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Considering the scale of the second Noe generation's West Coast operation, it's possible that a Great American Trust brochure boasting that the company controlled 40,000 trusts may have contained a shade of truth. And if the letter introduced at trial linking AAIP and Great American Trust is correct, it's possible that as some elderly customers die, their assets will slip under the spell of a shell company controlled by convicted swindlers, a company whose major notable activity appears to have been complex financial fraud.
The arrangement's so elegant, it seems almost magical.
Louis St. Laurent is a man who's proud of his French Canadian heritage; he's part owner of a Florida French-language newspaper, and he has a Web site detailing his family lineage. A former Florida state prosecutor, he's now in private practice in Coral Gables, specializing in mobile-home law; he's made the papers several times in recent years, advocating on behalf of people who reside in this form of inexpensive housing. St. Laurent has also served as a nearly permanent bugaboo for the Noe brothers and their schemes.
Thirty years ago, as a Florida prosecutor, St. Laurent put Paul Noe away on charges related to the banking and securities fraud schemes profiled in Super Swindlers.
In 1963, the Noe brothers bought a Texas bank with $1.6 million they'd borrowed against shares in worthless companies with fictitious balance sheets. The Noes then looted the bank. The brothers each received five-year suspended sentences for that crime, and were placed on three years' probation.
In 1970, the brothers attempted to buy control of the London merchant bank E.H. Marley & Partners Ltd., this time using bogus certificates of deposit as collateral. The Bank of England ultimately blocked that transaction after having difficulty verifying the strength of the Noes' companies in Belize -- but not before Clifford Noe had printed millions of dollars of phony E.H. Marley certificates of deposit and opened bogus branch offices of the Marley firm all over the United States.
The illicit certificates were then used by the Noes and their associates to attempt to defraud a mining firm in Ontario, to take over and loot an Alaskan insurance company, and to establish a bogus Florida loan brokerage office, through which they stole hundreds of thousands of dollars in advance fees, among myriad other schemes.
Not long after the Noes printed the bogus British CDs, Paul Noe Sr. went to Fort Myers, Fla., to effect a similar scam: He would print $50 million in phony negotiable bonds at a local printer, then use them along with the fake CDs to convince potential victims that the Noes' businesses controlled significant assets. Paul Noe Sr. had also taken out a telephone credit card and passed the card number among his international swindler confederates, who then charged $60,000 worth of calls on the card before Noe skipped out on his phone account.
"The printer saw that there was something fishy, and came to us and showed us these negotiable bonds," St. Laurent says.
The telephone company, meanwhile, approached state law enforcement regarding the unpaid phone bill. The list of callers who'd used the phone card, St. Laurent says, eventually became a sort of Rosetta stone for a Senate committee investigating international financial fraud. "It was a master list of who's who in swindling worldwide," St. Laurent says.
Paul Noe ultimately served 10 years on charges related to wire and securities fraud, St. Laurent says.
Three decades later, in 2001, St. Laurent accompanied a French Canadian client to meet with a director of a firm calling itself Great American Trust Co. in a tawdry office conference room in Boca Raton. Laurent's client had paid $10,000 in consulting fees to a broker, hoping to obtain $11 million of venture capital financing for a housing development he had planned for a suburb of Ottawa, Canada. The capital wasn't forthcoming, and St. Laurent was accompanying his client in hopes of getting the $10,000 back.
St. Laurent stepped into the conference room, and staring him in the face was the man he'd sent to prison 30 years before, now 74 and calling himself Paul Noe Randall.
"I recognized him, he didn't recognize me," St. Laurent says of his initial encounter with Paul Noe Sr. "He called my house and asked to meet with me the next day. He wanted to assure me that my client was getting his money back, and that there was no reason to go to law enforcement. They did pay my client back, and I proceeded to turn everything over to the FBI. They had a case in Columbia, S.C.
"And they didn't know it was the famous Noe brothers until I told them."
After their encounter in the Great American Trust office, St. Laurent arranged to meet Noe at a Boca Raton Starbucks. There, St. Laurent told the con man he knew who he was. Conversation drifted to old times. And then, as tends to happen among people in their 70s, talk turned to the next generation.
St. Laurent says Noe told him that the family's West Coast operation was placing Great American Trust as successor trustee in living-trust documents it was selling to elderly people in California.
"They put a clause in there, and when the trustee dies, the successor trustee shall be Great American Trust," St. Laurent explains. "Once he got Great American Trust on those documents, he could claim his company really did have assets; sure they were successor trustee, rather than trustee, but he could claim that was a technicality. He could tell investors [that] here was a company handling 40,000 trust accounts worth $5 billion.
"Knowing Paul it could be 4,000, but that's still significant."
St. Laurent did some of his own investigating. He retrieved records connected to Paul Howe Noe II and his California ex-wife, Robin Noe. He looked at property records, which I retrieved independently, showing Paul Sr. and Paul Jr. connected to property transactions involving a Paul Noe Family Trust.
