The Snowsnakes of Lake Riverside: My Family, a Drunken Jockey, and One of the Greatest Land Scammers in the American West

By Albert Johnson

In the late-20th century, promotional land development schemes were scamming investors out of millions. Albert Johnson tells how he and his family got involved with one such scheme at Lake Riverside Estates, California. From his adventures at Lake Riverside's horse riding stable, to a struggle with alcohol by his ex-jockey stepfather, Johnson shares his most bizarre, yet most fun, year of childhood.

He also follows the career of Robert J. Beaumont, the mastermind of Lake Riverside Estates and many other land scams. He exposes Beaumont's methods, and details his rise, fall, and resurrection as a real estate rip-off artist.

This tale of humor and tragedy unveils a scarcely documented and forgotten era from the American West—our dirty history of promotional land scams. These scams may soon make a comeback. But learning from history can help investors avoid the mistakes that cost so many their fortunes a half-century ago.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781312517769

Book preview

1: The Promotion of Land

Tired of salespeople harassing you? Here's how to avoid being their target: Think slowly. Scratch your head a lot. And when you ponder decisions, let your mouth hang open like an idiot. Drives salespeople nuts.

The biggest mistake you can make is to try to look smart in front of a salesperson. That puts too much pressure upon yourself to live up to your intelligent appearance. And then you become an easy-to-manipulate mark. Before you know it you'll be buying something worthless, just to keep from looking stupid, and all the while being praised for having enough sense to recognize a great deal.

No, hang your mouth open. Drool, if you must. Do whatever it takes to buy time, and carefully consider the bargain you're about to enter into. And if you do that, there's a good chance you'll avoid being conned. Yes, you'll keep from being like those many sheep who were sheared more than a half century ago, when I was a child.

That was in 1970. Looking back, it was the happiest year of my childhood. Because that year I rubbed elbows with a cadre of con artists. They were all nice fellas—after all, what con man isn't? And they were a lot of fun to be around. They were loaded with charm, full of good humor, and they never gave a damn what I did, so long as it didn't interfere with their sheep shearing duties.

They sold real estate, and if you bought land from them, they'd make sure you walked away thinking you were the smartest person in the world. In fact you might live the rest of your life, and go to your grave, never acknowledging to yourself that you might have made a dumb move, buying from them. Yep, they were that good.

1970 was the year my family went to work for a promotional land development scheme. If you're unfamiliar with promotional land development schemes, that's understandable. They're pretty much a thing of the past. They were running rampant, skinning people alive, way back in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. But investors eventually got wise to them, state laws were passed that clamped down on their shady practices, and the sharks who ran them swam away to newer, more productive feeding grounds. Such as time-shares, alternative medicine, and cryptocurrency.

Don't get me wrong. Not all land development promoters ripped people off, like the one my family worked for. There were a few respectable, honest ones that catered in reality rather than fantasies, and who built new cities full of satisfied, dumb-looking citizens. But on the other end of the spectrum were some outright fraudsters that robbed smart-looking investors of their savings while delivering virtually nothing in return, except empty, unfulfilled dreams.

Probably the worst of the worst was Ned Warren, Sr. He was a mobster who came to be known as the godfather of Arizona land fraud. I think it's a good thing my family never worked for him, or we might have ended up in a mass grave, somewhere in the Arizona desert.

Warren was sent to Arizona by the mob in 1961, for the express purpose of developing a land-fraud operation. Over the next decade or so, he masterminded dozens of land development schemes, with grandiose names such as Cochise College Park, Lake Montezuma, and Great Southwest Land & Cattle Co. These projects swindled investors out of millions.

Much of the land Warren peddled was uninhabitable, and stood virtually no chance of ever being developed. And he often sold parcels multiple times, to clueless buyers who were unaware that someone else had already purchased the same property. In fact it was common for identical property titles to be issued to more than one investor. Which really didn't matter, since the property was worthless anyway.

Warren got away with his sleight-of-hand by bribing public officials, and teaming up with powerful Arizona politicians. He found it amazing what bureaucrats and politicians were willing to do for him, for surprisingly small bribes. Warren sometimes mused that they could have held out for much larger bribes, but they were too eager to get in on the action. Much like the dupes who bought land from him.

But his success did not last forever. Don Bolles, an investigative reporter for the Arizona Republic newspaper, grew interested in land fraud. He uncovered Warren's peccadilloes, and began publishing exposés of his crooked dealings. And this caught the interest of the law, which began its own investigation.

While the law was snooping into Warren's nefarious business practices, and all the corruption rampant in Arizona, several men who were associated with him were conveniently murdered. Tony Serra, the sales manager for Warren's Great Southwest Land & Cattle Co., was convicted in 1974 for land fraud. Then in January 1977, Serra was shivved to death in prison.

And a former business partner, accountant Ed Lazar, was iced by two Chicago mafia hitmen in a Phoenix parking garage, in February 1975. This was one day before Lazar was set to testify before a grand jury, and after he had already testified to that same grand jury that Warren had bribed Arizona real estate commissioner J. Fred Talley.

Bolles was relentless in his exposés of Warren, and his connections to the underworld. Maybe too relentless. He kept pushing the envelope, and it seems he underestimated the reach and determination of the crooks behind the corruption. And they had a lot of reach. And a lot of determination.

On June 2, 1976, in what became the most explosive land fraud story yet, Don Bolles was ripped to shreds by a car bomb. He died 11 days later.

But in 1978, the law finally caught up with Ned Warren, Sr. He was convicted of 20 counts of land fraud, and several bribery charges. A judge handed him 54 to 60 years. That's a lot of time to spend, contemplating the error of your ways. But Warren only served two years of that sentence. That's because on October 9, 1980, he died of cancer in prison at age 66.

Warren may have been the worst, but as I've asserted, there were also a few honest players in the promotional land development business. One of the best was Robert P. McCulloch, and he too promoted land in Arizona.

McCulloch notched up some success for himself in the 1940s, when he introduced his McCulloch brand chainsaws to the world. But in the 1960s he shifted his focus when he decided to get into the real estate business. He purchased 26,000 acres of desert land for $75 an acre, near Lake Havasu, Arizona. He subdivided it, put it up for sale, and advertised it far and wide.

And nobody came.

It's no wonder. Lake Havasu is a hellhole of heat. The average high in July is 109 degrees. And it's way out in the middle of nowhere. Who in their right mind would want to buy land in such a barren furnace? McCulloch stood to lose a lot of money if he couldn't figure out how to attract prospective investors.

But rather than break out the snake oil and make a lot of lofty, empty promises to naive real estate investors, like so many promotional land developers were doing at that time, McCulloch made a fundamental assessment of his situation. And from that, he realized that in order to preserve his integrity and reputation for honesty, while turning a profit from land sales, he'd have to find a way to stimulate economic growth in his community of vacant lots.

So in 1964, he spent two million dollars to relocate his chainsaw factory from Los Angeles to Lake Havasu. Then he offered $600 cash bonuses to any employee who chose to follow his factory to this desert hellhole. And many took him up on the offer.

The presence of his factory, which churned out 3,200 chainsaws per day at its peak, provided something McCulloch could point to, when trying to sell land to potential investors. He could honestly promise that the area held great potential for growth, and that an investment in land would likely reap a decent profit in capital gains.

But still, McCulloch had difficulty attracting buyers. Land sales were slow, which got the chainsaw magnate fidgeting with various ideas for boosting sales.

Meanwhile, over 5,000 miles away in England, the City of London was facing a dilemma of its own. The London Bridge was falling down. Or, at least, it was sinking into the muddy bottom of the River Thames.

City officials determined they needed a new bridge, but rather than tear down the old one, they decided to auction it off. When McCulloch learned of this improbable auction, it started his chainsaw brain buzzing. He entered the auction and cut off all competitors with a whopping bid of $2.4 million.

Then, in true chainsaw style, he chopped the bridge up into blocks. Each block was marked with a number that cataloged its original position. He shipped the blocks to California via the Panama Canal, then trucked them 300 miles to Lake Havasu.

There the bridge was reassembled in the exact manner as it had stood, over the Thames. Only this time it was over a peninsula that jutted into Lake Havasu. Then McCulloch cut a channel beneath the bridge, transforming the peninsula into an island, and allowing the London Bridge to connect the shoreline to this island.

It took three years, from 1968 to 1971, to complete this bizarre endeavor. But now he had something to attract tourists and potential buyers, to his land. And it worked. From 1971 to 1978, free flights were offered, from distant cities to Lake Havasu. And many curious tourists took the offer, fascinated with the idea of seeing the incongruous spectacle of the London Bridge way out in the middle of the desert.

But part of the deal of a free flight was having to take a tour of the real estate McCulloch had for sale. And quite a few who took the tour liked what they saw and bought the land.

This was how Lake Havasu City, Arizona was born. McCulloch got his factory and bridge paid for, with profit from the sale of his land. And most importantly, the area developed and grew, as McCulloch had promised. Today Lake Havasu City boasts a population of over 57,000 happy, sunbaked citizens. It turns out, the land was a good investment for the original buyers.

If only the same could be said for all the other promotional land development schemes going on in those days. But sadly, most were a bust. They made good money for the land promoters, but the investors lost their shirts.

Perhaps I'm being polite. Some would argue they weren't just busts, they were scams. And if you've ever flown over remote areas of the Western United States, you may have noticed faint relics of these scams.

30,000 feet below your airline window seat, you may have detected an array of scribblings that resemble the tracings of ghost communities. Of many roads devoid of buildings, as if nuclear warfare had wiped away all civilization, except the pathways of motor vehicles from a long time ago.

These tracings are networks of old dirt roads that lead to nowhere. They were lineated and bulldozed by land scam artists posing as legitimate developers. In reality, they were promoters more than developers. They would flatten a reticulum of dirt avenues, then drive potential customers over the washboard roads, while boasting that soon these avenues would be paved, and a shopping mall would be built here, and a bank there, and a school over there, and so on.

They warned these potential investors that they'd better buy land soon. This was the sunbelt, after all, and people were migrating to the sunbelt in ever-increasing numbers. Soon all this real estate would be snatched up and built into great cities, and the price for a plot of dirt would rise like the dust devils that reached for the sky. So this was their golden opportunity to get in on the ground floor.

This sort of fraud was common in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. These days it seems to be time-shares, as well as fraudulent exit plans that falsely promise to get owners out of their time-share contracts. For an upfront fee, of course. But back when I was a kid, the scam was different. Scam artists would purchase vast tracts of land from ranchers, for a few dollars on the acre. Then they would subdivide it and clear cheap roads. They'd sell small, residential plots to their victims for thousands of dollars an acre, all the while promising them big returns on their investment.

But all too often the communities they promised to develop went undeveloped. And even when developed, with amenities like power and telephone lines, the land would often sit vacant for years, hosting nothing more than tumbleweeds and cacti. And the value of the property would plummet to a fraction of what the investors had put into it. Or if it went up, it was a slow creep that would take generations to produce any kind of decent capital gain.

Yes, below your airplane window, you might spot tracings of old land scams such as these, with colorful names like California City, Chamisa Ranches, Cochiti Lake, Paradise Hills, Rio Rancho, Silver Saddle Ranch and Club, Waterwood, and Whispering Pines. You won't see many buildings. Mainly you'll just see networks of dirt roads over dusty, unoccupied wilderness. Monuments to shattered dreams and pilfered life savings. Frauds.

But how can I accurately say they were frauds when much of what was done was legal? Not all the promoters were as crooked as Ned Warren. Nor were they as saintly as McCulloch. Many were somewhere in-between, walking a fine line that separated legal from illegal.

Perhaps not the best of ethics was used, in peddling their low-value land at highly inflated prices, but there is such a thing as caveat emptor. The buyer must beware, and exercise due diligence. When you're a buyer, never, ever plunk down your hard-earned nest egg without conducting exhaustive research. When you rely upon the convenience of a salesperson's pitches, charms, and lofty promises, you may end up paying dearly for that convenience.

As so many did.

Lake Riverside Estates was the name of the land scam my family got involved in, when I was 11 years old. We helped the sales team working that land development, by playing host, and catering to the suckers who nibbled on the bait we held out. There were six of us. My mother, my stepfather, two of my three sisters, my brother and I, all helped bait the hooks that the salesmen reeled in.

My stepfather got us involved in this scheme. He was a midget, so when I tell you about him, it will be a short story. But first, we have to deal with my other stepfather, and get that no-good-for-nothing bastard out of the way.

2: Oceanside

My mom and dad split up when I was a toddler. In fact I was so young, I can't remember them being together. Which saves me from remembering all the hellacious fights they got into, that my siblings sometimes talk about. I was the youngest of their five kids, and about seven years younger than my oldest sibling, Ronaele, and three years younger than my youngest sibling, Gene.

I was an afterthought child. An accident. In fact, if it wasn't for the Holy Trojans, I wouldn't be here.

Shortly after the big split, my mother married my dad's best friend. And this man was no good. My dad was a great guy, so how he could ever be friends with an asshole of this caliber, I'll never understand. The memory of this prick's name leaves me feeling disgusted whenever I utter or type it. Why give this schmuck any recognition, even if bad recognition? Well, because I want to write a story that is as close to accurate as possible.

So, okay, the asshole's name was Clancy.

Clancy molested some of my sisters, verbally abused us on a constant basis, and frequently uprooted us, by moving us from town to town. We suspect he may have been trying to stay one step ahead of the law, due to his proclivity for being a pedophile.

He and my mother often fought, sometimes violently, and in February 1969, their differences reached an irreconcilable climax. They separated, and eventually divorced. After they broke up, my mother couldn't afford to support us, so a diaspora followed. My 17-year-old sister, Ronaele, ran away from home and got involved with a military man in Texas. My 15-year-old sister Kathie, moved in with our grandparents. And since she and I were very close, I joined her in that household. Meanwhile, my 14-year-old sister, Cherie, along with my 13-year-old brother, Gene, were taken under the wing of an aunt and uncle.

At 14, Cherie was growing increasingly wild. During the summer of 1969 she ran away from my aunt and uncle's home and hitchhiked up to Canada. There she lived like a flower child, staying at communes and becoming amorous with various hippies and draft dodgers. One of them got her knocked up, and she suffered from an ectopic (tubal) pregnancy.

She was hospitalized, but the Canadian healthcare system wouldn't perform the surgery she needed, because she was not a Canadian citizen. My dad had to travel to Canada to rescue her. He brought her home to live with him in Washington state. But for some reason Cherie did not like our stepmother, Deah. Not long after she recovered from her ectopic pregnancy, she fled Deah and came back to Oceanside, California to live with our mother and us siblings.

That was in September of 1969, and by that time our mother had gainful employment, and had secured the return of Kathie, Gene, and me. So altogether, four out of five of her children had been brought back into her fold since the breakup of our family that occurred in February.

Ronaele returned briefly, in December 1969, with her military man. But not to live. She was still 17, and needed my mother's permission to get married. I remember those two were horny as hell. They would lock themselves in a bedroom for endless hours, while all kinds of frightening noises emanated from the room. Soon, my mother granted permission for their marriage, and off she went with her new husband. Over the next 22 years they would travel the world, have four children, achieve spectacular financial success, and then get divorced.

Ronaele never met our next stepfather, and never took part in the land scam that he involved us in. Which is too bad for her. We had a hell of a lot of fun with him.

Shortly after Ronaele got married, my sister Kathie ran away from home to make a go at living with our dad in Washington state. I was very jealous. Kathie was 16, and could get away with this. But at 10 years old, I was too young to decide which parent to live with, and was stuck with my mother. And not only was I jealous, but also sad. Kathie and I were very close, and I missed her terribly. She was almost like a mother to me, and filled certain voids my real mother left, and that children need to have.

Meanwhile, Clancy had never gotten over his divorce of my mother. He wanted her back. So he rented a small apartment right next to the small house in Oceanside that we were renting, and started wooing her. They managed to arrange a detente, and got on speaking terms. But to her credit, Mom balked at going back to him.

One day I was walking past Clancy's apartment, when he stopped me. He ordered me to come inside. I was afraid of him, so even though he wasn't my stepfather anymore, I did what I was told. He showed me a wastebasket that was full of trash, in the tiny bathroom of his miniature apartment, and he ordered me to empty it. Emptying the trash had been the family chore I was traditionally saddled with while growing up, so this was a task I knew all about.

I returned the empty wastebasket and stepped toward the door to leave. But Clancy stopped me again, and called me back.

Didn't I tell you to empty the trash?! he roared.

I did! I insisted.

He pointed into the wastebasket at a single, wadded-up piece of paper. I knew that piece of paper had not been in there when I returned the wastebasket, so how it manifested out of nowhere, I had no clue. I was dumbstruck.

Clancy scowled at me. You didn't do what I told you to do! he accused, with a taint of beer emanating from his breath. That means you have to be punished! He pointed at his bed, sprawling across the majority of his studio apartment floor. He ordered, You're going to get a spanking. I want you to pull down your pants and lay over the bed.

Pull down my pants?! I'd been spanked a few times before in my life, but nobody had ever instructed me to expose my derriere, for the accomplishment of the job. This seemed foreign to me. And frightening.

I stood frozen, not knowing what to do. Clancy issued the order again. But I remained frozen. So he sternly ordered the de-pantsing one more time. I didn't move. Hell, I was too afraid to move. A long pause. Everything felt awkward. Finally Clancy gave up. Get the hell out of here! he demanded.

That was one order he didn't have to issue twice. My frozen composure instantly melted and I quickly scurried away.

This incident was so bizarre, it has stood out in my mind ever since. For many years, I puzzled over it. Why had Clancy done this? But it wasn't until after I achieved adulthood, with a broader understanding of this world, that it finally dawned on me. The son-of-a-bitch was trying to molest me. He had surreptitiously tossed the wad of paper into the wastebasket, and then used that as a pretense to tell me to drop my pants. But not for punishment. I think what the creep really wanted was to fondle my young ass.

I've always felt glad that I didn't comply. I guess there can be merit to freezing in panic.

We lived on Myers Street, about three short blocks from the Pacific Ocean. It was a small, two-bedroom, one-bathroom house, with an attached garage, which had a loft in it. These days, the house we rented is worth over a million dollars, and rents for three or four thousand per month. But back then, when Oceanside wasn't so popular, the rent was much cheaper.

My mother wasn't as eager as Clancy to revive their old marriage. She was too busy dating other men, and playing the field. I think Clancy was helping her with the rent, because I don't know how else we could have afforded to live there. She worked as a nurse, but her job didn't pay much. And she was a piss-poor money manager, always profligate with her spending. She collected welfare, and we often got our food from an agricultural commodities program that offered free hand-outs to the destitute. Basically, our family was a charity case.

It was November 1969, and my mother had borrowed or scraped up enough cash for a large Thanksgiving feast. And in her eagerness to meet men, she got involved with a program at the nearby Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base, where she could invite unmarried servicemen over for a Thanksgiving meal.

Unfortunately for her, the two Marines who showed up were only about 20 years old, and too young for my 35-year-old mom. But my mom was very attractive, so they might have regarded her as a MILF. Just the same, no romance sparked between her and them.

But they were nice young men. I don't remember their names, so I'll just call them Dave and George. I remember being enamored with them, at the Thanksgiving table. That's because they revealed that they were soon going to deploy to Vietnam. I'd just seen the John Wayne movie, The Green Berets, and this film had left me infatuated with that controversial, Asian war.

The scene where Jim Hutton gets caught in a mantrap that swings his body onto a rack of impaling spikes left me especially fascinated, in a morbidly curious way. I'm sure I brought it up with these poor, frightened young men, while peppering them with all kinds of other impolite questions about their probability of surviving this conflict.

I was kindly told by my sisters to shut the hell up.

After dinner, Dave and George disappeared into the dark of the evening, with my two teenage sisters, hand-in-hand. It was then that they confessed a secret. They told my sisters they were conscientious objectors, and did not want to go to Vietnam. Gee, I sure hope my table talk about the horrors of war wasn't what sent them over the edge.

This was at a time when the anti-war movement was capturing the hearts of many young ladies, including my sisters. So they wanted to help these men avoid the fighting. And they made a secret arrangement. They proposed to