By Dan McCue
Staff Writer

For Jim Scarborough, today and Saturday’s auction of economist Al Parish’s ill-gotten assets at the Charleston Area Convention Center, is effectively the end of the treasure hunt.

Parish, a former professor with Charleston Southern University, has been charged with 11 criminal and five civil counts related to his management of five investment pools through, which he allegedly defrauded as many as 500 individuals of about $55 million.

Scarborough, a private investigator who helped the court-appointed receiver gather Parish’s assets after the charges were lodged, said he still marvels at the magnitude of it all.

Of course, the question now, is how much it brings in for his investors,” Scarborough said. “Right now all any of us involved in the case can do is hope for the best.”

Both serious bidders and the merely curious turned out early this morning to participate in what’s believed to be the largest auction of a single person’s assets in Charleston history.

Even before the bidding began at 11 a.m., J. David Dantzler, the receiver’s attorney, said they had received a pre-auction bid of $1.25 million for all Parish’s watches, many of which are encrusted with diamonds and other jewels.

While Dantzler said he still hoped a similar sizable bid would materialize for Parish’s now infamous Mont Blanc pen collection, as of this morning, it had not materialized.

Likewise, while a number of individuals have inquired about guitars that once belonged to Jimi Hendrix, Rolling Stones singer Keith Richards and the late former Beatle George Harrison, there has been no serious pre-auction offer for those items either.

“A lot of people are talking around making an offer, but they just haven’t pulled the trigger on a deal,” Dantzler said.

On a brighter note, though final tabulations have not been done, Dantzler said a 90% off tag sale of items from the now defunct A.J. Davis & Sons store, which Parish bought in 2005, did much better than was anticipated.

“At the outset, we thought at best the store’s creditors would see a return of 50 cents on the dollar, but our sense now is that they did much better than that,” Dantzler said.

George Reed, a former Sotheby’s appraiser who has been assisting in preparations for the auction, said he agreed with an assessment by Dantzler on Wednesday that raising $1 million through the sale of less valuable items in Parish’s bizarre collection, like his myriad gnomes and Red Skelton paintings, would be a home run

But even if the auction exceeds everyone’s expectations, the eventual return to aggrieved investors, is expected to be quite small.

“Basically what’s going to happen is this,” Dantzler explained. “All of the money raised through the auction will go into a single fund, the receivership. From there, the expenses of the receivership will be paid first, with court approval, followed by payments to those creditors of Parish’s who have perfected their claims of leans and security interests, and then, whatever’s left, that’s what will go to investors—and of course, all of this is something that won’t occur until the end of the case.”

Dantzler hastened to add that expenses related to the actual auction itself have been kept to a bare minimum. The management of the Charleston Area Convention Center itself provided the receivership with a deep discount on rent for the exhibition hall, while everyone from the auctioneer to the security detail has agreed to cap their rates.

“Gathering this stuff and conducting the initial investigation ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but thanks to people being good citizens and being concerned for people hurt in this situation, costs associated with the auction have been kept to a minimum,” he said.

Receiver Gregory Hays echoed those statements, recalling that when he first became involved in the case on April 5, assets were everywhere, Parish was in a psychiatric ward and nothing was adequately insured.

“Parish had almost all of these assets in a home covered by a $1.5 million insurance policy that specified coverage of ‘contents’ of his home, the house did not have any working locks, and there was no alarm system,” Hays said. “A lot of the expense associated with this case was getting a handle on what he had done and securing these assets so that there could be some return to those he defrauded.”

But if much of the past several days have been devoted to preparing for the auction, Dantzler and Hays said there have also been many very hard moments. On Wednesday night, for instance, many of Parish’s investors got their initial first-hand look at what he’d spent their money on.

“Some were angry, some wept, some were completely in a daze,” Dantzler said.

At the same time, the receiver has been negotiating for most of the week with Yolanda Parish over what pots, pans and utensils she’s been able to keep so she could feed her children, and what will be added to the auction floor.

“Those discussions, as you can imagine,” are very difficult,” Dantzler said.

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