Ron Wilson Convicted on Still More Counts
A chandelier seized from Ron Wilson’s home and sold at auction to repay his victims. Via FoxCarolina.
Looks like Ron Wilson, the former SCV Commander-in-Chief who went to federal prison in 2012 for masterminding a decade-long, $57M ponzi scheme — one that ran concurrently with his tenure as C-in-C — wasn’t done cheating his victims:
The money Wilson, his wife, and brother are accused of hiding from investigators would have gone to make partial restitution for his victims. Efforts to recover Wilson’s ill-gotten gain continue. When Ron Wilson was sentenced in 2012, Tim presented himself as a victim, saying,
If the feds’ allegations in this new indictment are correct, those people oughter go away for a long, long time.
You can read the backstory here. Wilson, along with close allies like the odious Kirk Lyons, was a primary mover in the upheaval in the SCV fifteen years or so ago, that resulted in a wide-scale purge of insufficiently un-reconstructed individuals and camps, in favor of a more confrontational, activist group — what Lyons called “a modern, 21st century Christian war machine capable of uniting the Confederate community and leading it to ultimate victory.” Whatever the SCV is today, good, bad, or indifferent, it has Wilson’s nasty, avaricious fingerprints all over it, and will for years to come.
Anyway, enough about that crook. Here are some more items that may be of interest:
- Over at SHPG, Tom Perry is very upset that the Danville Museum is seeking to remove a Confederate flag from its grounds. Also, he wants to know where Danville is.
- The Veterans Administration is looking into the claim that a headstone at Woodlawn National Cemetery, near Elmira, carries the wrong name. Good.
- Reportedly no one got seriously injured in this mess. Someone’s been living right.
- A couple of students hung a Confederate flag at Bryn Mawr; Steve Conn chalks it up to ignorance of history.
- After fourteen years of conservation work, specialists at the Warren Lasch Center in Charleston are finally exposing the actual hull plating of the submersible Hunley.
- The Seven Days: The Emergence of Robert E. Lee and the Dawn of a Legend by Clifford Dowdey, with an introduction by Jeff Wirt, is $1.99 for Kindle (thanks, Chellers!).
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Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog 
Nice family, those Wilsons….
Now that he’s plead out, I’m sure Ron will throw his confederates under the bus.
Wasn’t Danville where the Old Ninety-seven derailed?
Yes. Goin’ down-grade at ninety miles an hour.
I had never learned of Wilson’s fraud. I had many online arguments with his supporters during the great upheaval.
It’s the biggest fraud of that sort in South Carolina history.
I don’t see the issue of the Confederate flag at Bryn Mawr. The flag was flown side by side with the US flag during CW reunions, and many states celebrate Confederate Memorial Day. Our ancestors gave their all defending their southern country, and we should be able to commemorate the way we feel is best. I see blogs undermining our heritage, and that is a major problem and culprit of a culture war.
The students at Bryn Mawr assumed that the Confederate flag is a benign symbol of “the South” that carries no particular negative baggage with it. It’s a common mistake often made by people with a tightly-circumscribed worldview.
We all compete in the marketplace of ideas.
I just saw this posted on one of our local television websites:http://www.wyff4.com/news/exclusive-ron-wilson-talks-in-rare-jailhouse-interview/30195912?absolute=true&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=wyffnews4
Really not very informative and somewhat self-serving. Doesn’t do a thing for the folks he fleeced, either.
Definitely self-serving. I could almost have some sympathy for him were it not for that last bit about how he’s lost more than his clients. He may well believe that, but it’s not likely to sway anyone else’s views.
What the interview doesn’t get into, though, is how he and a handful of allies strong-armed their way into the leadership of the SCV, and hammered anyone who stood in their way. Ron Wilson would be a belligerent, selfish egotist regardless of his line of work.
Agreed on both counts. I have little sympathy for white collar criminals who rip off individuals. They may not use a gun but to steal someone’s life savings, as these types often do, is just as reprehensible.
I once covered a story where a small public company fleeced about 8,000 people out of approximately $275 million. Many of the victims were retired mill workers from the South Carolina Upstate. It wiped them out completely.
The con men (and women) who ran the company tried to say they didn’t mean to lose anyone’s money, but evidence indicated they’d knowingly created a giant Ponzi scheme. I can’t image being 70 years old and suddenly having most everything I’d worked for my entire life disappear.
Wilson earned his punishment; apparently he sees himself as a victim of sorts. Perhaps not surprising given the way he ran roughshod over so many. It’s hard to have any sympathy for him.
Ponzi schemes are particularly bad in that way because — unlike, say, knocking off a liquor store — they rely entirely on forming close interpersonal relationships and betraying the trust of the victims. Wilson himself makes that clear in the interview.