For three months last year, Muhammet Atayev—California businessman and, by his own account, a former Turkmenistani cabinet minister—limited himself to a small universe in Dallas. He spent his nights in a room at a Best Western motel. In the morning, he slipped into business clothes, gathered his things and walked a one-mile stretch of sidewalk—past Denny's, under Stemmons Freeway and up Oak Lawn Avenue, arriving at a patch of grass behind an Exxon station.
Patrick Michels
Muhammet Atayev stood outside Joseph Ashmore's law office for three months last fall, hoping to draw attention to Atayev's plight: He says a $250,000 investment was supposed to return $25 million in just three months. Instead, he says, he lost it all.
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Once there, he stayed from 9 to 5 each day, a sign hanging around his neck. He spent the balance of the steamy late summer on that corner, his humorless face glistening with sweat, though he never seemed to soak through his suits. He ate nothing during the day and drank only water.
That scene is all most people knew about Atayev—a quick glimpse as they drove past on Maple Avenue, him in dark sunglasses under a black umbrella, feet planted, eyes fixed on the office across the street. The object of his fascination was a palace of beige concrete covered in brown mission tiles, arches and columns. Sometimes Atayev talked on the phone; sometimes he sat in a canvas folding chair. He kept regular business hours, never missing a day.
The sign summed up his purpose simply. Addressed to Mr. Joseph Ashmore, Mr. Jack Wilemon and Mr. Allan Clark, it asked: "Where is our money??? I will be on a hunger strike until I die or get the money."
Months passed and little broke Atayev's routine. One day one of Ashmore's sons emerged from the office and threw Atayev's chair, an attempt to shoo him away. Mostly, though, people just drove right past. On weekends, Atayev treated himself to an air-conditioned respite at NorthPark Center, where he'd sit with a coffee and watch more people pass by.
The money never came. A $250,000 investment—a handshake deal that he claims was supposed to return $25 million in just three months—had left Atayev with nothing but a stack of old emails and a pile of sweaty shirts.
But a strange thing happened as he stood there: People started to stop, sharing with Atayev stories of other can't-miss investments from the last few years that all went back to the men whose names were scrawled on his sign.
In fact, as lawsuits, disciplinary hearings and federal investigations detail, there were dozens more people whose money ended up in bank accounts under Ashmore's name, for investment partnerships with Clark and Wilemon. The investors were offered access to lucrative bond deals, foreign currency leases or international securities trades, and the good name of Joseph Ashmore Jr., a 77-year-old former Dallas County probate judge and prominent local attorney, was often given as evidence that their money would be safe.
Atayev eventually left his perch, but the stories kept piling up—stories of people who should have known better, who blew their retirements believing tall tales of instant riches, who mortgaged their homes because a buddy swore the deal was just golden. How were the deals supposed to earn such outrageous returns, or were they ever meant to? And the ones who've begged, sued and settled until they did get their investments back—whose money were they really getting? Map the mind-bending web of transactions and they all lead back to the same three men, and the same simple question on Atayev's sign.
The deal began with a phone call from Fort Worth to a balcony in Baku.
Atayev and his small group of investors were at their hotel in Azerbaijan, sipping wine in the warm evening breeze and celebrating a new business partnership. The capital city's grandest sights were lit beneath them, from the presidential palace to the beach boardwalk beside the Caspian's crashing waves.
There with Atayev that night was Hellen Mitakys, a retiree from California's state tax board. She'd met Atayev years before, during a goodwill trip for officials from former Soviet states. She was one of the few people Atayev knew in Sacramento when he moved from Turkmenistan in 2005.
Jim Wyatt was also there. He was Mitakys' neighbor and, at one point anyway, a high-flying international businessman who wrote books on turning quick profits in real estate. When Mitakys met Wyatt, he lived in a huge home and drove a Mercedes. But he'd lost big in a farming deal in Thailand, had divorced his wife and had part of one leg amputated because of diabetes. The setbacks had forced him to take refuge in Mitakys' guesthouse.
That night in Baku though, at last, things were looking up. Wyatt still had his stellar business contacts in Dallas, and at the time—summer of 2007—the markets had never looked so sweet. After years watching other people getting rich, they finally had an asset to put in play.
Atayev had a friend in Kyrgyzstan with a mountainside gold mine who'd just agreed to let them place the mine into a lucrative asset management program with Wyatt's friends in Dallas. As Atayev and Mitakys recall, Wyatt said the mine would be worth $100 million on the global market. Wyatt seemed so sure, they say, and acted every bit the global dealmaker. (Messages left for Wyatt went unreturned.)
