Police rolled into the roundabout encircling Kelly Gordon Rogers' fountain at his sprawling estate in Frisco recently, with warrants charging him with money laundering, securities fraud and aggravated theft in a $2.8 million oil and gas rip-off.
The indictments, issued by a Collin County grand jury, provide a laundry list of individual investors and funds the Texas State Securities Board says gave Rogers sums between $50,000 and even nearly $1 million for an oil and gas venture. The investors, the indictments say, were "induced by deception," their money "unlikely" to ever be recovered.
They also accuse him of securities fraud for failing to disclose to his investors a litany of civil lawsuits for alleged misappropriation of investor funds; a suit for alleged fraud and breach of fiduciary duty in an oil and gas scheme in Louisiana's Vinton Dome formation; a bankruptcy filing in which he declares debt of $2 million; and a 2007 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission suit accusing Rogers of participating in a Ponzi scheme touting high-yield bank debentures with monthly 25-percent returns. Rogers channeled the dough through Level Par Investments. He was a managing member of the fund until he was forced to resign in July 2006, according to the complaint, for diverting cash to his personal bank account.
The SEC says he and others, instead of investing their clients' money, mismanaged it through Ponzi payments, "exorbitant fees" and "personal expenses." Rogers settled the case for $153,000 and a promise not to violate federal securities laws.
With a "trail of lawsuits" in his wake, the state securities board says he'll now answer for five different felonies. Rogers, an oil and gas attorney with a law degree from SMU, declined to comment without first speaking to his attorney when reached Tuesday morning.
