Three of the four central characters in the international investment scam that sent Joyce Judy, former president of a Little Rock credit union, to federal prison are now convicted felons.
Charles L. “Chuck” Walker, a resident of North Carolina at last report, pleaded guilty last month to one charge, wire fraud conspiracy, leveled against him in June 2014 by a federal grand jury in South Carolina.
He and two co-conspirators were originally charged with five counts of using a company, Global Holdings Groups LLC, to lure “wealthy individuals” into “a high-yield, unregulated, transnational investment opportunity” that was really a personal enrichment scheme that lasted from September 2006 to July 2009.
It wasn’t the same scheme that ensnared Judy, then president of the Arkansas Employees Federal Credit Union. That scam didn’t start until a few months later, when Walker persuaded her and a retired Nascar driver that his “very honorable” friend in London, Emlyn Mousley, had an investment opportunity that would create the millions they needed in order to buy the Iowa Speedway.
As you may recall, Judy scraped together $1 million, half of it borrowed and half stolen from a credit union customer who believed it was being placed in a super-safe CD. That money was wired to Mousley, never to be seen again. Judy, after pleading guilty to bank fraud, spent most of 2012 and 2013 in federal prison.
Mousley entered a negotiated plea to one count of wire fraud early this year, also in South Carolina. His conviction was not related to Judy’s million bucks, but he admitted attempting to “induce potential investors … to invest funds in bogus investment programs.”
Mousley was sentenced to three years of probation and allowed to return to the U.K. Walker may wish for such luck when he is sentenced.
His Global Holdings Group co-defendants pleaded guilty months ago. One was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison, while the other got a year of probation.
Both have been ordered to pay $3.3 million in restitution to the victims of their scam.
The only player in Joyce Judy’s investment adventure who hasn’t been convicted of a crime is Bob Schacht of Mooresville, North Carolina, the former racecar driver who wanted to own his own track.
“He was a patsy if you think of a patsy as someone who doesn’t know what’s being done to them,” Schacht’s lawyer, Bill Morgan of Hickory, North Carolina, told Arkansas Business earlier this year.