silette's case is extreme in its magnitude, it is not unique in the Hudgins dossier. Crawford has tracked down other gifts and payments Hudgins distributed across the U.S. and Canada and has worked to get them back. A woman from the best millionaire dating sites in Idaho received $10,000; A woman in Chicago received $5,000; A woman in Toronto received a $17,500 Tiffany necklace. There have been Rolex watches and diamonds. Even the Church of Christ in Nacogdoches received $80,000. Crawford said he's reached agreements with most of those parties.
The story of Wendy Silette's misfortune is tinged with the same overtones of illusion that have come to define most of Hudgins's evaporated promises — a certain kind of vanishing act that applies even to Hudgins himself.
"I saw a very wonderful, benevolent man who was just great. That's what I saw," Silette said. "All I know is the man I thought was so wonderful had disappeared."
Silette plans to appeal her eviction if she can find the money.