XI

Robinson resumed working at Equi-II, and in August 1985, only days after Judge Hutcherson had initially revoked his probation, he appeared on the cover of Farm Journal, a national agricultural magazine. He was pictured standing in the middle of a cow pasture, wearing a dapper sport coat and tie, smiling out at the world. He is happy, calm, and confident, and he would use this favorable publicity to promote Equi-II as a successful consulting firm that advised ranchers on the tax benefits of limited partnerships. In print, he came across as an expert in both finance and farming.

“For every dollar the limited partner invests,” Robinson said, “he gets $2 to $4 in tax write-offs, along with a return of 25 percent to 50 percent on his investment over the life of the partnership.”

As he’d done earlier when fleecing Harry Truman’s physician and then scamming Ewing Kauffman’s corporate office, Robinson again crossed the path of another prominent local figure. The Farm Journal article on limited partnerships quoted Sam Brownback, a Kansas State University agricultural law professor who would go on to become a U.S. senator from Kansas. Robinson used this periodical to speak optimistically about the future of partnerships for cattle ranchers looking for solid investment strategies. One man who actually got involved with Robinson in the limited partnership business, Bob Lowrey of Norwich, Kansas, lost $10,000. So did his associate, Bill Mills. Steve Haymes’s fears were being realized: Robinson was only getting better at his ability to work con games. Yet he had made mistakes in the past that were about to ensnare him.

For months, Johnson County (Kansas) officials had been investigating Robinson’s connection to Back Care Systems, which in 1982 had hired Equi-Plus to market its seminars. Robinson had promised to deliver a number of services to the company—promises that were unfulfilled—but he’d sent them invoices for his work. Early in 1986, while he was appealing his probation revocation in Missouri, Robinson went to trial on the Kansas side of the border over these financial practices. In late January, a jury found him guilty of submitting $3,600 worth of false billing. Because the defendant had been investigated for so many crimes in recent years, Assistant District Attorney Steve Obermeier asked Johnson County district judge Herbert W. Walton to apply the Habitual Criminal Act when deciding Robinson’s sentence. Judge Walton followed this suggestion and ordered him to spend five to fourteen years in prison and to pay a fine of $5,000.

Before the sentence could begin, Johnson County filed still more charges against Robinson, this time for stealing $50,000 when acting as a middleman in a condominium sale in Page, Arizona. Robinson had allegedly collected $150,000 from a Kansas buyer but passed along only $100,000 to the seller. This was a sizable score compared to some of his earlier ones, but he needed more income than ever before. In addition to his ever-mounting legal bills, his family had continued living on their four-acre estate at Pleasant Valley Farms and two of his children were in college, while the twins were still in high school. With the conviction in the Back Care Systems case, Robinson’s wife now realized that her husband’s days of avoiding prison were coming to a close. He was about to be convicted on the middleman theft charges in Arizona as well, and he now faced a total of six to nineteen years behind bars. His crime spree appeared to be over and his income could obviously not be maintained while he was in prison. Without his ongoing money scams, his family would not be able to stay at Pleasant Valley Farms. Nancy was about to put the house up for sale and start looking for work. Her children could not escape the reality of their father’s criminal past. His activities had not only harmed countless people outside of his family but profoundly affected those inside it as well, both economically and emotionally.

While these events were unfolding, the Kansas City–based Business Journal wrote a scathing exposé of Robinson that outlined his almost twenty-year-long criminal record. Through interviews and other research, the publication uncovered Robinson’s trail as a phenomenally good chameleon.

“Apparently,” wrote the Journal’s Delbert Schafer, “Robinson has developed a convincing manner of gaining the confidence of business people over the years. He has the ability to ferret out information and then use it to tell the listener exactly what he wants to hear.”

After a couple of years of investigating the con man, Steve Haymes had noticed that whenever Robinson received some really bad publicity like this, the probation officer’s phone started to ring with calls from strangers. These people had also encountered Robinson and some of his “investment strategies” in years past. Until now, they hadn’t been able to bring themselves to tell the authorities what had happened.

“When someone kicks in your front door and burglarizes you,” says Haymes, “you’re always going to call the police. But when someone tricks you out of money, the police sometimes don’t get called. There are certainly indications that there were some neighbors [of Robinson’s] whom he was able to convince to give him money that was soon gone and to my knowledge this was never reported to the police. There was some embarrassment on the part of the victims. Probably in some of Robinson’s business dealings, he just wore people down. He was good at wearing people down. He would come up with receipts and excuses and eventually people would just say, ‘I give up.’

“Looking at most criminals I’ve dealt with over the years, you say, ‘How did they get there?’ and it’s a fairly easy path to follow back. They didn’t have a lot of guidance or bad guidance or perhaps they fell in with the wrong people or got involved in drugs or alcohol, and at least you have some idea of how they got where they are. With Robinson, it’s not very clear-cut. He had many opportunities as a young person. His siblings did well. His parents, as far as I know, were good people and worked hard. So I don’t know what made him make that turn.

“It was fairly late, well into his twenties, before the crimes started showing up. I think there were some dysfunctions in him that just continued to grow. The sex thing grew over the years, and other things, but what turned him to go the easy route?”

Pondering his own question, Haymes shakes his head. Then he shakes it again, still haunted by his inability to answer it.