[cobcoop]

Do a little research on this guy, there is another thread talking about him as well. This guy's claim to fame is bilking low income families out of money using utility and cell phone scams. Way to go Colorado!

For its new Medical Marijuana Advisory Committee, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment selected Ken Weaver, subject of this week's "Blowing Smoke." It's the latest item on a résumé that includes going to prison for stealing a plane and making up a fake life -- but CDPHE apparently didn't know that part of his story. Weaver skipped over his past on a committee application obtained by Westword -- and listed a current job that doesn't seem to exist. Weaver did not return repeated phone messages. But in his application to the state, he noted that he's a survivor of Hodgkin's lymphoma and "has been involved with various industry segments throughout his career." According to the bio he provided, that included working for construction management companies, a telecommunications concern and "additional utility elements."
Nowhere does he note that from 2006 until 2009, he owned Freedom Power, a Texas electricity company known for racking up the highest number of consumer complaints in the state; that he amassed a fortune and raced in NASCAR; or that he made up a fantastic background for himself, including imaginary college degrees, false football exploits and bogus construction executive jobs.

https://blogs.westword.com/latestword...rijua.php#more

[mr. bojangles]

And they think we're the crooks

that's really fucked up, but I don't think he will be around to long once this BS is full blown.

[SGMeds]

His history isn't news... shit, the State really should have known... or at least it would've really easy to find out...?

This was posted by someone else somewhere else... can't remember, but googled it...



05:55 PM CDT on Monday, October 5, 2009

Second of two parts

By STEVE McGONIGLE and ED TIMMS / The Dallas Morning News

Ken Weaver had a problem with his past. A decade of scheming, stealing and prison made for many inconvenient truths. So by the time Texas licensed him to provide phone and electric service, he had constructed a heroic history.

The college dropout from Duncanville became a dual-degreed university graduate and varsity football legend. The carpenter was transformed into a corporate vice president who developed resorts in Brazil.

The fake pedigree, as well as state inattention, allowed Weaver into the lucrative deregulated utilities market. He was one of a breed of entrepreneurs who saw opportunity in selling expensive electricity to people living on the economic edge.
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For some, the consequences were painful.

Weaver's Freedom Power developed a track record of cutting power to customers in midsummer, despite a state-imposed moratorium on cutoffs during a heat emergency. It also compiled the highest rate of consumer complaints in Texas and one of the highest rates of rule violations of any electricity provider in the state.

The Public Utility Commission, which is supposed to protect consumers in the deregulated market, ultimately fined Weaver's company $21,050 for a few electrical cutoffs. But it took no other action even after The Dallas Morning News informed it of Weaver's criminal history and false statements his company made in filings to the commission.

Weaver failed to amend Freedom Power's existing operating license to add his name as owner after he bought it in 2006. And an earlier amendment to Weaver's prepaid phone license denied any company officer was a convicted felon.

Admission

After The News questioned Weaver this summer about his criminal record and other details of his past, he filed documents with the PUC stating that he had sold his interest in both companies to a trust run by his former wife.

Weaver later admitted to the newspaper that he had perpetuated an elaborate fantasy over the past 20 years to bury what he called the most embarrassing period of his life.

He apologized and said he would try to make amends. "But to be honest," he told The News, "my real instinct right now is to go hide under a rock."

The PUC had little to say about Weaver. One current and two former commissioners said they didn't know him. Staff lawyers declined to speak on the record.

If the PUC had known about Weaver's felony convictions, that would not automatically have disqualified him from obtaining a license, the agency said, although it would have been considered.

Had state regulators conducted even a cursory check into Weaver, they could have discovered a life story that raised repeated questions.

The jet-set lifestyle Weaver, 53, leads today belies his modest origins. He was raised in a blue-collar family, the middle child of a school janitor. Inspired by an uncle, Weaver began working as a carpenter while still in his teens.

He barely attended college, although his résumé includes a bachelor's degree in business from the former North Texas State University and, sometimes, a second degree in construction technology and management.

Sports claims

Weaver also has boasted a three-sport athletic career at North Texas.

He told The Toledo Blade that he played on three championship baseball teams and had a 39-inch vertical leap in basketball. He said he was summoned from third-string obscurity in 1975 to quarterback the Mean Green in its opening football game, delivering a 63-0 victory and leading the team to a 5-5 season.

The head football coach at the time, Hayden Fry, told The News that he didn't recall Weaver. A spokesman for the university's athletic department said he could find no record of Weaver participating in any varsity sport at North Texas.

After initially repeating his claim of a college degree, Weaver conceded to The News that he had enrolled in only a few college courses before dropping out.

"I have told that lie to cover up my conviction and to make myself seem more educated," Weaver said in an e-mail message.

Weaver made the same degree claim in seeking licenses for his telephone business from at least four states between 2000 and 2002, records show. Two states that sent him to prison – Texas and Georgia – licensed his phone company.

'All kind of talk'

Weaver's boyish good looks and casual demeanor are disarming.

"He seems to play the Texas drawl, to play the good ol' boy thing to the hilt," said Toledo Blade sports reporter Matt Markey, who met Weaver while he was driving in a minor league stock car circuit. Weaver is an "always smiling, always joking, backslapping kind of guy," Markey said.

Other acquaintances describe Weaver as a beguiling raconteur who can captivate a room with colorful stories, attractive female companions and large wads of cash.

Don McKinley remembers Weaver's gift for gab. The two met in November 1986 while McKinley ran a small airfield near Pearsall, southwest of San Antonio.

"He had all kind of talk," McKinley said.

Identifying himself as a Dallas cabinet shop owner, Weaver rented hangar space from McKinley to store a single-engine Cessna he had piloted to South Texas.

The plane turned out to be stolen from Love Field, and Weaver was arrested before he could fly out, according to police reports.

Maps of Mexico

In a search of the plane and Weaver's pickup, deputies found almost $10,000 in U.S. currency, another $400 in Mexican pesos and a set of scales, along with marked maps of ranch airstrips around Torreon, Mexico, and a .30-30 rifle.

Weaver told deputies he had gone to Torreon to recruit workers for his cabinet business but refused to discuss the plane, according to police reports. "You don't know, these people will kill my wife and kids," he told Frio County Chief Deputy Sheriff Clayton Schelcher.

Robert Bedell, the plane's owner, told The News that Weaver identified himself as a potential buyer named John Jackson. He said he had shown him the plane a few days before it was taken.

Bedell said law officers suspected Weaver planned to fly to Mexico to buy drugs. Weaver's wife begged him not to press charges, Bedell said, saying her husband was trying to raise money to save his foundering business.

Customs agents ultimately seized the money and Weaver's truck, records show. But Weaver was charged only with unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. Even though he was on probation for an earlier theft of a construction tractor in Dallas County, Weaver was granted bond. He posted it and vanished, leaving behind his wife and two daughters.

Stolen cars

He resurfaced in July 1987 when police in Smyrna, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, arrested him for possessing stolen cars and falsifying their identification numbers.

A former neighbor in Smyrna, Dan Strousberg, said Weaver identified himself as Steve Landers, a wealthy Texas oilman. (Landers is the name of a Weaver brother-in-law.)

Weaver lived alone and said he was going through a divorce, prompting sympathetic women to cook him dinners, Strousberg said. "He was good at conning people."

Investigators later determined that Weaver had been stealing cars from Georgia and Texas, transferring ID numbers from vehicles bought at salvage and reselling the cars. Weaver pleaded guilty to theft and fraud-related charges and was sentenced to three years in prison. He served less than a year before being returned to Texas to face prosecution in the airplane theft case.

Again admitting guilt, Weaver received two years in prison from a Dallas County judge and six years from a judge in Frio County. Because of time served, he spent just three months in prison before being paroled in August 1989.

Weaver was 33 and single. His business was dead, and he had no home. From the day he regained his freedom, he told The News, he vowed to hide his past.

New beginnings

He remarried and started a second family. He revived his construction business and began dabbling in real estate investments. Then he met a man who convinced him that there was good money in selling phone services to people of modest means.

Soon after local telephone service was deregulated, Weaver launched AccuTel in 1996. His business model was selling service on a prepaid basis.

In filings to the PUC, he listed a phony college degree and a work history that included a stint as a construction executive who oversaw the development of several resort properties in South America.

The employer he referenced was Specialty Restaurants Corp., a nationwide business founded by Dallas native David Tallichet.

John Tallichet, the founder's son and successor as company chairman, told The News that SRC never built resorts in South America. He said Weaver may have worked for SRC's construction division, but he was never an executive.

Weaver later admitted he "overstated" his work for SRC to conceal his felony record. "It's a stigma and a label that greatly limits a person from achieving success," he wrote in response to a question from The News.

The PUC approved Weaver's license application for AccuTel in three months.

After entering the phone business, Weaver's fortunes seemed to soar.

In 1999, he bought an office building on John Carpenter Freeway worth nearly $1 million. Two years later, he purchased an 11,000-square-foot home near Preston Hollow. In 2003, he bought a penthouse condo on Turtle Creek, a fleet of 19 pickups and joined the NASCAR Craftsman Truck series.

Weaver also began racing on the ARCA stock car circuit, a feeder league for aspiring NASCAR drivers. At 47, he joked of being the "old fogey."

While he never won a race, he had two second place finishes and ranked third in championship points in 2005. He was runner-up for ARCA's rookie of the year.

Weaver dropped off the circuit soon thereafter. He said it was frustration, but an ARCA spokesman said Weaver had clashed with his sponsor.

Freedom Power

In February 2006, Weaver purchased Freedom Power, which had been licensed by the PUC two years earlier. He didn't know the electricity business, he said, but still felt qualified. "We thought we understood the consumer very well, and the needs of the consumer," he said.

Weaver insisted he cared about his customers and worked personally to keep their power flowing. During a two-hour interview in late June, Weaver produced a printout of what he said were daily payments he accepted from one customer.

"It's devastating when the lights go out," he said. "It changes your life."

Although thousands of his electricity customers had failed to pay their bills, Weaver said, he chose not to pursue collection.

Customer complaints to the PUC were often the result of people in desperate financial straits trying to maintain electrical service by any means, he said.

"When we look at the nature of the complaint," Weaver said, "usually it's that we couldn't extend [payment]. We have all kinds of payment options, but some kind of payment has to be made for the service to be rendered."

His sole aim, Weaver said, was to earn enough to keep the business going. "There's nothing about this that we intended it to be a charity."

Weaver acknowledged in the June interview that he knew about the PUC's rules regarding felons operating electricity companies, but he gave no indication that he intended to sell Freedom.

Sale announced

In July and August, however, Weaver notified the PUC that he had sold his ownership in the electric and phone companies to an irrevocable trust controlled solely by Peni Barfield. He did not identify Barfield, an officer of both companies, as his former wife.

Weaver refused to provide documentation of the sale. Financial records he filed with the PUC are not publicly available.

Around the same time Weaver settled two lawsuits with a former fiancée whom he accused of failing to return a $54,000 engagement ring and thousands of dollars in personal loans.

Chivas Warren, a former cocktail waitress who lived with Weaver for six years, had threatened to expose Weaver's criminal past, according to Lisa LeMaster, a media relations consultant Weaver hired after his interview with The News.

Settlement terms were not disclosed, and the parties declined comment.

In a letter to The News in early August, Weaver said he was ashamed of his misrepresentations but added:

"You and I both know," he said, "that a convicted felon is not going to get a license, a job or for the most part a second chance."

[cobcoop]

Thanks SG, that was the article I was referring to posted on this site, I think it was in the 1284 thread somewhere...

[Rednick]

Thank God for Westword!

One time the CU-Denver paper wanted to post a artsy nude picture in the school paper and the company wouldn't print it, the same company that publishes the Oyster.

So Westword published the school paper that time.

[trichrider]

things are getting fuckin scary in the front range!

[HokuLoa]

Hey, "father" knows best right..? Given the irrational stupidity of most of our State's handling of "regulation" it shouldn't surprise too many that they are equally inept at vetting committee members.

[Greenmopho]

Yea, I posted that a while back. I've met this guy personally, and he fucked over and scammed some other growers I knew in Denver a while back...and he's the guy they pick for the Committee?

[TheReleafCenter]

We attended the meeting this morning, unlike a certain plane thief. He's being replaced by Joey Gutierrez from Pueblo.