(Photo courtesy The Willison Herald: Jarvis Green and Nathian Hossley)
A picture in the Sept. 17, 2011 edition of The Williston Herald—the local daily for rural Williams County in North Dakota—shows former NFL player and Louisiana native Jarvis Green standing should-to-shoulder with his buddy and business partner, Nathian Hossley. The two are smiling, each flashing one of the two Super Bowl champion rings Green earned as a defensive end for the New England Patriots.
“Ex Pat helping bring man camp to Watford City,” reads the headline above the picture. An accompanying article enthusiastically describes the 80,000-square-foot “man camp” Hossley, Green and four other Louisiana investors were building for oilfield workers drawn to the area’s lucrative Bakken shale play.
But less than a year after that glowing article appeared, the Watford City project was out of money, the man camp sat half finished and the one-time partners were battling each other in court. Hossley filed suit first, alleging his former partners tried to cut him out of the deal he’d put together.
But Green tells a very different story about why the man camp went under. He says Hossley preyed on unsuspecting wealthy victims and used money from the business ventures he cooked up to fund a lavish lifestyle.
“Everywhere we’d go he had $10,000 in his pocket,” says Green, who has lost much of the fortune he earned during seven seasons with the Patriots and is now juggling a construction job with trying to launch a seafood business. “We’d go to gentlemen’s clubs and he’d be throwing money around and I was like, ‘Dude, where are you getting all this money?’”
Lawsuits are not unusual in the construction business, where one-time partners routinely wind up in court battling over completion dates, change orders and the timely payment of subcontractors. But with Hossely, there’s a disturbing pattern of deals gone bad. The Watford City project is just one of many botched projects to result in litigation. Among the most frequent allegations that show up in court records: He stiffed subs, left job sites unfinished, and defaulted on lines of credit—and those are just the complaints that have been filed this year.
Other civil suits date back to the mid-2000s. There were criminal cases, too. Twice Hossley has pleaded guilty to federal charges. Both times he went to prison.
Hossley could not be reached for comment, and the attorney representing him in several ongoing lawsuits, Steve Duplechain, declines comment. But those who have done business with Hossley say they wish they had known about his background before getting involved with him. Perhaps, they say, it would have saved them a lot of time and money.
“I remember being introduced to him, and he seemed like a nice guy,” says Chakesha Scott, president of Impact Charter School in Baker, where Hossley’s construction company did concrete and asphalt work and is now being sued for nearly $700,000. “But he’s not. He just lies. They need to lock him up.”
TWO FRAUD CONVICTIONS
Legal troubles have dogged Nathian Hossley for much of his adult life. He graduated from Covington High School in 1984 and the University of Southwestern Louisiana—now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette—in 1991. Just four years later he was arrested in Lafayette with his brother, Henry Hossley, on charges of theft by fraud. According to court documents, the pair was accused of making more than $100,000 worth of purchases using bogus credit cards.
Nathian Hossley worked out a plea agreement with the U.S. Attorney’s office. In return for his cooperation, which reportedly helped the FBI bust the California ring supplying the fraudulent cards, he was sentenced to just one year in prison.
In 2002 Hossley again found himself on the wrong side of the law, when he was indicted on four counts of fraud for making false statements on a loan application with Home Bank in Lafayette. He again struck a deal with prosecutors, pleading guilty to a single fraud count, and was sentenced to eight months in prison, court records show.
Jarvis Green didn’t know any of this when he met Hossley a couple of years later. By then, Hossley was out of prison and had relocated from the Lafayette area to Baton Rouge. Green, who was then playing for the Patriots and jetting back and forth between the East Coast and his home base in Louisiana, recalls first meeting Hossley in the Mallard Lakes subdivision, where both had homes.
“He would come over and pull up in his nice car with his Rolex watch and jewelry, and he befriended me,” Green says. “At the time he was building the biggest home in the neighborhood.”
Hossley talked a good talk, but he backed up his bravado with quality workmanship, according to Green, who hired Hossley to repair his mother’s home in Donaldsonville after Hurricane Katrina, and also to do some work on his own house. Green was so pleased with the outcome, he hired Hossley to help him and his twin brother renovate an old bus station in Donaldsonville that they turned it into a now-defunct sports bar and grill.
“He had that gift of vision,” Green says of Hossley. “If you go look at that building now it’s the best building on the avenue. He did all it. That why I had confidence in him.”
After the successful renovation of the sports bar, Hossley talked Green into investing in the construction company—First Millennium Construction—he had formed in 2004 with his wife, Sarah Hossley. The company had done well capitalizing on the post-Katrina reconstruction boom, and Hossley needed capital to expand. Once Green came on board, the firm got certified as a vendor with Walmart Corp. and landed several gigs working on new Walmart construction sites.
In 2010, in the midst of working on a Walmart project, Hossley pitched Green on developing the man camp in northwest North Dakota, Green says. North Dakota was booming due the huge oil and natural gas reserves underneath the Bakken shale formation that were suddenly recoverable through hydraulic fracturing. But the area desperately needed housing for its itinerant workforce. Hossley proposed developing an 80,000-square-foot lodging facility for Watford City with supporting commercial development to follow.
“He was bragging about how well the company was doing and asked me if I wanted to go in half with him,” Green says. “He said, ‘Give me $250,000.’ I ended up giving him $1.6 million over two years.”
Hossely rounded up several other local investors as well—Steven Kent II, and his wife, Jana Kent, who own a number of companies in south Louisiana; Gerard Smith, the Kents’ longtime associate and owner of Kent Materials in Port Allen; and local restaurateur Wayne Stabiler. Green invested more than $1.6 million in the venture, according to court documents. The Kents and Stabiler together invested some $4 million, court records show.
Within months, however, the project was out of money and Hossley had filed suit against his partners, accusing the Kents, Smith and Stabiler of conspiring to cut him out of the deal—thereby undermining his ability to borrow money—and making decisions in secret that led to the project’s demise.
In court documents of their own, however, the defendants said Hossley failed to maintain or provide adequate documentation of expenditures. They went on to allege that he falsified invoices and instructed subcontractors to inflate their invoices to the company, then spent the extra funds on personal expenses—including personal credit card bills.
The case never went to trial. Just four months after the initial court action was filed, the Kents, Smith and Stabiler settled with Hossley. They decline to discuss the matter, citing the agreement. Not long after the settlement was signed, a Massachusetts investor bought the man camp project and completed it.
Green, meanwhile, was embroiled in a legal battle of his own with Hossley. It began when his attorney, Richard Mary, sent Hossley a demand letter for the $1.6 million Green says he was owed. Hossely responded by suing Green, accusing him of making “false representations concerning Hossley’s honesty,” and “misappropriating funds from the private lending source on the project,” among other things.
“The result of the misstatements, defamatory statements and accusations by Green caused the collapse of the entire series of projects,” Hossley’s court documents say.
Green denies the allegations in his own court filings and says it was Hossley who misappropriated funds, withdrawing more than $1 million from the bank accounts that were used to support the project without Green’s knowledge or consent.
“Mr. Green has no knowledge as to how the above sum was spent by Hossley,” the lawsuit reads.
Green now says he believes Hossley used that money to pay for a variety of luxury expenses, including an RV that he purchased to drive around North Dakota. Green says he tried to get to the bottom of what he characterizes as questionable transactions with the other partners before the deal collapsed, but it was too late.
“I was nervous and I kept telling the Kents, ‘You gotta check the books,’” Green says. “They said, ‘You mean to tell me your partner is stealing?’ And I said, ‘I have common sense and he has an unlimited amount of cash.’”
No action on Green’s case has been taken since January, according to court records. Green’s attorney says to file additional measures at this point “just seems like it would be throwing good money after bad. … At this point it’s just a question of whether my client will get anything back.”
‘HE PREYED UPON YOUNG ATHLETES’
Green may be the best known of Hossely’s former business associates to wind up fighting him in court, but he is not the only one. Nor is he the only former NFL player to become entangled with Hossley. Michael Clayton, a retired Tampa Bay Buccaneers wide receiver who played for LSU in the early 2000s, is another. He’s suing Hossley for more than $300,000.
According to that lawsuit, Hossley talked Clayton into investing in First Millennium Construction to help it fulfill a contract Hossley said he had for several home weatherization projects. The contract was through a U.S. Department of Energy-sponsored program called SMILE that sought to improve the energy efficiency of homes in low-income neighborhoods. Hossley told Clayton he had several contracts lined up and that Clayton would get a 25% share of the profits from the contracts in return for his investment, court documents say. But the money never materialized, and litigation ensued.
In court documents, Hossley’s attorney says First Millennium never made any guarantees that the project would be profitable nor did it agree to make any payments in the event the SMILE work wasn’t profitable. But Clayton’s attorney says a paper trail of emails and contracts proves otherwise.
“An obligation existed to repay to Michael Clayton Enterprises the full amount of its investment in the SMILE project undertaken by First Millennium Construction,” court documents say.
The case went to trial in June in U.S. District Court in New Orleans. No ruling has been issued yet, but Clayton’s lawyer says it’s more than mere coincidence that Hossley is fighting two former NFL players in court.
“He preyed upon young athletes, guys who are fresh out of college,” New Orleans-based attorney Joseph McMahon says. “They thought they were making sound investments, and unfortunately they weren’t.”
In recent months, the lawsuits against Hossley have begun to stack up. In January, a 2009 case against the businessman and First Millennium over nearly $600,000 in unfinished work on a Head Start center in Jefferson Parish was reopened to force Hossley to attend arbitration hearings. Court records show that for more than two years he failed to appear, as had been agreed upon in a 2013 settlement agreement.
Also in January, Baton Rouge-based H&E Equipment Services sued Hossley and First Millennium for failing to pay a nearly $96,000 balance on an open line of credit to lease construction equipment. Hossley has denied those allegations as well, and is fighting the matter in court. H&E declines to comment.
In April, Bouma Construction sued First Millennium and Hossley for breach of contract over work the firm did at the charter school in Baker. According to allegations contained in court documents, First Millennium “failed to properly install or complete asphalt paving, facility striping, insulation, curbing, topsoil placement, site excavation, gate installation, concrete demolition and construction of drainage structures, sidewalks, a fire lane, the parking lot etc.” The company also allegedly failed to pay subcontractors at least $600,000.
“It’s a mess,” says Scott, the school president and CEO. “[Bouma] finally sent another sub out to fix what First Millennium did not do and they repaired the parking lot, but it looks very patchwork. It looks like it’s 10 years old, and we just moved in a year ago.”
In court documents, First Millennium again denies the allegations. A trial is set for January 2017.
More recently, the Capital Area Transit System began pursuing First Millennium for defaulting on a contract to install 30 bus shelters along CATS routes. The agency paid the firm nearly $122,000 of the total $126,690 it was owed, even though only 20 of the 30 prefabricated shelters were installed. It is unclear why First Millennium did not complete the work, but CATS has since filed a claim with its surety company, according to a CATS spokesperson. First Millennium’s attorney declines to comment.
Hossley has also had legal problems in areas outside the construction sector. In October 2014, he and several partners opened Spice Bistro in the Panache Plaza Shopping Center at 8342 Perkins Road. According to press reports at the time, the restaurant promised to serve upscale, updated versions of classic Louisiana dishes.
Just six months later, however, Spice closed, and Hossley and his co-owners abandoned the 5,000-square-foot space, leaving more than $63,000 in unpaid rent, according to a lawsuit filed in June by the shopping center’s owner.
In a related suit filed in September, Sysco sued the restaurant and Hossley for more than $11,000 worth of food and supplies that were never paid for. As of early October, Hossley had not been served with the suit because he could not be located, according to an attorney for Sysco.
It’s hard to say for sure where Hossley is living, as he defaulted on the mortgage of his mansion at 21828 Turkey Creek Drive. Last December, Pennymac Holdings sued him and Sara Hossley for $1.35 million to enforce a promissory note on the home dating from 2008. In January, the sheriff issued a sale and seizure notice. But Hossley subsequently sold the house for $2.1 million and repaid the mortgage company. In August, the notice of seizure and sale was canceled.
In the midst of it all, the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s office issued a warrant for Hossley’s arrest for allegedly writing three bad checks totaling nearly $3,000. The warrant was recalled a week later after Hossley paid the money back.
A WARNING TO OTHERS
Business Report could not locate Hossley for this story, and his attorney declines to make him available or divulge where he is living. Green thinks he’s now in Orange Beach, Alabama, with his family, but that could not be verified. Eventually, though, he’ll potentially be forced to show up for court.
While the various suits against him make their way through the legal system, Green is trying to move on with his life. He’s doing construction work for Aeco Interiors in New Orleans and also trying to start a seafood distribution business. Earlier this year, he worked briefly for Rouses Supermarket, selling shrimp and doing seafood demos in the chain’s grocery stores throughout south Louisiana.
It’s not what a former Super Bowl champion imagined a decade ago he’d be doing as he approached middle age. But times change, and Green concedes he made some bad decisions when he was riding high. He doesn’t blame Hossley for all of them, though he does believe the money he lost in the Watford City deal helped lead to the breakup of his marriage, which also set him back financially.
Looking back on it, Green thinks he may have been suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, brain damage caused by repetitive concussions or head injuries from his football playing days.
“I was so naïve,” he says. “After I left football I was very cloudy. That’s where all the CTE stuff started coming up. My attention span was bad. I couldn’t read things for more than five minutes.
One of the casualties of Green’s problems has been the Jarvis Green Foundation, which once hosted wine tasting fundraisers to help support single mothers from low-income families. It had just $725 in assets at the end of 2013, according to the most recent IRS 990 report that was available. Green hopes to eventually grow it again, but for now the foundation has to take a back seat to his efforts to grow his nascent business.
Still, Green is not bitter. Nor, he says, is he broke. He has a comfortable living and is happy with the new opportunities he is trying to carve for himself. But he also has something of a mission—to spread his cautionary tale among young athletes, who still have fortunes to burn and mistakes to avoid.
“The biggest thing I tell younger athletes is to dot your I’s and cross your T’s and ask more questions,” Green says. “I was naïve not to ask more questions. I tell a lot of players that now—not to let all that talk fool you. It’s not real. It’s a fairy tale.”
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The post Despite two fraud convictions, First Millennium’s Nathian Hossley convinced NFL players, prominent businesspeople and government agencies to fork over millions of dollars. Now they’re all fighting to get their money back. appeared first on Baton Rouge Business Report.