A California conman has been sentenced to spend years in prison after he pled guilty to several charges related to a Ponzi scheme in which he promised investors he could turn cow manure into green energy.
From March 2014 until December 2019, Ray Brewer of Porterville, California, managed to convince investors that he had built several anaerobic digesters on dairies in counties across California and Idaho. According to a press release from the Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of California, such anaerobic digesters can break down cow waste and turn that biodegradable material into methane which can then be sold on the market as green energy.
However, in Brewer’s case, “[n]one of this was true,” the press release said. Instead, Brewer repeatedly lied to his investors, sending them falsified documents — including forged contracts and fake construction schedules, copies of invoices, and reports — and even providing them with fake pictures of dairies which he claimed he was building. In some cases, he even took some investors on tours of dairies, promising them that he would soon build digesters there.
A fake digester picture Brewer sent to investors.(screenshot of the press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of California)
In all, investors handed Brewer more than $875,000,000 for his project, and in turn, he promised them 66% of the profits plus tax credits. Instead, he took the money, deposited it in a bank account, and then distributed the money to various other accounts he created under the names of family members and an alias. “He did so to conceal the location, source, ownership, and control of the money before using it for personal expenditures,” the DOJ press release said.
Those “personal expenditures” turned out to be two sizeable properties of more than 10 acres apiece, a 3,700 square foot home, and multiple new pickup trucks. At one point, Brewer did his duty and gave some previous investors some or all of their money back, but that was money Brewer had just taken from other new investors who were not yet privy to his deceitful ways.
When investors figured out that Brewer was full of it and won civil judgments against him, he absconded to Montana under an assumed name. But he didn’t stay hidden for long. In November 2020, authorities caught up with him. And as he had done so many times in the past six years, Brewer lied, this time telling police he served time in the Navy and had even once saved “several soldiers” from death by standing between them and flames from a fire which had ignited, the DOJ statement said. He later admitted that he made up the story about the fire and his military service “to curry favor with law enforcement.”
In February, Brewer pled guilty to wire fraud, money laundering, and identity theft charges. Though facing 20 years in prison, Brewer, now 66, was ultimately sentenced on Monday to serve six years and nine months.
“I made some very bad decisions in an attempt to keep us going,” Brewer previously wrote in a letter to the court. “I should have known that you cannot make something right by doing something that’s wrong.”
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