He’s No Angel

Poor attempts were made to kick dirt over the money trail. A day after the Diamond Benefits bank account transferred $465,000 to the Burrillville Land Company in Santa Monica, Burrillville cut three checks to Hill Top in increments of $100,000, $315,000 and $50,000.

Settling Reeder's scores hadn't been Resolute's only dubious move. Christopher engineered a series of questionable investments, including the purchase of a $5.4 million note from a company owned by his brother. He also took hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay off the mortgage and liens on his house in Texas.

With Reeder's debts squared and Christopher's mortgage paid off, no money remained to pay the annuity holders. Diamond Benefits began cutting rubber checks. Colleen Comey, the president of Diamond Benefits, asked Christopher and Reeder where the $18 million had gone. They provided no meaningful answers, according to the Court of Appeals. Comey froze the bank account and alerted regulators. She was fired the next day.

Diamond Benefits went into receivership soon after Comey blew the whistle. American Universal staggered along before becoming irretrievably insolvent in 1991, the largest insurance company in Rhode Island to fail; 400 jobs disappeared along with it. "When it collapsed, a lot of people were hurt," Sheldon Whitehouse, the former director of Rhode Island's Department of Business Regulation, tells the Pitch. The Providence Journal-Bulletin estimated the total cost to insolvency funds in Rhode Island and Arizona at $120 million.

Lawsuits and a criminal investigation followed. Christopher and Reeder were tried separately. Christopher was convicted of looting $26.7 million. Sentenced to 10 years, he is ex-pected to be released from prison in 2006.

Reeder's first criminal trial ended with a hung jury. The government retried the case and won.

At his sentencing, Reeder said he was "ashamed" of his conduct. Today he strikes a more defiant pose. He disputes the assertion that insurance regulators were deceived. He says there was a $12 million deed of trust on his collateral but it was "fully disclosed."

The jury in the first trial voted 8-4 to acquit, Reeder notes. A second jury did not see him in as favorable a light, but Reeder believes the jurors lacked important facts. "I was found guilty by skill on the prosecution's part, because they didn't bring back the witnesses that we destroyed at the first trial to show that I was an innocent man."

The government won its case but did not defeat the man. Reeder calls the prison camp at Nellis Air Force Base in southern Nevada, where he served 16 months, a "country club." He spent another year at a halfway house in Kansas City. "I never had a cuff laid on me, from start to finish," he says.

The real villain, the Reeders say, is Christopher. "We fired him in 6 weeks," Wayne says. Leslie calls Christopher "the only man who's ever defrauded Lloyd's of London, which, of course, we find out a little bit later."

Reeder feels betrayed also by Herman Beebe, who introduced him to Christopher. "That was absolutely the last the time you and Beebe were ever friends," Leslie says, looking at her father.

"Oh, absolutely," he says.

Was Reeder duped? Whitehouse, who later became the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island, doesn't believe so. "It didn't seem plausible to prosecutors. It didn't seem plausible to judges. It didn't seem plausible to the Department of Business Regulation."

Outside the gate that nonunion workers use to enter the View work site, ironworker Joshua Huffman stages a one-man picket line. What Huffman lacks in company he makes up for in enthusiasm.

Huffman waves at motorists as they travel along East Ninth Street. Huffman's is not a Queen Elizabeth wave. He leans his body into the motion, as if trying to get the attention of a favorite celebrity passing in a limousine. "A lot of guys get bored out here," Huffman says. "I make it a good time."

Ironworkers Local No. 10 pays Huffman, its designated picketer, $24.50 an hour to stand outside work sites that, in the union's estimation, flaunt established working conditions. When he picketed his first work site, in 2002, Huffman thought that workers nearing retirement were best suited for the task. But he came to like it. He passes the time listening through headphones to commercial and shortwave radio. Worried about sunscreen's chemical properties, he wears tape on parts of his nose and cheek that have burned in the past. A hard hat and work gloves honor his trade. Huffman calls himself a "silent warrior."

Huffman usually arrives at the View before 7 a.m., when nonunion workers begin arriving in dented Toyota Tercels and Chevy Luminas. One car entering the site has plastic for a rear windshield. Another needs a bungee cord to keep the trunk lid shut.

Huffman does not taunt the arriving workers. His sign does the talking. He holds it like a mask as they pull into the driveway.

Huffman is on the line because the View's developers did not give ironworkers a bidding chance, says Mike Bright, Local No. 10's assistant business agent. "They're going to renovate them as cheaply as they can and sell them for big money," he says.

Other residential projects in the downtown were built with a healthy supply of union workers, Bright says, a point made also by Jack Earley, the business agent for the Carpenters' District Council. "There's every opportunity to do things fair and right," Earley says. He calls the View "a bad job in every respect that I know of." (Earley is also critical of the redevelopment of the Western Auto Building, which a Chicago-based developer is turning into condominiums. "Every now and again this happens," Earley says. "Owners make silly decisions that affect us all.")