Look at me, look at me.
I want you to be man to man
with me right now.
Goldberg: This is no ordinary traffic stop.
Price: It's almost like I think the Lord
wanted the story to be told.
Goldberg: You think?
Central Georgia, a landscape dotted
with small towns and country roads,
is just about as far away from Wall Street
as a person can possibly get --
that is, until the entrance of Aubrey Lee Price,
a small-town pastor who seemed to be a miracle worker
at investing money.
Smith: This is really growing fast.
Goldberg: But was it God's will or Brother Lee's?
He was a preacher and a genuine, honest, open person.
What's not to trust about Lee Price?
Mosley: Essentially, Aubrey Lee Price was a chef.
He was cooking the books. He was stirring the numbers.
Yocum: Just not everybody has their pastor
on the FBI's Most Wanted list.
Cross: Within a couple of months,
found out that I lost everything.
I literally fell to my knees, just screaming "No, no, no!"
$40 million was stolen.
Smith: Goes back to what my mother says --
"Don't cry over spilled milk."
But what Mama didn't know -- that was a lot of milk.
He just up and vanishes.
Juliano: And he goes, "I'm one of the most wanted men in America --
Aubrey Lee Price."
Only God knows the real story.
Goldberg: And now, you're about to.
Was he out to save a town or con a town?
And where is he today?
Well, you'll find out,
after a lot of fake IDs, fake suicide,
and a bunch of other fake stuff.
I'm Whoopi Goldberg, and this is "The Con."
-- Captions by VITAC --
♪♪
[ Church choir singing ]
♪♪
We need someone with a divine understanding
of how con artists operate.
That's where my girl Laci Mosley comes in.
She's not just a scam expert, she is a scam goddess.
Aubrey Lee Price is this clean-cut, shiny,
trustworthy pastor of a small town.
We're not talking about a televangelist
or somebody that you call in.
He's established as a trusted member of the community.
Everyone knows him.
Which is why this story is so unbelievable.
♪♪
Yocum: I live in Griffin, Georgia,
and Georgia is in the Bible Belt.
You can not go anywhere without people saying,
"Have a blessed day," or "Bless this, bless that."
It's just the way it rolls down here in the South.
Goldberg: For a new pastor in search of a congregation,
you couldn't do much better than god-fearing Griffin, Georgia,
so in 1998, Aubrey Lee Price was blessed
to make this town his home.
Yocum: Well, of course, when we first met Lee,
he was new to the church.
Lee was brought in as our pastor.
He was very compassionate.
He was youthful. He was energetic.
He had a great connection with God,
which you have to have that, and he was such a family man.
He had a young family, three children.
And, of course, I was the Sunday school teacher
to his children.
You know, I got to know him pretty good through that.
We'd get together for barbecues and things like that,
so we became friends.
He had such a good heart.
Mosley: At this point, Aubrey Lee Price
is deeply steeped in the community.
People trust him for praise and worship,
but he's also someone that people believe is smart --
smart enough to deal with their finances
or give them advice
or help them in more ways than just being a pastor.
Goldberg: He's a dual service advisor,
spiritual and financial,
soul-saving and life savings.
He had a way with taking small amounts of money
and building 'em up into big amounts of money
through his investments.
Several of the people at church had invested money in him,
and they said, oh, Lee was getting them
way, way better interest rates on stuff
than what was going on
in the regular commercial banking world.
And so I talked to Lee about it.
I called him, I notified him, and I said,
"Lee, I've got some money, and I need to invest it,
and I'm afraid to invest it with people I don't know."
He said that he would do it.
I wholeheartedly trusted him because I'd known him so long,
and he took my money
and set up an account that I could track online,
and that's what happened.
And I wasn't the only one.
There was his family members, many friends,
and many members from the church.
And other people who just knew Lee, they invested as well.
Goldberg: As testaments of Lee's good fortune spread,
it was not long before Lee had hundreds of clients
and a portfolio worth millions of dollars,
and he was highly favored by some big fish.
Smith: In 2002, three years before my retirement goal
was gonna be reached,
I met Lee Price.
I went into his office,
and I found him to be a very nice gentleman.
He was soft-spoken, very clean-cut.
He wasn't selling me anything.
I told him what my goals were, and we had a great conversation.
We talked about his involvement with church, as a pastor.
We talked about his wife's mission trips.
He just seemed like he was a genuine,
honest, open person that was just a good guy.
I was satisfied with his openness,
and, uh, over the next several years,
my wife and I had invested a half a million dollars.
Goldberg: As the money grew,
so did the complexity of Lee's investments.
He was soon brokering multimillion-dollar deals
on behalf of clients all over the state of Georgia.
Cross: In the early 2000s,
I was in real estate for 15 years
in and around Atlanta.
Things were going so well financially,
I started a food truck.
It was very successful.
My wife and I would joke that it was like,
"Man, we are, like, printing money here on this truck.
This is awesome."
I actually met Lee from my financial advisor.
Lee got excited about stuff, you know,
and then I would be like, "Okay, it sounds great.
You know, wow, this is exciting."
Lee talked me into starting with the IRA first
and then moving the rest of the money later.
Initially, the money that I invested did fine,
and it all seemed very normal.
Goldberg: True to form, Lee's fancy financial moves pay off,
and his investors' faith is rewarded
with some modest returns.
We would have monthly meetings online.
You would literally see the numbers bouncing up and down.
I mean, it was like a meeting with your financial advisor,
with all the data.
Yocum: I didn't know anything
about the investment world or the money.
I just trusted him to be taking care of my money
like he was doing for everybody else.
I mean, he was even handling his own mother and father's money,
so I had no reason to think that anything would go wrong.
Goldberg: For Lee and his investors,
everything seemed to be going according to God's plan.
But in 2008... We've got a problem now.
...the gates of Hell opened,
and the markets crashed overnight.
[ Thud echoes ]
Reporter: Lehman Brothers got caught in this financial phenomenon.
[ Reporters' voices overlapping ]
2008 was really turbulent, you know, with finances,
but somehow, the way that Lee invested our money seemed sound.
It seemed to be doing well,
even in the light of what was going on.
It seemed that Lee knew what he was doing.
Smith: I watched the quarterly statements grow every quarter,
and I'm thinking, "Well, this is pretty good."
It's a little bit better than what the Dow Jones is doing,
which you would expect.
And then it got a lot better.
And then I'm looking at these numbers --
they don't look that real anymore, you know?
This is really growing fast.
Yocum: Well, I have a friend who was very big --
She was a CPA, and she was very big into investments,
and she said,
"I don't know how Lee is getting you this kind of interest."
So she said, "Can you put me in contact with him?"
And next thing I know,
she was investing some of her money with Lee.
Goldberg: So far, Lee has been a steady hand
through some rough financial waters,
and his latest deal was about to make waves of its own.
Cross: I remember a specific phone call
that he was talking about purchasing a bank.
You know, I remember thinking that was kind of a --
kind of a weird thing to invest in.
As an average American, I am stumped at --
at the thought of even buying a bank.
How do you buy a bank?
That just doesn't feel like something
that you can pick up, like a shirt
or a pair of sneakers at the store.
Like, "Hey, it's Tuesday. Let's buy a financial institution."
Every morning, I wake up and watch the TV show on business.
There's banks failing right and left.
A hundred failed last week,
and a couple hundred before that.
I said, "Lee, you're crazy."
Goldberg: Come on. Buying a bank at the height of a banking crisis?
Even for a man of God, that's quite a leap of faith.
♪♪
Goldberg: In late December of 2010,
pastor-turned-investor Aubrey Lee Price
doubled down on his "Aw, shucks" persona
and decided he was gonna save a small town
by rescuing their local bank.
Cross: You know, I remember thinking that was kind of a --
kind of a weird thing to invest in.
It seemed like you should invest in stocks and bonds
or, you know, stuff like that.
Goldberg: How small town was the small-town bank?
Take a look for yourself.
The Montgomery Bank and Trust
is on the corner of Lee and Gum Street
in Ailey, Georgia --
population 423, and that's during rush hour.
Cross: I was concerned, so I called Lee, and Lee said,
this bank was about to close
and meant everything to this town,
so by saving this bank, we are gonna save jobs,
and it's gonna be great for the people of that town.
It's gonna be great for us,
and it was impossible for this to fail.
Lee's judgment and his advice
always created a lot of wealth for the fund,
but nobody thought the next step
would be a failing bank in Central Georgia.
But he was bound and determined,
out of probably arrogance and pride,
that he was gonna make this work.
Hofland: Lee really enjoyed doing this kind of work.
He was really excited about finding ways to make money.
And he really thought that he could fix this bank.
So he takes $11 million of money
that has come from investors in the community and all around,
and this man purchased a bank.
Hofland: Lee was really excited
about all the possibilities with this bank,
but once he signed on the dotted line,
he saw that there were so many problems with this bank --
that it was bleeding money.
It would be like buying a boat
knowing that there were a few little holes in the boat,
but once they pulled the boat out of the water,
realizing that it didn't just have one or two holes in it,
but it had hundreds of holes in the bottom of the boat.
Aubrey Lee Price put himself in an overwhelming position.
He had taken people's money,
but this bank that he purchased was losing money.
So Aubrey Lee Price decided to take the funds
right from the bank
and essentially gamble it on the stock market by day trading,
hoping that that would bring in some more income.
Goldberg: Hold up, I'm having a premonition,
'cause I can see where this is going.
Unfortunately, it did not.
Hofland: He just was not thinking clearly.
Lee Price keeps losing more money,
so he throws good money after bad money,
and it just keeps happening.
And then on the other side, he's being told,
"Hey, these other loans that are out
that the bank didn't pay before,
you gotta pay back those loans."
He just was spiraling out of control
and further and further down into an abyss.
Goldberg: With the bank sinking
and dragging his investors' fund down with it,
Lee began a frantic shell game
to create the illusion that all was well.
He was moving money around like it was going on tour
with the band from the Titanic.
Essentially, Aubrey Lee Price was a chef.
He was cooking the books.
He was stirring the numbers.
He was frying the figures.
Nothing that he was sharing with people was actually true.
Cross: There was this one statement that,
you know, had a pretty significant drop,
and Lee said, "Don't worry if I --
you know, if I can't make this up for you in the next --
you know, by the next statement, I will make you whole.
I'll personally put that money back in your account
and make you whole."
So that was, you know, the first moment of,
[Hisses] yeah, that -- that doesn't sound right.
I was wanting to withdraw just a short amount of money,
and he was very tense-sounding.
I could sense right away
that there was something not right with Lee
because it just came through the phone in his voice.
I could tell he was really having a hard time.
Mosley: Lee has convinced all these people to invest with him.
People's finances are heavily tied into this --
their life savings, kids' college funds --
and he just up and vanishes.
Smith: Monday morning at a quarter to 8:00,
my phone rings -- unusual.
It's Lee's assistant. He said, "Have you heard?"
I said, "What are you talking about?"
"Have you heard about Lee?"
I said, "No, what about Lee?"
"He's missing."
I said, "What do you mean, he's missing?"
Cross: And it was like, "Wait, what?"
We sent an e-mail, no response,
then got on the website,
and the website was all different.
Everybody's picture had been taken down,
and it just looked really odd.
And I called the number, and this guy answered the phone,
and I asked to speak to Lee Price,
and he said, "Lee Price doesn't work here.
He sold this business.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Lee is missing?"
"Yes, we don't know where he is."
I mean, I knew in my heart of hearts
that this was -- that it was gone.
The money was gone.
♪♪
Goldberg: Baptist pastor turned banker Lee Price
exploited his infallible image to buy a small, failing bank.
Now, faithful investors are praying for a miracle
because Price and their money have disappeared.
"We have heard that there has been an incident
with Lee Price."
Well, there was an incident, all right --
I all of a sudden had no money.
Cross: We were talking with the SEC,
we were talking to the feds,
trying to get into the accounts.
So, after making some calls,
they said it appears as if it's all gone.
And I found out that I lost everything,
and...I literally fell to my knees,
just screaming, "No, no, no!"
Everything's -- boom -- gone overnight.
You just don't have any -- any way to survive.
That was a very difficult time.
It was a hard time.
A very hard time.
Um...yeah.
I was sat there in my den, and my wife kept asking me,
"Well, what's wrong?"
I couldn't talk.
Goes back to what my mother says --
"Don't cry over spilled milk."
But what Mama didn't know -- that was a lot of milk.
Goldberg: What do you do when you lose $500,000 to your pastor?
[ Scoffs ] Hire a lawyer.
My name is John Chapman.
My colleagues and I had the honor of representing
a number of Aubrey Lee Price's victims.
I heard stories of Mr. Price visiting people
and, before asking them to sign any papers,
he would say, "Let's pray on this."
He thoroughly understood
the value of the Christian affinity
that he had with so many investors,
and that's how they became victims
of his Price Financial Group Ponzi scheme.
Goldberg: Ponzi scheme? What's that?
Charles Ponzi is one of the pillars
of the scam community.
If we had a Mount Rushmore for cons,
his face would be on it.
Basically, what a Ponzi scheme is,
is you get people to invest money,
and instead of investing that money and creating real returns,
you just continue to collect more people.
So in actuality, there is no money being made.
The pot only gets bigger by getting more people involved,
and if too many people want their money at once
and you don't have the money, you can't pay them.
At this point, all hope is lost.
You take the money and then you disappear.
Now to the incredible story
of a Georgia pastor and banker...
Leaving behind a trail of victims
from whom he stole millions.
Investigators have been searching the world for this man
and thought he might be sailing the seas.
Goldberg: The only place to see Lee Price these days
is on the news.
Even his family has no idea where he is.
Chapman: The town was abuzz.
It was the lead story on every news station,
that this banker had gone fugitive.
That obviously threw panic into the investors,
and no one had any idea just what had happened
and just where he had gone.
Smith: Lee escapes.
He's hiding out.
In fact, I'm writing letters to the FBI,
saying, "You need to check South America
'cause he bragged a lot about that."
Cross: I remember him saying he goes to Venezuela a lot
and that I should come with him sometime to Venezuela.
♪♪
He even knew the mayor of Belize.
I said, "Okay, go to the mayor's house.
I can tell you exactly where it is -- I've been there."
Nobody could find him.
It's not everybody has their pastor
on the FBI's Most Wanted list.
Mine was.
At this point, with no information,
the rumor mill is brewing,
and this is a small town,
so the girls are on their porches sipping tea,
just pontificating at length on where is Aubrey Lee Price?
Goldberg: The shepherd has abandoned his flock
and is now on the lam.
But for Price's parishioners and investors,
his actions have carried a very heavy toll.
I needed to make my house payment.
Well, I fell a month behind.
Then month number two came.
It was one thing after another, and next thing I knew,
I was having to just get all my stuff out of the house
and I was living in my car.
I lost everything. I mean, I lost every penny.
Smith: He turned his back on people
that knew him through the church,
his family, his parents, his friends --
taken away everything that they earned, crushing their dreams.
His reaction, it seemed to be cold as a cucumber.
He's got to have a conscience.
Goldberg: But wait.
Lee Price suddenly reappears
and is spotted on camera in Key West, Florida.
He's made his way past all the puka shells
and the Bermuda shorts to board a ferry boat,
carrying a duffel bag and a heavy burden.
Yocum: They said they had video of him on this barge.
Mosley: Then they make another discovery --
Aubrey Lee Price's suicide letter,
which I would call a book because it is very long.
And in it, he explains everything that happens.
He admits to running a Ponzi scheme,
to stealing people's money and going on the lam,
and all of a sudden, people have these answers
that they have been looking for.
Goldberg: His 22-page rambling missive is full of regret,
where he admits blame for losing the investors' money,
as well as the failure of the Montgomery Bank and Trust.
Lee is becoming volatile.
He's not had contact with his family.
People did not recognize what Lee had turned into.
Mosley: Aubrey Lee Price got onto this ferry,
and he wrote that he had taken diving weights with him.
He was planning to commit suicide.
♪♪
Goldberg: It seems Lee was not ready to face judgment
here on Earth.
Yocum: I thought of his children and his wife
and how terrible that was for them.
I just did not feel that ease in my mind,
like, "Okay, this is the end of the story."
♪♪
Goldberg: As authorities look for him across the globe,
the pastor-turned-fugitive Aubrey Lee Price
has left a confession letter,
admitting his sins and his plan to end his life
off the edge of a Florida ferry boat.
♪♪
But now, the courts appoint a steady hand
to recoup the money for the swindled investors.
Damian: The Securities and Exchange Commission
asked the Judge to appoint me
as receiver in the Aubrey Price case.
In this situation,
because it was an obvious Ponzi scheme,
I was asked to liquidate the assets
and then find an equitable way to distribute the assets
to the defrauded investors.
It was still very difficult
for them to believe that this had happened,
that it was real.
Goldberg: Now, Melanie and her team
call a meeting at the church
to give details to the scammed investors,
and it is not the good news they had hoped for.
Damian: The room was full and they had a lot of questions.
From a big-picture perspective,
most people thought that they still had the funds
that they had invested.
And we explained, you know,
sort of what we knew at the moment.
There wasn't much assets left at the time.
We were able to obtain the records
that $40 million had been invested into this Ponzi scheme
and the bank accounts only had $350,000.
Goldberg: Wait, wait. Hold up. How much did this man lose?
$40 million was stolen,
and there's only $350,000 left behind.
That's not a lot.
And one of the things that was so upsetting to me,
there was an older woman, late 70s, early 80s,
and she kept saying,
"Well, what about my monthly check that I get?"
And she was like, "Well, no, that's --
You're not gonna be getting that anymore."
She was like, "Well, okay,
but what about the monthly check?"
You know, certainly, half of my life is over,
but here's somebody -- like, how are they --
I can go back to work.
It's like, how are they gonna get through this?
Yocum: It's pretty hard to get a job when you're my age.
They don't -- they think, "Oh, you're on your way out,"
so they're not too confident in hiring you.
I ended up working at a grocery store.
I just am a shelf-straightener.
No big thing, but at my age, it's okay, it's fine.
♪♪
Damian: We, at that moment, couldn't promise really much
in terms of what we would be able to return
for the investors.
All the cash we had was $350,000 when we started,
and so we knew this was gonna be a difficult case
to be able to get money back to investors.
Goldberg: Using the 22-page confession letter,
Melanie begins tracking down assets
that belonged to Lee Price
that could be liquidated to repay the conned backers.
Damian: Some of the assets were easy to recover,
but then everything else was sort of illiquid --
real estate, two life insurance polices.
There were farms in Venezuela
where he had invested a couple million dollars.
We really wanted to recover those funds
on behalf of the investors, so we reached out
to an American missionary
that was down there managing one of the farms
and made a plan.
♪♪
We went into the country to go and see the farms,
figure out what the situation was,
and see if there was gonna be any way for us to liquidate,
or if we should abandon the asset,
and we actually came up
with some really creative ways to sustain the farms.
It took about two years,
but we were able to sell our interest in the farms
to a Venezuelan conglomerate that paid us in dollars.
Eventually, we got, I think,
about $1.7 million out of Venezuela,
which wasn't bad for the situation.
We got a small portion check --
a very small portion check of that.
A lot of those people, with the praise they put on money,
it just angered them to think that they'd lost it.
Goldberg: These victims are left without money and answers,
but none of them could have guessed
that the intricate tapestry of lies, manipulation, and fraud
that shrouded this community
would be unraveled by a routine traffic stop.
Goldberg: Nearly 18 months after Aubrey Lee Price
seemingly drowned off the coast of Florida,
proper justice continued to elude Price's victims.
But on December 31, 2013,
it appeared that larger forces were at work.
Juliano: My name is Justin Juliano, and I'm a Major
at the Glynn County Sheriff's Office.
At the Sheriff's Office, we're a unique department.
We do have a traffic team
that goes out and works on the interstate.
A typical day on the traffic team,
I would go out 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning
and start working on 95,
enforcing speeding laws and traffic violations.
It was December 31, 2013.
It was New Year's Eve, about 10:00 a. m.,
and we were traveling northbound on Interstate 95
at about the 40-mile marker,
and we were looking for criminal activity.
I was in the fast lane.
I observed a Dodge Ram pickup truck.
I noticed that he was slowing down,
close to the 50 mile an hour range.
On 95, no one drives less than 70.
His license plate was expired and his windshield was cracked,
so we decided to make a traffic stop.
♪♪
So when I identified myself and told him why I stopped him,
the driver was very nervous.
He told me that he was coming from Ocala, Florida,
where he had been visiting some family.
He had his license in his right hand,
and he started fumbling through his wallet with his left hand.
And I allowed him to do that for a few seconds,
and then I said, "Your license,
the one in your right hand, that's the one I want."
He was very fidgety with his hands,
kept putting them in his pockets.
I kept asking him to take his hands out of his pockets.
This probably happened four to five times.
You seem extremely nervous.
I asked him if he had anything illegal on his person
or in his vehicle, which he told me he didn't,
and I asked him if I could have consent
to search him and his vehicle, which he verbally gave me.
As I went into his pockets, he had some debit cards,
and the debit cards had a name on 'em
that did not come back to the ID he had originally given me.
And while going through those cards,
I found another driver's license that had a picture of the driver
and a different name
than the original ID he had given me.
He gave me consent to search the vehicle,
and I started searching the interior of the truck.
There was a laptop in the backseat of the truck,
and because I couldn't identify him
with his pieces of identification,
I asked him if he would allow me to look into his laptop.
He opened his laptop, put the password in,
and let me look into it.
I noticed a file on his desktop screen,
and I clicked on it,
and it happened to be a marijuana grow operation.
There were photographs of plants that were being grown.
There was a spreadsheet on how much money
he had spent on lights and filtration systems.
I looked at him and I told him, like,
"I know what marijuana looks like.
I've been doing this quite a while."
Whoo, whoo.
We made the decision to place the driver under arrest
for giving a false name and date of birth.
After we made the arrest, he did make a comment
that he was happy to be done running,
and he asked me if I wanted to really know who he was,
and I said "Yes, I want to know who you are."
And he goes, "I'm one of the most wanted men in America --
Aubrey Lee Price."
Goldberg: [ Laughs ] Holy resurrection.
The preacher is alive and growing marijuana. What?!
Juliano: I wasn't that excited about it.
I didn't know who Aubrey Lee Price was.
I think I even told him
I'd have rather him been 10 kilos of cocaine
and, uh, he didn't think that was funny.
When I went back into the booking room
to start putting his information on an arrest and booking form,
it came back that he was wanted by the FBI.
To be honest with you, he didn't look a whole lot
like the wanted photo that the FBI had.
The FBI photos were of a gentleman
who was clean-shaven, had a business suit on,
and the guy I had in booking was --
had long hair, facial hair, his clothes were dirty and old.
He went from looking like
the most Christ-like, trusted person
to full-on criminal.
Like, this is, like, the outfit that I would wear
to audition to be in crime.
Juliano: Once I ran his fingerprints,
sure enough, he was Aubrey Price.
You could tell at that time, he was kind of prideful
in the fact that he was as wanted as he was,
and I think he was prideful in the fact
that he had gotten away with it for as long as he had.
Goldberg: Prideful?
He's proud that he evaded judgment
for ruining people's lives?
Huh. I guess this dude never read the Bible.
I mean, what happened? Come on.
How did a man who was minding the flock
end up running with the wolves?
Chapman: He explained, at some length,
his misadventures when he wasn't dead,
but he was somehow tied in with some drug traffickers
and living a life of high adventure and great danger
somewhere in South America.
The whole thing was a tissue of lies and fiction.
He wanted -- He wanted the limelight again.
Goldberg: The story of Aubrey Lee Price is being told,
but for a man who came back from the dead,
he might not like the role he played,
especially once the news of his resurrection
reaches his investors.
I'm down visiting my very elderly mother-in-law
in Marco Island.
My wife and I went out to dinner.
We come back on.
She, like most people her age, is watching the news.
Reporter: After he was arrested, police in Ocala, Florida,
raided the apartment he had been renting
and removed 225,000...
And they found this guy.
I thought, "Oh, my." I mean, I hardly recognized him.
Reporter: And this is what he looks like now.
Arrested in Georgia on New Year's Eve...
And my mother-in-law is asking me about
how was dinner, and I just about put my hand over her mouth.
Reporter: Aubrey Lee Price,
the preacher turned financial advisor
who faked his own death.
You gotta be kidding me.
Goldberg: Despite being declared legally dead 18 months prior,
a routine traffic stop reveals
Aubrey Lee Price to be amongst the living.
And the news of his arrest spreads like the gospel.
Bam! He is risen.
It's Easter Sunday. Aubrey Lee Price is back.
A major break this morning in the case
of an American banker on the run.
Reporter: Leaving behind the customers
whose millions of dollars he'd stolen.
Reporter #2: Authorities say he faked his own death.
Oh, my God, they found Lee.
I said, "I want five minutes alone in a room with Lee,
just five minutes." [ Laughs ]
♪♪
I never one time ever, ever thought that he killed himself.
He loves himself too much.
I mean, he's an egomaniac.
If you read that rambling, rambling 22-page suicide note,
it's just obvious
that this guy wouldn't hurt a hair on his head.
Goldberg: With Price now born again and under arrest,
the prosecution is building its case,
and a trial is set for June of 2014
at a federal courthouse in Statesboro, Georgia.
Smith: I got a call from the FBI,
and they asked me if I would testify,
and I said yes.
And they gave me a certain entrance
that they wanted my wife and I to go in,
and, you know, goofy me, I said, "Well, why's that?"
He said, "Because his family's here
and we do not want you to see the family.
We don't want you to go soft."
[ Laughs ]
I said, "You have nothing to worry about."
A former bank director accused of defrauding his bank
and investors out of millions appeared today in federal court
in Brunswick, Georgia.
[ Crowd shouting ]
The judge threw the book at him, and rightly so.
Chapman: I think that's appropriate.
I think that it is a good thing when folks of that kind
are imprisoned and pay a serious debt to society.
I think justice requires no less.
Goldberg: Forgiveness is a core tenet of Lee's Christian faith,
and he has little to do but ask for it
as he writes to his victims
and apologizes for everything he's done.
In the letter he wrote everybody, he quoted scripture,
every part of the Bible you could choose.
And I wrote him one back, and it came out,
"Exodus -- Thou shalt not steal,"
because that's what he did.
So, these are letters that Lee Price sent to me
from prison.
February 6, 2014.
"Dear Wendy, I'm writing to you once again
to express my deepest and most sincere apologies
for the financial, emotional, and painful losses
you've experienced as a result
of my mismanagement of your investments.
I am truly sorry, and I do not expect your forgiveness."
Well, that's good, Lee, 'cause you're not getting it.
"Nor do I expect any second chances.
Again, I'm truly sorry
for the pain I've caused you and your family.
Sincerely, Aubrey Lee Price."
What a bunch of bull[bleep].
People can say whatever they think and --
and what their opinions are about this whole thing
that took place for all of us,
but he's written a couple really heart-wrenching letters,
and I just don't think he's a con man.
I think money will do terrible things to people
and it can get you in a lot of trouble,
and I think Lee's a prime example of that.
So, only God knows the real story.
Damian: We actually met with him several times in prison.
He was very cooperative in helping us find some assets
that were a little bit harder to find
because there weren't good records.
I think our ultimate return was about 18%,
but 18% of your life savings
isn't what you're hoping for at that stage of your life.
Smith: I took a picture of that little old check that came
and said, "This is it." [ Chuckles ]
Pennies on the dollar. Pennies.
Chapman: Victims of Ponzi schemes often blame themselves,
and they wish they could turn the clock back, but they can't,
and they blame themselves for not being careful enough.
They blame themselves for not asking more questions,
and they're ashamed.
They feel that they have betrayed their family.
There's also an awful cynicism and lack of trust.
I think when you go through an experience like that,
you never look at the world in exactly the same way again.
Smith: I had no reason to distrust him, none whatsoever,
and he bamboozled me pretty good.
I guess that hurts more than losing the money,
if you know what I'm saying.
You know, I mean, the money, well, that's bad enough,
but it really hurts how human beings
can disappoint you so badly.
It is a horrible thing to have to survive.
It stays with you.
I mean, it's -- you know, there's a trust issue now.
I never, ever reinvested after that, you know,
and it changes you.
It changes you for the rest of your life.
Smith: I struggle with that a little bit
because he hurt a lot of people --
a lot of people.
These people lost everything.
But I gotta forgive him.
You know, I'm not his judge.
Yocum: He kept writing me letters and saying,
"Oh, please forgive me. Please forgive me."
And I finally said, "Stop asking me for forgiveness.
I forgave you once and for all, and it's done."
It was just money.
♪♪
[ Crying ] It was just money.
Goldberg: It's hard to know how an entire community
can begin to heal
after Aubrey Lee Price left them with such deep wounds.
All they have is their story to tell
and the small measure of justice that he's behind bars.
[ Telephone ringing ] Price is still preaching
about divine justice...
Operator: This call is from a federal prison.
...just this time, from prison.
[ Cell door slams ]