TROY, Va. (AP) - Two years ago, Danny Wilmer looked forward to a peaceful retirement on 55 acres of rolling Piedmont with a pond, some woods and his modest brick house.
Things have not turned out as planned for the former professional football player and longtime assistant coach at the University of Virginia. “My wife says she sees me up there crying, sitting on that porch a lot of times,” he said.
Wilmer remains close to many of the players he coached and recruited over the decades, and some still visit his Hidden Lake Farm in Fluvanna County, just a half-hour drive from Scott Stadium. To Wilmer, they are all “my kids.”
One of them, Merrill Robertson Jr., a former Cavalier linebacker, was convicted of taking Wilmer’s retirement savings in an investment scheme that dashed some of the coach’s dreams, put the ownership of his home at risk, and nearly stripped him and his wife of things they hold dearer than property.
“He got everything I had,” Wilmer said. “I didn’t think any of my kids would have ever done that.”
The betrayal left him dumbfounded. “I don’t understand it. It’s completely baffled me,” he said.
His wife, Myrna, was also close to Robertson. “I loved him, loved his family,” she said. “His wife and children would come to our home. The children would play outside on the playground and, every time he came to talk to us about our investments and how well they were doing, he would actually show us papers.”
Before talking business, the Wilmers often joined hands with Robertson. “We would pray. Sitting at this table, we would pray,” she said.
Now, she said, “I pray for Merrill’s soul.”
The Wilmers are better off than many of the more than 50 other victims of Robertson and his partner in crime, Sherman Carl Vaughn Jr.
The two men were convicted in one of the most egregious cases of its kind prosecuted in federal court in Richmond in recent years. It is difficult to see how they ever hoped to get away with the scam, much less how it went on for seven years.
The experience has been rough on the Wilmers - Danny, 70, and Myrna, 64.
“I have been receiving counseling,” he said.
“I don’t sleep well. And then I don’t sleep at all. And I wake up in the middle of the night. The only thing that can get me up is when I start thinking about this stuff. And then I’ll get up. For these last two years, all we’ve done is work on that - sending lawyers information or going down to Richmond,” he said.
The emotional impact on the Wilmers may be deeper than the financial one. That is not unusual, said Jayne W. Barnard, a professor emeritus at the College of William & Mary School of Law.
“The experience of fraud victimization is really a very deep and traumatic one. It’s not a medical condition, such as PTSD, but it’s very much like PTSD,” said Barnard, an expert on white-collar crime and its victims.
“It’s not always about the value of what’s been lost financially, it’s about the value of what has been lost very personally,” she said. “They feel betrayed in a very powerful way, and it doesn’t just go away, and it’s not just about money.”
Barnard said, “People don’t invest unless they trust someone. It’s one thing for a salesman to come to your door, or somebody who makes a pitch at an investment luncheon. It’s another thing when it’s someone you already know and for whom the basis of trust is already there.”
A preacher’s son and a standout player at L.C. Bird High School, Robertson, 37, of Midlothian, was recruited by Wilmer in the 1990s. Wilmer arranged for him to spend a year at Fork Union Military Academy to get his academic work up to par so he could play at U.Va.
Robertson faces up to 330 years in prison when sentenced Dec. 6 for mail fraud, wire fraud, bank fraud and money laundering in a scheme that took $9 million from people he knew through church, schools and football - people like Wilmer and Eugene Monroe, a U.Va. football star who went on to a seven-year career in the NFL and lost $500,000 he invested with Cavalier Union Investments.
Vaughn, 46, of Blackstone, the son of a former high school principal, testified that he and Robertson created Cavalier Union Investments in early 2010. The scheme started earlier, while Robertson was still a financial adviser at Merrill Lynch, he said.
Vaughn pleaded guilty, testified against Robertson at his August trial and is facing up to 20 years in prison when sentenced Dec. 18 by U.S. District Judge John A. Gibney Jr., who has given notice that he may impose a term above the federal guideline sentence called for in the case.
At a Nov. 13 hearing, Robertson told Gibney that “I was working very, very hard. It was not a scheme.” In a bid to change his legal team, Robertson said witnesses his current lawyers failed to call during his trial would show he had no clue what was going on behind the scenes - presumably that Vaughn was orchestrating the wrongdoing.
“They would have said that I’m not a crook,” he said of the uncalled witnesses. Robertson said only 30 percent of the money came from retirement accounts. The rest was checks from investors that were loans to the company.
Testimony showed that many investors thought their savings were being rolled over into tax-deferred retirement accounts and would not have turned the money over had they known that Robertson and Vaughn were taking hefty commissions from it and that there would be tax consequences because the money was not being rolled over into tax-deferred accounts.
Robertson claimed to Gibney that the IRS told him that the deals involving 401(k) accounts were “not taxable events.” However, among other things, Robertson did not address the fake account statements shown to victims or the loan schemes he was involved with.
Gibney listened to Robertson’s request to fire his current court-appointed lawyers - his second team - but ultimately ruled against him at the Nov. 13 hearing. The judge said he listened to Robertson’s testimony during his trial. “Your testimony, candidly, sir, was pretty much mumbo-jumbo. It just didn’t make any sense,” Gibney said.
Vaughn testified at Robertson’s trial that the two men lied about almost everything, from their résumés - which omitted bankruptcies - to assets, which were nonexistent. They also lied about being qualified to accept tax-deferred retirement savings accounts and the promised returns on investments, he said.
Lawyers for Robertson said Vaughn was the mastermind of the scam and manipulated the younger and less experienced Robertson, who worked hard and honestly to try to make the company survive and never intended to defraud anyone.
Robertson used his contacts and relationships to solicit investors, and Vaughn came up with the investment ideas, according to the government.
Most of the investments were not real. Evidence showed that from 2009 to 2016, the two took in $10,490,000 from investors and paid $1,490,000 back to some to keep the Ponzi-like scheme going.
That left $9 million of investor money that is still owed. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, nearly $6 million of it was spent by the two defendants on cars, family vacations, spa visits, luxury goods, educational expenses for family members, and a luxury suite at a football stadium. In Vaughn’s case, some of it went to girlfriends.
The government wants Gibney to order Robertson and Vaughn to make a total of $8,999,600 in restitution to investors and Robertson and other co-conspirators an additional $266,399 to defrauded banks and credit unions.
Their victims are black and white, male and female - some well-educated and well-off, some struggling, and none is an experienced investor.
One man lost his home after losing his savings to Robertson, who used some of the money to pay his own mortgage. Robertson spent some of the money taken from his childhood Sunday school teacher to travel to Honolulu, although Robertson said the trip to Hawaii was to be with his father during heart surgery.
After taking their savings, Robertson, in a side scheme with others who have also been convicted, bamboozled some victims into taking loans. The victims borrowed money, with much of it going into the pockets of Robertson and co-conspirators.
The loans left some victims not only broke but also in debt and with ruined credit.
Raised in Buena Vista, Wilmer is a graduate of East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., where he played tight end. He later played one season as a linebacker with the Canadian Football League before coaching high school football.
He coached at the college level at Western New Mexico University and James Madison University before being hired by former Cavalier coach George Welsh in 1984. He left his U.Va. coaching and recruiting job in 2001 to work in community relations for the university until his retirement in 2015.
Over the years in college athletics, he came to know hundreds of players, more than two dozen of whom went on to play in the NFL.
Wilmer pursued Robertson for U.Va. while Robertson was at L.C. Bird.
“He was a great kid,” Wilmer said. “We recruited him. I was the recruiting coordinator.” The Cavaliers initially wanted him as a fullback, but he wound up playing linebacker.
Robertson played at U.Va. from 1999 to 2002. He and Wilmer lost touch after Robertson left the school. He tried out for the Philadelphia Eagles but did not make the team. Eventually, Robertson wound up as a financial adviser with Merrill Lynch.
One day in 2009, Robertson gave Wilmer a call. Robertson learned that Wilmer had a 401(k) plan through the university that he was worried about after the financial crisis. Unknown to Wilmer, Robertson and Vaughn’s scam got underway that same year.
Wilmer recalled that he first gave Robertson $25,000, then $75,000.
“Then I started giving him more to put in different stocks,” he said.
Over the years, Robertson handled a number of “investments” for Wilmer, at times returning some of the money to Wilmer, at Wilmer’s request. The last two checks, $10,000 and $5,000, bounced, Wilmer said.
According to restitution figures filed by the government in the case, Wilmer invested $709,895, of which at various times over the years he got back a total of $235,140, leaving a loss of $474,755.
Robertson, who had trained at Merrill Lynch, could talk the talk of an expert. “We sat right here and talked about what I wanted to do in retirement,” Wilmer recalled recently while sitting at his dining room table.
“He asked Myrna what kind of car she wanted, what kind I wanted and what we needed the most,” he said.
Wilmer was surprised but not alarmed when Robertson told him he had left Merrill Lynch and had started his own investment firm with Vaughn so he could better help small investors. Wilmer believed the money was going into a tax-deferred retirement account.
“He progressively persuaded me to give him more and more and more and finally he got the last bit,” Wilmer said. “With all the money I had invested, he was promising me $2.5 million, plus he was going to pay this house off.”
Among other things, Wilmer said Robertson kept saying the money was overseas. “That’s why I gave him the last ($190,000). He said that investment would give us more money, and he said he would be able to pay everybody off.”
Wilmer retired, and the paychecks stopped. “I said, ’Merrill, I have to have some money. … I got bills to pay, things to keep up,’” Wilmer said. “Well, he said, ’I got a way to get some money.’ That’s when he started all the Navy Federal (Credit Union) stuff,” he said.
“I said, ’Wait a second. I can’t pay a loan back. They’re not going to give me a loan right now,’” Wilmer said. Robertson promised to pay off the loans, and Wilmer could use the loan proceeds to tide him over “until the big money got here.” Wilmer reluctantly agreed and signed for the loans from the credit union - one of them to purchase a vehicle.
Wilmer did not initially realize he was applying for a vehicle loan.
Stephen Eugene Anthony, an assistant U.S. attorney, asked Wilmer: “What was your reaction when you learned that it was a loan for a vehicle?”
“I went crazy. My wife did, too. I mean, we didn’t know what to do. I mean, I couldn’t figure it out. He told us that, he told us it was a ’conversion’ loan,” Wilmer testified.
“I trusted Merrill. I believed everything he said,” Wilmer testified at one point. Anthony asked Wilmer if he tried to stop the loan from going through once he discovered it was for a vehicle.
Wilmer said, “No, sir. You know, it was like, ’Don’t worry about it, coach. I got you. I got you. You know, trust me. It will go through. They will pay their side of it, and it will be taken care of - you won’t owe anything.’”
In light of that, Wilmer, like several other victim-witnesses, signed immunity agreements to testify about the shady loans. Robertson and others, some of them convicted in separate cases, got much of the loan proceeds. Wilmer’s credit score tanked.
There was a line of credit at Navy Federal that was also set up for Wilmer. He testified he did not realize that his loan application said he worked for Cavalier Union Investments. Wilmer said Robertson told him he had to take $12,000 from the line of credit out of which Robertson took $8,400.
Despite Robertson’s promises to pay back the loans, the borrowers started asking Wilmer for payments. “I said, ’Hey, Merrill, they want their money; they’re sending me bills now,’” Wilmer said.
Nevertheless, the Wilmers still held out hope that Robertson would do the right thing until one day late last year when the FBI and other investigators showed up at their door to tell them their money was gone.
“I didn’t believe it. I still thought something was going to come through. I still believed. I just couldn’t believe he would do something like that,” he said.
Learning she was broke after thinking she was a millionaire, his wife said, “I cried and said, ’No. I don’t think he would do this.’ I honestly didn’t think that he was that evil.”
She returned home one day last year and saw her husband crying.
“Danny was saying, ’How stupid was I? How stupid was I?’” She said she was furious. They are not victims of stupidity, they are victims of misplaced faith, she said. “We trusted him. We loved him.”
“One thing that broke my heart - Danny said, right after it happened, with tears, he said, ’We won’t be able to help anybody. We’ve always been able to loan people money or help them when they were in a bind.’” But, she said, “We may not be able to help a lot, but we can help a little. We can still help people.”
The Wilmers have received some unsolicited contributions from “his kids” and from some U.Va. alumni. It amounted to thousands of dollars, was sorely needed and was put to good use by the Wilmers - but it was little more than a drop in the bucket to what they lost.
One former player, now the president of a mortgage company, got them refinancing so the Wilmers now believe they can hang on to Hidden Lake Farm, but it was a close call.
“We had to do a lot of scrambling, and there were times we were not sure how we were going to make ends meet,” Myrna said. Wilmer said he has also been borrowing from his life insurance policies. “That’s kind of the way we’ve been staying alive.”
His wife said, “Some of the victims had nothing else. That was all they had. That was all of Danny’s retirement … but we have several rental properties so we do have rental income and if we have to sell some property, we have property to sell.”
“There are a lot of people still hurting and scrambling and will be for the rest of their lives,” she said.
The couple testified against Robertson in August. Wilmer said that when he was on the witness stand, he focused on the lawyers, not Robertson. “I never looked at him. I couldn’t look at him.”
“When I got up there, my wife said she watched him and said he started crying,” Wilmer said.
Myrna said she will attend Robertson’s sentencing. Wilmer initially said he did not want to attend. “I can’t bring the hate and bring the desire, in my heart … to see him, you know, go down like that,” he said.
“He’s going to get a lot of time, I think, and it hurts a lot,” Wilmer said. But he later changed his mind and will be there to support his wife.
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