My dad always told the story of when he was a kid during the Depression there was an ad in the Tennessean newspaper for an air show at the airport. A fairly large crowd went to see the show when they spotted a truck in the distance driving toward them. When the truck arrived, a little old man got out and collected dimes for the show from all the spectators. He got back in his truck and drove away. The crowd waited and waited. Needless to say, no planes ever showed.
I had never heard of this story. Something similar happened in the rich suburb of Carmel Indiana, right out side of Indianapolis. Somehow the police department lost the only piece of evidence, a cellphone.The families of the perpetrators were wealthy and managed to get the creeps no jail time. One of the main perpetrators is now even a practicing attorney.
When the Williamson County director of public schools played the Nashville school board to get a raise at his current job and leave us hanging. Not really a ponzi scheme but was a shitty thing to do.
Ray Termini allegedly diverted millions in Medicaid money from his Connecticut-based nursing homes to fund Category 5 Records here in Nashville (repped Travis Tritt and several other notable acts). Bankrupted his company Haven Healthcare and ultimately was sued by Tritt
I drive by where that building once was every morning on my way to take my kid to school. And in my head, I still see the boarded up windows with what I think were parts of the US constitution and amendments written on them? I was very young when he was going through his legal troubles, but those are my memories of that building, and it stayed that way for, at least in my childhood brain, was a very long time.
Nashville shipping 100 hookers to Louisville during the civil war is kind of a bamboozle I guess. Cities still do similar things with homeless by offering them jail time or a ticket to another city. I used to see a lot homeless people who came here from other cities this way.
How about the lady on the East Nashville page who was a "plant consultant"? Some guy paid her $500 to pick out a plant for him and then she bait and switched him for a different plant.
Before Bridgestone Arena was called that, it was the Sommet Center. Until the founder of the Sommet Group was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 20 years.
I gotta give the nod to William "Boots" Del Biaggio who committed enough fraud to buy the controlling interest in the Nashville Predators. Only got 8 years for it too, almost worth the risk
I forgot about Sommet Group! If I remember correctly they were using client payroll funds in a Ponzi-esque manner. That's a great one. Seems like smaller businesses + stadium naming rights = suspicious behavior
I worked for Instacart after I lost my job after the Covid shutdowns. A lot of people got deactivated for pretty minor things so I can't see them getting away with that for too long.
Murder in Music City details the murder of a young babysitter by her mother, covered up by Mayor Briley because she was a Vandy nurse who regularly supplied narcotics to Nashville's elite. An innocent man served over 20 years for the crime. Every single corrupt Nashville politician got away with it, and no one but Clark was ever punished.
And when illustrious Mayor Megan Barry resigned in disgrace, we got Beverly Briley’s grandson David Briley as Mayor….and I heard from several reputable sources he was an entitled pr*#*k
They or another one like it set up in donelson plaza in the early 2010s, and I bought my first memory foam mattress from there, and it was pretty fantastic. They had some crazy looking stuff that you see on the regular at southeastern salvage, or when a Fictional South American drug lord’s home is raided and the goods are repossessed.
As someone who is currently working in SoCal 3 weeks a month this is crazy accurate. EVERYONE I meet says “You live in Nashville?! We’ve been looking to move there.”
There is currently one under investigation and in court. Google Mark Janbaksh. He is the previous owner of Automasters, and current owner of Plaza Mariachi in South Nashville. There’s about $30M on the line. Apparently he lied to banks about his assets to secure additional loans from banks and later filed bankruptcy so those banks were SOL and finally investigated him and his businesses. The FBI and the DOJ are involved at this point.
I see your submission and raise you HotChickens.com which was a restaurant (yes, it's name was a website address) and was run by Sammy Kershaw and Lorrie Morgan.
One of our most recent was the Barry Stokes ponzi scheme. Stokes was the founder of 1Point Solutions, a company that managed 401K plans for companies. He was charged in 2006 after clients found their 401K accounts were missing assets. The end tally was over $19 million embezzled from clients and their employees. He bought a lot of art with the money. I assume he figured that would not get seized. He was sentenced and ultimately died in prison.
Not really a fraud, but definitely a scheme: My dad told me once there was a plot to blow up the Percy Priest dam, and then the crew would go rob banks while the cops were busy with the dam explosion. Obviously didn't happen.
Never invested in ftx but man RIP for all that did! The corruption in crypto and even the actual stock market is insanely high. I can’t wait for the whole system to collapse
The biggest scam in the history of Nashville is convincing those rednecks that y’all actually produce music. It would honestly be pretty impressive except the ppl that go to Nashville for music or buy that trash y’all call music are toeing the 64-65 IQ line.
Those shitty festivals like the Taco Fest or Beer and Bacon. Charge a decent fee just to stand in lines just to have them run out of everything in an hour. They still sell like hotcakes so...
Paying to see a act that was so auto tuned, the live experience was poor. I was in another state when I saw the Justin Timberlake HBO special. It was similar to Elton John. I can imagine that having live performances that are as good or superior to a headset at home. Or your vehicle, etc. would help audiences not feel “scammed”.
My dad always told the story of when he was a kid during the Depression there was an ad in the Tennessean newspaper for an air show at the airport. A fairly large crowd went to see the show when they spotted a truck in the distance driving toward them. When the truck arrived, a little old man got out and collected dimes for the show from all the spectators. He got back in his truck and drove away. The crowd waited and waited. Needless to say, no planes ever showed.
This made me laugh. I like old stories like this!
Minnie Pearl Fried Chicken.
Now we are talking:
“Fortunes, Fiddles & Fried Chicken," by Bill Carey
What about that time all the football kids @ Brentwood academy raped the younger kids and the story just went away because their parents have money.
Sad…know a lot of people and their kids involved and it absolutely happend
This was so disgusting and disturbing
What the fuck
WHAT?! When did this happen?
Brentwood academy always follows their 1% tolerance policy. As long as you are in the 1% then you good . /s
Wasn't the judge who dismissed the case with prejudice connected to the BA board somehow?
Dayum! Hide yo kids & hide yo wife cause they rapin errybody out here!
I had never heard of this story. Something similar happened in the rich suburb of Carmel Indiana, right out side of Indianapolis. Somehow the police department lost the only piece of evidence, a cellphone.The families of the perpetrators were wealthy and managed to get the creeps no jail time. One of the main perpetrators is now even a practicing attorney.
Dave Ramsey
Dave Ramsey getting his table flipped over in the afterlife
When someone says “better than I deserve” I throw up a little
Being a POS as a white “Christian”is not equivalent to a fraud scheme.
Tennessee Waltz was a scandal. The Ray Blanton thing wasn’t a scam, but a big enough deal that they made a movie out of it,
Don’t forget Tarnished Shield. When the TBI arrested a bunch of law enforcement in Cookville for running cocaine. Which they still do.
https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/stories/2008/may/tennesseewaltz_050208
And a song to the tune of Chattanooga Choo choo called “Pardon Me Ray”.
What was the Ray Blanton movie?
When the Williamson County director of public schools played the Nashville school board to get a raise at his current job and leave us hanging. Not really a ponzi scheme but was a shitty thing to do.
Don’t you remember the murder on music row?
Ray Termini allegedly diverted millions in Medicaid money from his Connecticut-based nursing homes to fund Category 5 Records here in Nashville (repped Travis Tritt and several other notable acts). Bankrupted his company Haven Healthcare and ultimately was sued by Tritt
Megan berry saga wasn’t full flushed out still a bunch people don’t know about
Somewhere on the state email servers there are naked pictures of our former mayor taken by her security detail then emailed to his state account.
Tony Alamo
I remember this here as a kid in the z80s
This is the correcct answer. For background:
I just heard this story. Nashville has a ton of cults, huh?
I used to work at oceanway - lots of stories about Tony Alamo still floating around over there.
I drive by where that building once was every morning on my way to take my kid to school. And in my head, I still see the boarded up windows with what I think were parts of the US constitution and amendments written on them? I was very young when he was going through his legal troubles, but those are my memories of that building, and it stayed that way for, at least in my childhood brain, was a very long time.
The fake parking guys. $20 to park here and it’s The edge of a dingy warehouse lot they are not associated with
My parents got got by one these people when parking for a Preds game. Their car was towed too.
The county clerk taking "tips".
Bill Boner
Yep, the Boner bridge that was never built but the money was all gone.
Nashville shipping 100 hookers to Louisville during the civil war is kind of a bamboozle I guess. Cities still do similar things with homeless by offering them jail time or a ticket to another city. I used to see a lot homeless people who came here from other cities this way.
This is how Atlanta combatted the large homeless population prior to the Olympics in 96, they shipped many of them to various cities.
Wow do you think this still happens?
Check into Sheriff Fate Thomas!
No- don’t. That man used to feed us all free barbeque
I couldn’t find anything spill* the 🍵 lol
Buy one pair of boots, get two pairs free!
I’ve always seen the billboards, but never checked into it until now. This is what the website says:
such a steal!
I can never even find one pair of boots I like there, much less three.
*for $450 🤣
The Janet March murder
Auto Masters.
Not just Nashville but the Haslam/Pilot trucking scandal was pretty big.
That’s Knoxville
How about the lady on the East Nashville page who was a "plant consultant"? Some guy paid her $500 to pick out a plant for him and then she bait and switched him for a different plant.
You're going to have to tell me more about this. Who would pay someone $500 to pick out a fucking plant? 😵💫
Fucking Britt
Wait what?!
Is that the same lady who used to sell (or still is IDK) crazily overpriced not at all rare plants on Facebook marketplace?
The underground Beanie Baby ring at Furniture Warehouse.
Ok, I have to hear more of this
Hahahaha what?! 🤣
That first sentence is just gorgeous and I want it to be some sort of anomaly, from the
What about the Dickson highway robbers aka the 23 judicial drug task force on I 40 stealing peoples cash .
Yep, it was the other “Lakewood”, but worse.
Need to know more about this. I just always remember them staked out on 1-40 all the time. I’m that one section
Bill Lee. Seriously look up the amount of money that dude has raked in since being governor. I'm surprised the US Treasury hasn't jumped him.
Pretty sure our housing market is some kind of scam.
Isn't the private prison industry based out of Nashville. Hard to think of a bigger scheme then that.
Corecivic, formerly Corrections Corporation of America.
East Natty staying weird
HCA in the 90s keeping two sets of books and then in the mid 2000s with their insider trading lawsuit
And now one of the players is a U.S. Senator in Florida:
Schrushy! My FIL was the interim CEO after all of that went down. It was insane.
Before Bridgestone Arena was called that, it was the Sommet Center. Until the founder of the Sommet Group was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 20 years.
Yes, the Sommet Group.
It was like our local Enron
I gotta give the nod to William "Boots" Del Biaggio who committed enough fraud to buy the controlling interest in the Nashville Predators. Only got 8 years for it too, almost worth the risk
8 years in federal, too.
There was the time those idiots set off a bomb on J. Percy Priest dam trying to flood Nashville. So they could rob a bank.
Nutty. I hadn't heard that one before! Thanks for sharing
Both Nashville Predators related: Boots Del Biaggio And Sommet Group
I forgot about Sommet Group! If I remember correctly they were using client payroll funds in a Ponzi-esque manner. That's a great one. Seems like smaller businesses + stadium naming rights = suspicious behavior
Instacart shoppers who add items to your order then turn around and return them for $ at the store.
um what? you have to approve any additions to your order. you can't be charged for anything you didn't add or approve.
Thank you for the heads up. I had no idea this was happening.
I worked for Instacart after I lost my job after the Covid shutdowns. A lot of people got deactivated for pretty minor things so I can't see them getting away with that for too long.
The McLean Ponzi scheme was a pretty big deal, if you count Murfreesboro. Not the biggest I’m sure, but the first that springs to mind.
Literally anything involving Ray Blanton
Murder in Music City details the murder of a young babysitter by her mother, covered up by Mayor Briley because she was a Vandy nurse who regularly supplied narcotics to Nashville's elite. An innocent man served over 20 years for the crime. Every single corrupt Nashville politician got away with it, and no one but Clark was ever punished.
And when illustrious Mayor Megan Barry resigned in disgrace, we got Beverly Briley’s grandson David Briley as Mayor….and I heard from several reputable sources he was an entitled pr*#*k
Wasn’t there a furniture store (on Thompson Lane?) that was “going out of business” for 5 years?
It is actually out of business now for real lol but it was going out of business twice a year for 25 years.
Was that John F Lawhon? Seemed like longer than 5 years.
I thought that was what all furniture stores did lol
Yep.
They or another one like it set up in donelson plaza in the early 2010s, and I bought my first memory foam mattress from there, and it was pretty fantastic. They had some crazy looking stuff that you see on the regular at southeastern salvage, or when a Fictional South American drug lord’s home is raided and the goods are repossessed.
Tourism boards telling Californians that Nashville is more liberal than Los Angeles
As someone who is currently working in SoCal 3 weeks a month this is crazy accurate. EVERYONE I meet says “You live in Nashville?! We’ve been looking to move there.”
When did this start? What a blatant lie. I wonder how many moved here and quickly realized they were duped.
Bob McLean
The pool on the roof of McGavock.
The weird sex stuff on the golf courses behind McGavock in the late 70s.
Bob McLean
Rent in east Nashville
Mayor Beverly Briley - Murder in Music City, the book is definitely an interesting read.
The new stadium is going to set a record for public funds spent on a stadium and the mayor has convinced the public that it’s free
There is currently one under investigation and in court. Google Mark Janbaksh. He is the previous owner of Automasters, and current owner of Plaza Mariachi in South Nashville. There’s about $30M on the line. Apparently he lied to banks about his assets to secure additional loans from banks and later filed bankruptcy so those banks were SOL and finally investigated him and his businesses. The FBI and the DOJ are involved at this point.
Robert W. McLean. The Bernie Madoff of TN. There was an American Greed episode about it. Fascinating and sad.
Pathways Community Corrections
Panhandlers — you all should know what I’m talking about
Nashville hot chicken
I see your submission and raise you HotChickens.com which was a restaurant (yes, it's name was a website address) and was run by Sammy Kershaw and Lorrie Morgan.
Healthsouth Richard Scrushy, Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn
I thought Scrushy was Birmingham? Although no doubt he was/is a scumbag.
Biggest scam is convincing anyone it’s a good idea to live here and pay these expensive prices for dog crap apartments and houses 🤠
One of our most recent was the Barry Stokes ponzi scheme. Stokes was the founder of 1Point Solutions, a company that managed 401K plans for companies. He was charged in 2006 after clients found their 401K accounts were missing assets. The end tally was over $19 million embezzled from clients and their employees. He bought a lot of art with the money. I assume he figured that would not get seized. He was sentenced and ultimately died in prison.
There was the McClean mess in Murfreesboro 10-15 years ago:
Not Nashville but there was the Rutherford County Sheriff who only allowed his private brand of ecigs in the jail.
Larry Cherry. And the renovation of the olde music city mix factory into a British Night club circa 2000.
Religion.
Bill Boner
NFL FOOTBALL STADIUM DEALS!
I came here to say this very thing! Huge scam!
It’s probably more like $50B, which is $26B more then Enron. Crazy.
Seriously??? The new stadium of course!!!!!
Has me wondering what Nashville’s priorities really are
Opry Mills
Megan Barry
"Ghetto"
The music industry.
The music industry
I'm going to drop the name "W.T. Hardison" here and let other longtime Nashvillians provide the color commentary.
Not really a fraud, but definitely a scheme: My dad told me once there was a plot to blow up the Percy Priest dam, and then the crew would go rob banks while the cops were busy with the dam explosion. Obviously didn't happen.
Never invested in ftx but man RIP for all that did! The corruption in crypto and even the actual stock market is insanely high. I can’t wait for the whole system to collapse
The biggest scam in the history of Nashville is convincing those rednecks that y’all actually produce music. It would honestly be pretty impressive except the ppl that go to Nashville for music or buy that trash y’all call music are toeing the 64-65 IQ line.
Those shitty festivals like the Taco Fest or Beer and Bacon. Charge a decent fee just to stand in lines just to have them run out of everything in an hour. They still sell like hotcakes so...
Chad Fox mentioned here yet?
music row
Paying to see a act that was so auto tuned, the live experience was poor. I was in another state when I saw the Justin Timberlake HBO special. It was similar to Elton John. I can imagine that having live performances that are as good or superior to a headset at home. Or your vehicle, etc. would help audiences not feel “scammed”.
Bernie Madoff
How is this Nashville?
Health insurance industry