The Greatest Course That Never Was

by J. Michael Veron

  He shook his head. “Not yet. But don’t worry, Cap, I’ll get there.” He threw some photographs on my desk. “There’s some pictures of his house, his office, his Jag convertible, and some other good stuff.” Pointing to one in particular, he added proudly, “There he is goin’ into the club yesterday after work.”

  Frankie then pulled some documents from his briefcase. “I’ve got copies of a couple of malpractice suits filed against him, too. Apparently, your boy messed up a couple of times doing—what do you call them things?—oh, yeah, angiograms. My sources tell me he doesn’t do any surgery anymore; the insurance got too expensive.”

  I was impressed and said so. That pleased Frankie.

  “I told you, Cap, I’ll take good care of you. I like the kind of work you have me do. Beats the hell outta that divorce stuff. I don’t like hidin’ in the bushes tryin’ the catch people in the act. Makes me feel kinda dirty, you know what I mean? I don’t mind looking up records on deadbeats.” He sniffed. “It’s a little more dignified.”

  He paused for a moment and winked at me. “’Course, I looked in the criminal records just in case your doctor friend had had a little problem, like a DWI or somethin’, but there wasn’t anything.”

  “You’re always very thorough, Frankie.”

  He stood up to leave. “Yeah, well, I’m gonna get the lowdown on that handicapped golf company. If it’s anywhere in the state of Georgia, I’m gonna find it.”

  I shook his hand. “Frankie, thanks a bunch. This is real helpful. I won’t forget it.”

  Frankie clapped me on the shoulder. “I’ll be back with the other stuff in a couple of days.” As he headed out the door, he called out, “Have a great weekend.”

  After Frankie left, I sat down and looked over the pictures and papers he had left with me. While they were interesting, they really didn’t tell me anything extraordinary. Of course, I couldn’t tell Frankie that I was disappointed in any way. After all, he was doing me a favor, and besides, it wasn’t his fault that he didn’t find something juicy we could use.

  The one thing I was really interested in was the details about this company that would supposedly get the proceeds from the sale of the property. It was probably a legitimate deal all the way, but I needed to be sure. I figured I had to find some way to derail any sale of Bragg’s Point, or the course and all its stories might have been lost again.

  At that point, I couldn’t think about it anymore. I had an important deposition in a product liability case coming up on Monday, and I needed to get ready.

  I didn’t hear from Frankie again until the following Thursday. He was almost breathless on the phone.

  “You got a minute or two to see me this morning?”

  I looked at my calendar. “Sure. I can visit with you right now, if you want.”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  As I hung up the phone, my mind raced with possibilities. Frankie sounded like he had found something interesting. But, I reminded myself, he had sounded pretty much the same way the last time. Frankie had a way of making whatever he was doing sound important.

  He didn’t disappoint me this time.

  After sitting down heavily in the chair across from me, Frankie said, “Well, I got good news, and I got bad news. Which do you want first?”

  I didn’t want to play games. “Give it to me in any order you want.”

  He shrugged. “Okay. The bad news is that your buddy’s sellin’ that property in California to a bunch of Japanese investors. I think it’s some of the same ones who bought Pebble Beach a few years back. You know, they were a shady group.”

  I recalled something controversial about how the Japanese investors who bought Pebble Beach obtained their financing and that they had problems back in Japan, but I couldn’t recall any details.

  Frankie took a deep breath. “Anyway, this is apparently part of the same group. They want to sell a bunch of memberships back in Japan and turn it into an exotic country club of some kind.” He laughed. “Maybe they’ll have those geisha girls or somethin.’”

  I let him know that I didn’t think that was funny.

  “How’d you find that out?”

  “I can’t tell you that just yet. I’ve gotta protect my sources. Let’s just say that not everybody likes Dr. Moore.”

  It was an intriguing comment.

  Frankie looked at me with a sarcastic smile. “But that’s not the stinky part. The company that’s gettin’ the money—this so-called golf company that will promote access for handicapped golfers—your friendly heart doctor owns it. Turns out he incorporated the business himself just a couple of months ago.”

  He pushed some papers across my desk. “That’s a copy of the articles of incorporation and the certificate from the state capitol showing the date it was formed. You see who’s listed as the incorporator? Stephen R. Moore, M.D.”

  Frankie had hit the jackpot. Dr. Moore was going to sell Bragg’s Point and pocket the money in violation of the trust.

  “Besides the money, do you have any idea why he would do this?”

  “Did you say besides the money?” Frankie raised his eyebrows and shook his head. “You said that property was over a hundred acres on the Pacific Ocean. You got any idea of what that’s worth today? If the Tokyo crowd pays him a hundred million bucks, they’ll make it back through memberships alone. I don’t care how much money these heart doctors make, it’s small potatoes compared to that.”

  After Frankie left, I called Moonlight. Given his attitude about the Japanese, I anticipated his reaction when I told him what Dr. Moore was planning to do.

  “Sonuvabitch,” he kept saying, over and over. Then he muttered something about Truman stopping too soon before asking me whether there was anything we could do.

  “Honestly, Moonlight, I don’t know. I’ll have to check around here with some of our trusts and estates lawyers to see if we have standing to challenge this.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  I realized that I had lapsed into legal jargon. “I’m sorry, Moonlight. It just means I need to check and see if we have the legal right to stop it. We’re not a party to the trust in any way, so the law may say that it’s none of our business.”

  I had an idea.

  “But there’s more than one way to skin a cat, as the old saying goes. This amounts to fraud. Maybe the authorities can bring some heat on Dr. Moore. Plus, there may be restrictions against the sale of this kind of property to foreign citizens, I don’t know. The federal government may be interested in this, too. And we may get some help from the USGA. Maybe they can get the word out about the course. The media attention will turn a spotlight on Dr. Moore. He might not like that.”

  Moonlight seemed relieved. “Sounds great, lad. But who can ya’ call?”

  “I have a friend who might be able to help. Let me make a couple of phone calls, and I’ll get back with you.”

  I hung up and put in a call to Brett Sullivan.

  Chapter 30

  THE VOICE ON the other end of the line had a familiar friendly tone. “This is Brett Sullivan. May I help you?”

  “Brett, it’s Charley Hunter.”

  “Charley! The man responsible for discovering Beau Stedman. How are you, buddy?”

  Good old Brett. Always upbeat, I thought. It was a trait I admired. After we exchanged pleasantries about the state of each other’s health and golf games, I told the USGA’s curator the story of Bragg’s Point. I must have talked for nearly ten minutes nonstop. Brett never interrupted me.

  When he finally spoke, he was clearly fighting incredulity. In slow and measured words, he said, “You know, Charley, if anyone but you told me that story…”

  “Hey, I know, Brett,” I said quickly, “but, if you think about it, it’s no stranger than the story of Beau Stedman.”

  He laughed. “Well, anyone who says lightning doesn’t strike twice never met you. Who’d have thought you’d be part of another story like this?”

  I exp
lained the connection between Stedman and Moonlight. Sullivan admitted that it made sense, and he began to warm to the idea of bringing out the story through the USGA.

  “You ought to know from last time, this is the kind of stuff that we devote ourselves to, preserving golf history. It’s always been part of our mission statement.”

  Sullivan agreed with me that the site should be kept intact. “If it’s sold, God only knows what’ll be done with it.”

  We talked awhile about how best to stop the anticipated sale. Brett was wary of getting any kind of exhibit together on such short notice, but he thought we might be able to publish something in the USGA’s Golf Journal and draw the public’s attention to the situation that way.

  I told him I was also investigating the possibility of legal action. He said that might not be necessary. As he put it, “Never underestimate the power of public opinion. Anyone who’s about to put a hundred million into a piece of property will think twice if the public’s up in arms about it. Besides, California’s got the most stringent permitting requirements for land use in the country. If we get the folks over there fired up about this, they could delay the whole thing for years and make the developers give up altogether. It’s happened before.”

  I was encouraged by everything my friend at Golf House was saying. Before we hung up, however, he warned me. “This is all subject to the approval of our Executive Director. And he’ll probably take it to the Executive Committee. I don’t have the authority to move on something like this on my own.”

  I was worried about any and all delays. “How long will that take?”

  “Well, as luck would have it, they’re meeting this weekend at the Senior Amateur in Portland. I don’t believe David is scheduled to leave until day after tomorrow. Let me see if I can brief him on this. If I need more information, I’ll call you. I think I have enough, though, to get the Executive Committee to authorize us to proceed if we’re satisfied with the evidence you’ve got. I’ve got to convince David first, though.”

  I thanked him profusely.

  He laughed again. “Don’t thank me. If it were anyone but Charley Hunter behind this story, I’d need a lot more before I sent this up the line. But your name carries a lot of weight after the Stedman thing. They know you’re not some crackpot.”

  After he hung up, I called Moonlight and gave him a report of our conversation. He was excited, but he didn’t like the idea of waiting the better part of a week before doing something.

  “Ain’t there somethin’ we can do now?”

  I tried to placate him by promising to spend some time in the law library to see what legal recourse we might have. I warned him, though, that I was skeptical that a stranger to a trust could assert a breach of trust claim. Still, he liked the idea that we were at least weighing our options.

  I stole odd moments here and there over the next few days to research every conceivable law that might help us. While I was pretty comfortable looking through federal laws, I didn’t feel very confident trying to understand California property and trust law, even though I could do research in the Stanford Law Library through the Internet.

  I visited with Paul Watkins, one of the rising stars in the firm’s trusts and estates section, to see if he had any books that might help me understand the issues. He was naturally curious about why I was working in his area.

  I told him it was a family problem that my father had asked me to look into for an uncle out in California and that all I was trying to do was get some general background information. Watkins was one of the really nice guys in the firm and offered to help with my project. I begged off by promising to come back to him if I got confused.

  What I learned was not encouraging. One of the leading reference books on trust law, Bogart on Trusts, confirmed my worst fears: without a personal stake in the trust, we weren’t entitled to bring a court action to challenge the trustee’s actions. While the treatise didn’t make specific reference to California, that seemed to be the general rule, and I had no reason to believe California was any different.

  That left me to consider our alternatives.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t like what I kept coming up with. For one thing, we had no proof that Dr. Moore did not actually intend to devote the new company to improving golf course access for disabled golfers. We had our suspicions that that was the case, but suspicions without proof don’t carry much weight in a court of law.

  In simple terms, no wrong had been committed—at least, not yet. For that reason, no criminal prosecutor was going to get excited about pursuing anything against a prominent cardiologist like Dr. Moore.

  According to the law, the only remedy for Dr. Moore’s anticipated diversion of trust assets was to sue him after he did it. Even then, there was the question of who was entitled to sue. I knew we couldn’t, because we weren’t beneficiaries under the trust.

  That’s when it hit me. The immediate beneficiary of the trust was the game of golf. But in legal terms, someone (i.e., an actual person) had to be the eventual—or what the law called residual—beneficiary.

  I didn’t recall reading anything about a residual beneficiary in the trust when I first saw it, but I wasn’t reading for that. So I went and pulled my copy. There, in the next to last paragraph, the trust stated in clear and unequivocal terms: “At the cessation of this trust, its corpus shall be distributed to P. Harvie Moore for his eventual disposition in accordance with the purposes expressed herein.”

  It was another dead end. Under the law, P. Harvie Moore’s heirs would be substituted for him upon his death. We were back to Dr. Stephen R. Moore. So the only interested person who could sue to prevent Dr. Moore from dissipating the trust’s assets was—drum roll, please—Dr. Moore.

  It then occurred to me that P. Harvie Moore might have had other children. Of course, it was highly doubtful that any of them would stand in their brother’s way, particularly if he offered to share some of the wealth with them. Still, it was something I needed to investigate, no matter how pointless it may have seemed. I hadn’t asked Frankie Johnson to check out Dr. Moore’s extended family. I knew that Harvie Moore’s heirs would all be listed in the probate of his estate, which presumably was filed in Atlanta.

  I had learned that one of the privileges of being a member of the local practicing bar was that I was allowed to check out courthouse records. I sent one of our runners for the probate record pertaining to P. Harvie Moore at the county courthouse.

  Upon reviewing the judgment from the elder Dr. Moore’s succession, I discovered that Dr. Stephen R. Moore had only one sibling, a brother named Francis X. Moore. None of the pleadings gave an address, however.

  I could only hope that Francis Moore lived in Atlanta. Pulling out my desk copy of the telephone directory, I kept my fingers crossed while digging through the alphabetical entries under the family name of Moore. There was nothing for Francis.

  There was a listing, however, for an “F. Moore.” I called that number, but the woman who answered was named Frieda and didn’t know anything about a man named Francis Moore.

  By now, it was close to quitting time. I decided to wait and call Frankie Johnson the next day to see if he had any ideas about how to locate Francis Moore. Dr. Stephen Moore’s brother might be our only hope.

  When I called Frankie the next morning, he was his typically confident self. “Charley, I’ll find him if he moved to Mars.”

  When I pressed for details, he became evasive. “Hey, I don’t ask you about your trade secrets now, do I?”

  I let it go at that. “Just get me his address or something I can use to contact him, okay?”

  Late that afternoon, he called back.

  “I found your boy, but I don’t want to say nothin’ on the phone. You free?”

  I had a mountain of paperwork on my desk, but none of it held the urgency of Bragg’s Point. The paperwork could wait. “Sure,” I said. “How soon can you get here?”

  I pretended to work while waiting for Frankie, but my
mind was completely preoccupied. Where had Frankie found Francis X. Moore? What kind of man was he? Was he as surly as his brother? Would he even care about Bragg’s Point?

  Frankie walked into my office less than 20 minutes later, wearing the same rumpled blazer and ugly tie. Forgoing the usual pleasantries, he said simply, “He’s in Mobile.”

  I was impressed and said so. “How’d you find him so quick?”

  Frankie was proud of his work. “Okay, I’ll tell you how I did it, but just this once.” He paused, as if for dramatic effect, and then giggled a manly giggle. “I played a hunch. I figured he grew up here, so I checked the suit records in the courthouse downtown to see if his name turned up anywhere. Turns out he went through a divorce about 15 years ago while he was still living here. Those things can drag on forever, you know? Once the court here gets it, it don’t matter where you go.”

  I knew that the court granting the divorce usually had continuing jurisdiction to hear all incidental matters, like alimony, child custody, and child support. Once you were pulled into divorce court, you were usually stuck there until your children registered to vote.

  Frankie went on. “About five years later, his former wife filed a motion to change child support, and he countered by asking for custody of the kids. Only this time, his address was listed in Mobile. I then went to Mobile directories and, even though his address had changed again a couple of years ago, he was still in the area.”

  He handed me a sheet of paper. “Here’s his current address and phone number.”

  I took the paper eagerly. “Thanks, Frankie. As usual, you came through.”

  Frankie’s chest puffed out. “There’s more. Your man is a big-time businessman. Owns three beer distributors. We’re talking some big bucks.”

  “How’d you find that out?”

  He smiled. “I got a buddy in Mobile.”

  “You seem to have a buddy everywhere.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m a popular guy.”

  Frankie was always good for a laugh.