Tomatoes

How the Purple Tomato is Changing Consumer Perception of GMOs

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 15:00:00 GMT

Eating the rainbow has become easier and more flavorful in recent years, especially when it comes to anthocyanins — the purple pigment that’s in blueberries, blackberries, red grape skins, eggplant and now — thanks to genetic modification — the purple tomato.

Nathan Pumplin is CEO of Norfolk Healthy Produce, the company behind the Empress Purple Tomato, a bioengineered tomato made by adding two genes from snapdragons. These tomatoes are a rich source of antioxidants because the purple pigments are in the whole tomato, not just the skin.

“They’re really good for people’s health, and most of us don’t eat nearly enough anthocyanins,” Pumplin says.

But the trained molecular biologist, who has worked for nearly 20 years in R&D and commercializing new types of plants that solve problems, says bringing a GMO purple tomato to market has not been without challenges.

“The first GMOs were really marketed to farmers, and the innovative farmers said: ‘OK, there’s these new GMO crops, do I want to use them?’ And they very quickly saw: ‘Wow, this solves a lot of problems for me. Yes, I want to adopt them,’” he says. “What was forgotten was that it was food being produced and sold to consumers, and consumers never had an opportunity to engage with GMOs in the food system.”

“There were people who felt the food supply was playing God in the lab by adding DNA to create new varieties, and no one had asked them if they wanted to opt in or opt out,” Pumplin continues. “I think a lot of people felt like they were treated like guinea pigs. Their opinions and their values weren’t respected when those first crops launched. And that’s a huge problem.”

Adding to the challenge is the reality that most consumers don’t know what a GMO is, making education critical to driving demand for the purple tomato.

The Empress Purple Tomato is a stunner in a variety of dishes from appetizers to salads.

(Photo courtesy of Norfolk Healthy Produce)

“What’s really gratifying is that we find, generally, 80% to 90% of people in the U.S. want this product,” Pumplin says. “They know it’s a GMO, and they get a chance to ask questions like: ‘Well, don’t all GMOs have pesticides?’ And we can say: ‘No, there’s no pesticides on these. And they have the opportunity to ask a lot of questions, and then the vast majority of people say, ‘OK, I really want this.’”

While Pumplin says backlash against GMOs halted innovation and new product development for years, now he sees things coming full circle. And as consumers are hungry for the new, the flavorful and the nutritious, the fresh produce industry has innovated with the help of GMOs in some exciting ways.

“Now we have some breakthrough products, and so I’m really proud to say, our purple tomato — which is marketed in grocery stores right now under the Empress brand — is doing extremely well,” he says. “We also have the Pinkglow pineapple from Del Monte on the market. We have the Arctic Apple, which is growing and doing very well in a lot of segments.”

“I think we’re on the brink of a widespread recognition within the industry that this is something that consumers are no longer afraid of,” he adds. “They simply want a better product. They want something they can afford. They want something that their kids will eat. They want something that’s nutritious, that’s beautiful, that tastes good, all of that.”

But while today’s consumer might be ready for the better, purple tomato, Pumplin says it’s the produce industry that needs to catch up on GMOs.

“There’s just simply so little fear among the broad consumer base right now, and also such a desire for new and better products,” he says. “A big part of my messaging is to try to make sure that folks in the produce industry, these key decision-makers, understand where their consumers are.

“Because I think that’s actually the biggest gap right now. Consumers have moved on, and a lot of the decision-makers in the industry, haven’t caught up to where the consumers are,” he says. “They think the consumers are still 10 years ago, afraid of GMOs, and that’s not true anymore.”

New Chassis For Application: Terrana Biosciences Emerges From Stealth Mode

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 10:40:00 GMT

The saying in real estate is location, location, location. And that applies for technology being unveiling by Terrana Biosciences.

Emerging from stealth mode after four years of development, this Flagship Pioneering company is taking the RNA expertise of cousin company Moderna, and creating crop protection solutions in parallel but distinctly different than cousin company Indigo Ag.

“Terrana is coming out of the Flagship Pioneering ecosystem in Boston, and Flagship has a long history of working on RNA,” Ryan Rapp Terrana Biosciences co-founder and CEO. “Probably the best known RNA company is Moderna, but we have a whole host of other ones within the ecosystem, and it’s helped allow us to have all this knowledge about RNA, but apply it to solve problems in agriculture.”

Rapp says RNA is a natural solution to deliver proteins and RNA molecules that can solve many agronomic issues.

“Plants have natural RNAs inside of them that have been evolving with plants for thousands of years. They’ve been largely ignored, because when people are thinking about RNA in plants, they’re usually trying to find things that are making plants sick,” he says. “What Terrana does is we actually look at all the things that everyone else has not had the time to look at and we begin working with those and what we’ve developed from that is a class of three products: prevent, protect and improve.”

Still in pre-commercial phase, Terrana is working on its portfolio of biological RNA-based products that can work like a chassis to carry and deliver protein building information directly to the plant. Protective effects provided by such technologies include anti-insect, nematicidal, antibacterial, and one key solution Terrana is focused on is antivirals.
“We’re looking at some of the vegetable species where today there are severe problems with viruses in the in glass houses and protected culture, particularly like tomatoes,” Rapp says. “We’re working to create viral products that can deliver resistance to several different viruses that when you get them, you kind of have to destroy the whole crop in the greenhouse.”

(Terrana Biosciences)

While the company’s first development focus is specialty crops, Rapp is eyeing opportunities in row crops as well.

“Think about Asian soybean rust in Brazil. You’ve got farmers that are growing three crops of soybean a year down there and spraying up to 16 times. We believe with the way that our technology works we could potentially reduce that to one spray per cropping cycle. So it’s basically three sprays per year,” he says.

New solutions to previously uncontrolled pests, improved application efficicacy and climate resilience are all benefits Rapp says are possible.

He points to cherry orchards in the Pacific Northwest requiring chill hours–hours below 45 degrees Fahrenheit. And farmers have observed warmer winters, which leads to poor flowering, poor fruit set and poor quality fruit.

“Farmers don’t have good options today—they could cut down the cherry trees, move north to Canada, or replace trees with new genetics,” he says. “Terrana’s product lets us do something completely different. We could go in during the summer, spray those trees with our RNA based product, and actually attenuate or turn down the amount of cold hours that they need so that they can go back to being productive farms that are setting high quality fruit. This keeps those flavor profiles, keeps the cherries that consumers have come to love, and gives the economics back to the farmer.”

Terrana is aiming to have commercially available products in the next few years, pending regulatory approval, that can be applied as sprayables or seed treatments. And the company says its RNA-based biologicals can be stored at ambient temperature and will be formulated as stand alone applications or for tank mixes.

American Gothic: Farm Couple Nailed in Massive $9M Crop Insurance Fraud

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 14:09:35 GMT

Sex and power are primal, but greed is the father of farm crime. Welcome to a $9 million orgy of fraud steered by an unassuming husband and wife: American Gothic gone bad.

From the basement of a modest farmhouse, Robert and Viki Warren ran a crop insurance chop-shop: liquid eraser bottles, copy machines, telltale PVC pipes, and tens of thousands of forged documents. Across a six-year run, the couple’s purported crop losses were near-biblical, reaching critical mass when their stick-wielding farmhands destroyed a tomato field and tossed ice cubes and mothballs around the stalks—spurring the Warrens to brazenly claim yield loss due to a freak hailstorm.

As USDA investigators and a bulldog prosecutor closed in on the scam, the Warrens hid a significant portion of their nouveau wealth, presumably burying caches of twenty-dollar bills stuffed inside plastic tubes. After serving a six-year sentence for crop insurance theft, Robert Warren began depositing peculiar stacks of moldy, pungent cash into a bulging bank account, all while assuring tellers, “Things are finally looking up.”

In reality, the curtain was crashing on the final act of an agriculture fraud for the ages.

Dark Art

In 1996, prior to becoming either the unluckiest farmers on the planet or serial liars, Robert Warren, 49, and Viki Warren, 43, were Buncombe County-based producers at R&V Warren Farms outside Candler, in western North Carolina.

The Warrens lived in a brick, ranch-style home fronted by a pickup truck in the driveway. No Cadillacs. No swimming pool. No shine. Modesty by appearance.

Their operation earned a reputation among buyers for crop quality and strong yields. They were among the most successful producer-packer tomato businesses in the eastern U.S., operating 10 farms in two states: North Carolina and South Carolina (later 26 farms in three states). Simply, the couple was very good at growing and selling tomatoes.

In 1997, the Warrens noted the frailties of crop insurance oversight. A mix of federal and private layers, crop insurance is difficult to parse for those outside the agriculture industry: Private companies, subsidized by federal dollars and USDA, sell insurance policies to U.S. farmers.

The Warrens understood the winding back alleys of crop insurance. However, they didn’t understand, or failed to recognize, federal investigators cold-nosing their paper trail, steered by lead prosecutor Richard Edwards.

Despite a career colored by criminals of every stripe—narcotics conspiracy, public office corruption, construction failure coverups, video poker kickbacks, and even an Army veteran pretending to be blind who took in disability payments while coaching archery—the Warren case stays fresh in Edward’s memory.

“Crop insurance fraud cases often involve farmers that are failures from the start, but not so with the Warrens,” he explains. “They had an excellent product in their fields. They just loved money.”

From 1997 to 2003, with help from several drive-by insurance adjusters, Robert and Viki raked in $9,280,000 million in fake claims (and filed for far more) and sold the hidden tomato yields out the back door. They mastered the dark art of the double-dip.

Good Times, Great Money

They cheated going in; they cheated going out. According to an indictment delivered by a grand jury in 2003, the Warrens began cooking the books after purchasing crop insurance in 1997. They lied about average yield history, inflated acreage, moved production numbers between insured farms, and grossly underreported total output.

From the get-go, they faked yield data and manipulated planting dates. In 1997, Robert Warren planted his Spartanburg, S.C. farm on April 15, the first day allowed by his policy—or so he told the E.L. Ross insurance company. In truth, he planted on April 4-12. He subsequently claimed cold weather damage for April-May and collected $157,712 in crop insurance.

Further, the Warrens reported remarkably minimal yields on several farms. On the Spartanburg farm, they claimed a harvest of 9,862 boxes of fresh tomatoes. The actual harvest was 78,670 boxes. They pocketed nearly $150,000.

Across all 10 farms in 1997, the Warrens claimed losses on five. Their numbers were fantasy: On their North Carolina farms alone, they professed a total harvest of 293,077 boxes, while really growing roughly 500,000 boxes.

All said, the Warrens received $644,467 in crop insurance or premium credits for their scheme in 1997, not even factoring in gravy from the double-dip.

At first blush, it was easy money. They ran the same scheme in 1998, dramatically lowered overall harvest numbers, fudged figures between fields, and pocketed a smooth $1,277,216.

Good times. Great money. But why not go big?

Mother of All Crop Fraud

Cast lots with us, we will all share the loot. My son, do not go along with them, do not set foot on their paths.—Proverbs 1:14-15

“The Warren Farms investigation is literally the mother of all crop fraud investigations,” said Gretchen Shappert, U.S. attorney for the western district of North Carolina, in a 2005 NPR interview. “It was a result of a perfect storm of individuals who were involved in fraud.”

Enter George Kiser, Demetrio Jaimes, Harold Dean Cole, and Thomas Marsh.

George Kiser owned Kiser & Kiser Agency in Lebanon, Va. He sold the Warrens crop policies from Rain & Hail and E.L. Ross, and showed them the ropes of insurance fraud, advising the couple on how to receive payments for fictitious losses.

Demetrio Jaimes was a farm manager and supervisor who signed false documents and staged weather disasters. Harold Dean Cole forged spray records for the Warrens as a farm employee in charge of chemical applications. Thomas Marsh was a crop insurance claims adjuster who worked for Rain & Hail and E.L. Ross, and certified false acreage, damage claims, and false production figures.

“They were submitting reports to insurance companies from farms that would go in and out of existence by the year,” Edwards notes. “They fudged the serial numbers and kept it all unclear.”

By 1999, the Warrens had 20 farms. They churned out a blitz of forged documents: bills of lading, chemical receipts, sales figures, surveyor letters, acreage reports, planting dates, payroll records, invoices, manifests, and more. They claimed losses on 18 of the farms, with an abysmal overall average of 71 boxes per acre. Conversely, they reported a 3,386 box per acre average on the two successful farms. All told, they claimed 512,106 boxes in 1999, but their actual production number surpassed 1 million boxes. Their 1999 haul was $3.8 million off the backs of fellow farmers and U.S. taxpayers.

In 2000, steering a high of 26 farms, they doubled down with tomato and strawberry fraud, and conveniently suffered losses on 14 of 26 farms. Total insurance payout in 2000? $2,254,883.

Yet, the insurance lucre wasn’t enough. The Warrens wanted more. Specifically, they wanted $600,000 from a neighboring farm for alleged herbicide drift. Their greed was the beginning of the end.

A Haunting Detail

On Sept. 8, 2000, the Warrens sued Patten Seed. They accused an employee of Super Sod (an arm of Patten Seed) of spraying 2,4-D on a neighboring field with a highboy and causing drift damage on their tomatoes. Additionally, per their complaint, the Warrens alleged a sprayer hose broke on the highboy and leaked substantial amounts of 2,4-D on an adjoining backroad for three-quarters of a mile. In total, the Warrens pinpointed $600,000 in damages purportedly attributable to Patten Seed/Super Sod action.

During the exchange of information between the opposing legal teams, Warren Farms turned over sales and production data. Notably, the yield numbers were different from what the Warrens reported to E.L. Ross in 1999 crop losses. The figures given to Patten Seed listed overall 1999 North Carolina tomato yields at 865,997 boxes, yet the E.L. Ross 1999 North Carolina tomato yields were drastically lower—316,799 boxes. The discrepancy would haunt the Warrens.

Jumping the Shark

On Independence Day of 2001, the Warrens conducted one of the most outlandish dupes in the history of U.S. agriculture.

Covering their tracks, they switched insurance companies to Fireman’s Fund and added a new farm in Cocke County, Tennessee. Par for the course, the Warrens faked production records for the western Tennessee property, pretending to have grown tomatoes on the ground back to 1991—paving a full decade of forged documents with notarized lease agreements, false testimony from a realtor, fantasy planting dates, fantasy spraying records, bogus harvest records, false diagrams detailing a fantasy irrigation system, and hundreds of fake invoices.

Insurance acquired, the Warrens planted 252.2 acres of tomatoes on the Cocke County farm—so they reported. The real number? Roughly five planted acres.

On July 4, 2001, a devastating hailstorm materialized from a painted blue sky and released its fury exclusively within the bounds of the Warren’s tomato rows. Their farm employees used disposable cameras to record the catastrophe and submitted the hailstone photos as proof to bolster an insurance claim.

However, rather than a freakshow of nature, the hailstorm was a freakshow from the aisles of Piggly Wiggly or Walmart. Their farm employees purchased bags of ice and mothballs, flung the loads around the tomato plants, and snapped photos of the “hailstones” falling from the sky. A farmhand then walked the rows and obliterated the crop with a stick, with additional photos taken of the aftermath.

Bobby Chambers, farm manager at the Warren’s Tennessee operation, described the scene to NPR: “The way we did it, we was down taking pictures, out this row, and then we just stood behind it and throwed the ice over the top. To me, it looked like a hailstorm.”

“They had one Mexican who did all the beating, he beat every 16,000 of them,” Chambers added. “He’d just go through there and knock the leaves off of them. It made it look like where the hail had beat it up.”

Over 20 years past the event, and after a career witnessing every shade of crime, prosecutor Richard Edwards is still jolted by the Warren’s moxie: “The plants were about 1’ high and completely destroyed. In the submission photos, sure enough, there was ice on top of black plastic and pitiful plants everywhere, torn apart.”

However, during later execution of search warrants, investigators gained access to all the photos on the camera roll—including the outtake pictures not turned in as part of the Warren’s claim. “There were two different sets of photos,” Edwards details. “In one set, in closeup photos the Warrens didn’t turn in, the hailstones were curiously cylindrical in shape, with odd dimples on both ends. Also, the path of the hailstones had miraculously fallen with heavy concentrations trailing from the bed of a pickup parked on the turnrow. It was a dry, dusty day, and no doubt the bag leaked and left a trail of ice cubes from truck to tomatoes.”

“In the second set of photos, the hailstones looked amazingly like mothballs—because they were mothballs,” Edwards continues. “Then they beat down the plants to shreds and took pictures from the front angle to make it appear as if the entire farm was damaged, but they’d only planted 6 acres of tomatoes and left the rest empty. We used satellite imagery with different color filters to prove they were lying. Yet, two adjusters, Don Farrow and George Kiser, both approved the claim.”

In the replant of the 252.5 acres, the Warrens pocketed $98,490. (They also declared freeze damage on five farms in the Carolinas for a tidy cleanup of $63,761.25.) All told in 2001, over 17 farms, they received $1,097,718 from Fireman’s Fund, and claimed they were owed an additional $3,805,610. The Warrens had jumped the shark: USDA investigators were closing.

Foot of the Cross

Staying on the move, the Warrens attempted to shift insurance companies again in 2002, seeking a switch from Fireman’s Fund to IGF. They used virgin farmer names—front producers—as window dressing to obtain lower coverage rates.

But on March 12, 2002, their plans went sideways when federal agents with search warrants descended on their home and two packing houses. Investigators found a trove of evidence in the basement of the Warren’s house—a veritable document production facility where paperwork had been manufactured for the duration of the crop fraud.

“We were able to see exactly how Robert and Viki created documents,” Edwards says. “They took bills of lading, chemical receipts, sales receipts, and much more, and did cut-and-paste jobs. Then they photocopied the new document and turned it in as proof of low yield or high yield or whatever they needed. Their basement that had been turned into a facility for cutting and pasting with old fashioned Wite-Out and Xerox machines.”

Due to the motherlode of falsified and forged paperwork, the Warren’s fraud became one of the most fact-intensive cases of Edward’s career. “We’re talking about nearly 1 million damning documents, as well as multiple farms and multiple submissions,” he says. “I was fortunate to have a group of four USDA agents and one IRS agent working on the case and they were fantastic.”

How convincing were the forgeries? “You could take the xeroxed documents the Warrens submitted and match them against the pink or yellow originals and spot the changes in figures,” Edwards notes. “You could hold the documents up to the light and see the Wite-Out or places where tape had been stuck on paper to hide changes in figures.”

Beyond the reams of paperwork, the Warren’s basement held a curious assortment of PVC pipes. Some of the pipes contained stacks of twenty-dollar bills wrapped in aluminum foil, then placed in cloth bags, and finally stuffed into the plastic tubes—impossible to locate via metal detector.

“We strongly suspected they were burying cash on their land, but there was no way to find it,” Edwards says.

Despite a mountain of evidence screaming out crop insurance fraud across a six-year shuffle, the Warrens denied all wrongdoing and professed complete innocence: They were victims.

“The Warrens were extremely defiant,” Edwards recalls. “They never came to the foot of the Cross until a gallows conversion. They finally pled guilty.”

Saddam Hussein of Crop Insurance

A year-and-a-half after the search warrants were executed, the grand jury dropped a stinging indictment in October 2003, layered with details of the con. According to DOJ, “The indictment charged the Warrens, as well as two of their employees, an insurance agent, and an insurance adjuster, with participating in an extensive scheme to defraud the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC) and several private insurance companies of more than $9 million between 1997 and 2001, and attempting to obtain an additional $2.8 million in 2001 through 2003.”

Year by year, claim by claim, and lie by lie, the investigation exposed the Warren’s fraud, connecting the dots to George Kiser, Demetrio Jaimes, Harold Dean Cole, and Thomas Marsh. The evidence was overwhelming:

—Filing fraudulent applications for crop insurance and then filing false loss claims;

—Submitting falsified production records, planting dates, and harvesting dates;

—Creating thousands of false, altered, and forged documents to support fraudulent insurance claims;

—Staging false weather disasters to substantiate false crop damage claims;

—Using false records to file a fraudulent civil suit against a neighboring farm;

—Attempting to create false farming entities that would appear to be run independently of Warren Farms, as well as creating false reports and forged documents in support of these attempts.

Significantly, the government used the Warrens’ herbicide drift lawsuit against Patten Seed/Super Sod to bolster its case. In May 2002, on the heels of undergoing federal search warrants of their properties, the Warrens curiously dismissed their suit against Patten Seed. Nonetheless, the raw yield numbers were inescapable, and Edwards pointed out an impossibility: “To make their court case look good against Super Sod, they submitted huge past tomato yield numbers, but on the same farms, they had submitted dreadful shortfalls to USDA for crop insurance claims. Therefore, it was time to pick a felony because they both couldn’t be true.”

Overwhelmed by a flood of evidence, the Warrens took a deal. Robert Warren pled guilty to conspiracy to defraud the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC) and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Viki Warren pled guilty to conspiracy to defraud the FCIC and one count of mail fraud. The Warrens agreed to the forfeiture of $7.3 million, and $9.15 million in restitution to USDA.

Speaking to NPR, Robert Warren’s attorney, Sean Devereaux, deflected blame from his client: “It’s fine for the government to issue sentencing memoranda and make Robert Warren appear to be the Saddam Hussein of crop insurance, but he’s not. He basically was approached by people selling insurance and told, ‘This is an easy thing to do. Don’t worry, this is the government’s money, it’s not the insurance company’s money.’”

Almost the entire Warren crew confessed. Crop insurance agent George Kiser pled guilty and received a 27-month sentence and an $8.15 million penalty in restitution to USDA. Thomas Marsh, the loss adjuster, admitted guilt and was sentenced to 14 months and $767,000 in restitution. Harold Dean Cole refused to plead and went to trial. Cole was found guilty at trial of forging agricultural spray records on the Warren’s Tennessee farmland; his falsified records, ranging from 1991 to 2000, enabled the Warrens to triple guaranteed yield and increase the indemnity by $2 million. He was sentenced to 46 months and $2.18 million in restitution. Farm manager Demetrio Jaimes escaped with probation.

Viki Warren was sentenced to 66 months; Robert Warren was sentenced to 76 months. Roughly six years later, after he was released from prison on Nov. 29, 2010, Robert Warren quickstepped back to Buncombe County. Time to dig for PVC pipes?

Stale and Musty

On Feb. 22, 2011, while on probation at a halfway house in Asheville, N.C., Robert Warren opened an account at RBC Bank in Candler in the name of Beaverdam Valley Farms. Between April 13, 2011, and August 17, 2011, he deposited $208,463.40 into the Beaverdam account—in small bites never climbing above $9,000, ensuring no Currency Transaction Reports would catch the government’s eye. However, Warren was exposed by the odd physical condition of the money he deposited. Literally, the smell and feel of the bills set off alarm bells.

As reported by Eric Veater, IRS special agent: “The branch manager recalled that on two or three occasions she witnessed Robert Warren making the deposit of older twenty-dollar bills, specifically those without the security features added on the latest twenty-dollar bills, which were rubber-banded, wrapped in aluminum foil and ‘freezing cold.’ The branch manager recalled that Warren made comments such as ‘things are looking up’ and ‘things are getting better’ when he made the deposits. A teller at the RBC Bank Candler Branch said sometimes the cash that Robert Warren deposited at the bank smelled ‘stale and musty.’ The teller also said sometimes the rubber bands on the cash broke because they had lost their elasticity.”

Stale, musty, freezing cold, and aluminum-wrapped wads of money? “The currency that Robert Warren deposited fit with our speculation during the crop insurance case,” Edwards says. “We suspected that he dug that money up or retrieved it from somewhere, or both.”

Busted for bank fraud and probation violations, Robert Warren once again went back to the pen. Nine years after pleading guilty to crop insurance fraud, he was sentenced to 29 more months in prison.

What were the Warren’s plans had they not been caught? What drove their steadily rising and riskier levels of theft?

“They were buying property every year,” Edwards says. They were buying more farms. It’s purely conjecture on my part, and they didn’t have children, so I don’t know if they intended to sell the land as property values exploded. It seems to have all been tied back to generating more and more money.”

The Warren case is as old as time, Edwards concludes. “Love of money is the root of all evil. Maybe it’s just that simple. It appears the Warrens stole to steal.”

For more from Chris Bennett (cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:

While America Slept, China Stole the Farm

Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic

Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market

Tractorcade: How an Epic Convoy and Legendary Farmer Army Shook Washington, D.C.

Young Farmer uses YouTube and Video Games to Buy $1.8M Land

Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved After 40 Years

Bagging the Tomato King: The Insane Hunt for Agriculture’s Wildest Con Man

Thu, 27 Jan 2022 15:30:18 GMT

The hardest creature to hunt is human. Six hundred and fifty miles from his red-dirt home, following a month-long trail of busted leads and hollow tips, Bill Honea stood in the shadows outside a central Florida hotel, waiting with the patience of a stone. Hidden beneath casual cover afforded by a t-shirt and blue jeans, Honea, a renowned U.S. bounty hunter, was within minutes, and 100 yards, of capturing Jamie Lawhorne, one of the most infamous con artists ever to crash into U.S. agriculture.

At the tail-end of a bizarre chain of ag crimes, Lawhorne was on the cusp of launching an outlandish Ponzi scheme—astoundingly, his third agriculture-related pyramid in a mere two years. Silver tongue or seared heart, Lawhorne, a pied piper who bilked hundreds of growers for an approximate $3 million haul by floating evergreen promises of perpetual tomato and worm buyback profits, was about to pull the trigger on a cucumber heist—audaciously while on the lam.

As a nationwide manhunt for Lawhorne dragged across a month-long span, Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman turned over rocks in the West, while Honea beat the bushes and cold-nosed tracks in multiple states across the Southeast, culminating in a Florida stakeout 20 miles north of Orlando in Lake Mary, at the Candlewood Suites hotel, on Feb. 22, 2015.

Despite enough bravado to stir echoes of P.T. Barnum, Lawhorne, in room 310 of the Candlewood, had no inkling his buck-wild charade was in its final act. Just after 6 p.m., Honea, concealed body armor in place, entered the hotel with a single objective: Bag the engineer behind some of the wildest swindles in agricultural history.

Same Old Song

Lawhorne’s traveling grifter show was in full swing years before he discovered agriculture’s soft belly, with shady stints related to robo-call scams, miracle juice, dietary supplements, survival bunkers, and a near two-year stay in federal prison during the mid-90s for “conspiracy to defraud the United States.”

In early 2013, Lawhorne launched Cypress Creek Organic Farms in Hampton Cove, Ala., southeast of Huntsville. The pitch to prospective producers was fanciful, but relatively simple: $25,000 to $40,000 of income per year growing organic tomatoes. For a one-time fee of $9,950, “affiliates” were promised a greenhouse (100’ x 20’ high tunnels covered in plastic sheeting), 100 hours of training, buyback of all tomatoes at organic market value, daily pickup of product, free provision of organic seedlings each year, and guaranteed USDA organic certification. Major grocery chains (Publix, Bruno’s) were contracted and waiting to gobble up every tomato Cypress Creek could procure, according to Lawhorne. In just over six months, the sweet spiel attracted more than 250 Alabama and Tennessee growers and $2.2 million.

Lawhorne recognized the power of image and reputation, and attempted to lure Dr. Rick Snyder, a nationally reputed Mississippi State University Extension professor with a specialty in vegetables and greenhouse tomatoes, onto the board of directors at Cypress Creek. Snyder, who wrote the go-to text of tomato production, Greenhouse Tomato Handbook , saw past the shine of Lawhorne’s hustle, and helped prevent Cypress Creek from spreading into Mississippi. “I’ve never encountered a fraudster like him and he didn’t come across as a pathological liar,” Snyder recalls, “but when I looked at the details of what he was claiming, the whole story fell apart. I get approached almost every year by someone with lofty greenhouse tomato plans backed by investors, but Lawhorne is the only one who actually targeted the growers to take advantage of them.”

When the buyback promises collapsed and a baying local media descended with mounting questions, Lawhorne skipped town on 250 incensed affiliates, and surfaced several months later barking a brand new deal and sporting an alias—Jim Gilley—450 miles away in Concord, N.C.

Gone were tunnel tomatoes, replaced by red worms. Gone were “affiliates,” substituted by “associates.” Gone was Cypress Creek, replaced by WormzOrganic. Otherwise, it was the same saccharine song: For $4,950, an associate signed a 10-year contract guaranteeing buyback of all worm castings and red wigglers at market prices: $8.25 per sack of castings and $9.30 per pound of worms.

A few months and 100-plus outraged associates later, the worm pyramid toppled on July 3, and Lawhorne beat a retreat out of Concord, but was pinched eight days later for DUI in South Carolina, and eventually transported to Alabama to face Cypress Creek charges. On Oct. 31, Lawhorne was indicted on 24 counts of illegal activity related to the tomato caper. One month and a half after the indictment, Lawhorne would waltz into Bill Honea’s bail bonds office. Two and a half months after the indictment, Lawhorne would again be on the run, ready to strike up the grifter band and set up shop as a cucumber con man. (For more on Lawhorne’s bizarre run of scams, see Breaking Bad: Chasing the Wildest Con Artist in Farming History )

Parts Unknown

“I thought Lawhorne was a low-risk flight guy the first time I met him,” Honea recalls. “At first, he seemed like a classic scoundrel that you get along with, but hate. He was a guy motivated in business by all the wrong reasons, and a guy who would rather do wrong than right.”

Initially, bond was set at $600,000, but when an Alabama judge dropped it to $100,000, Lawhorne posted bail (backed by family money and property) via Honea’s #1 Bail Bonding of Alabama, and was released on Dec. 19, 2014, with a state monitoring bracelet fastened around his ankle and a confinement zone limited to his mother’s house in Bridgeport, 70 miles northeast of Huntsville.

Less than a month after posting, Lawhorne cut through the nylon straps of an electronic monitoring device on Jan. 17, 2015, and boarded a bus for parts unknown. Three days later, Honea’s cell rang with a tip: Lawhorne and $100,000 had bounced.

Dog the Bounty Hunter

“I very seldom get personal, but I feel like I’m an officer of the court and I’m viewed that way in many states,” Honea explains. “I take the privilege to write bail very seriously, and I hold myself and my agents to the highest standards. When Lawhorne jumped, I had 100,000 reasons to go get him, but I knew catching him was also about making sure his victims had a day in court.”

By jumping, Lawhorne made a severe miscalculation that would boomerang four weeks later: He didn’t account for the expertise and reach of Honea. Past president of the Alabama Bail Bond Association and member of the National Bail Bonds Association, Honea’s net trawled deep across the Southeast and beyond. Further, Honea was an associate and long-time friend of Dog the Bounty Hunter and Beth Chapman, having appeared with the couple in an episode of the 2013 television series: Dog and Beth: On the Hunt.

Dog Chapman doesn’t hide his respect for the Alabama bondsman, and is quick to give credence to Honea’s bonafides: “Bill Honea has apprehended so many people over the years because he’s just one of these rare guys that has what it takes and he has so much knowledge about law enforcement. I’d say Bill is one of the best in this business not just in the United States, but he’s in the top echelon across the world.”

When Lawhorne pitted his cunning against Honea’s savvy, it was a matchup that teased the odds. Across Honea’s 27-year career, only three jumpers have escaped—and each was toe-tagged with a significant caveat. One was believed by U.S. marshals to be dead; a second was chased by Honea to Mexico and nabbed by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA); and a third was a member of the notorious Gambino crime family.

“I’ve never claimed to be the best in the industry,” Honea says, “but I was going to catch Lawhorne. He could run and he could hide, but when the clock struck midnight, I was going to be standing beside him.”

A Cold Trail?

Honea began the search by shaking the tree in Bridgeport, picking up the severed ankle monitor, and interviewing Lawhorne’s mother. According to Honea, she told a dubious tale: After Lawhorne claimed (falsely) to have been granted travel permission by a probation officer, she dropped him off at a bus station outside Huntsville. End of story.

“I knew he was gone and not coming back on his own,” Honea remembers. “I didn’t come up with anything at the bus station, so it was immediately obvious this was going to be slippery. We got warrants in place, made sure he was in the FBI system in case he was apprehended in another state, and started checking for aliases. You tick off basic questions to cut down the angles. Where could he run? What is his personality? Is he willing to skip out and cost his father $100,000?”

Despite starting blind, Honea received a flood of tips after throwing out feelers in the Southeast and putting Dog Chapman on the lookout. “The tips came from everywhere and so I had to go everywhere. Most people are like cattle or deer and take the path of least resistance. I knew he’d want to keep up his lifestyle. Dog was looking for Lawhorne out West, and I started checking at his family’s homes. Some of the encounters were pretty rough and we had to bring in police.”

Honea interviewed scam victims in Alabama, North Carolina and Tennessee, trying to find overlooked details. Incredibly, Lawhorne had telephoned multiple Ponzi victims and asked for money, insisting he was still owed additional sums from the buyback contracts.

“He was somewhere and I just had to wait. Weeks were going by. The judge wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy. Basically, I was looking night and day.”

Over 3,000 tips (even from international sources) poured in via phone and social media, and placed Lawhorne’s presence in a wide range from Atlanta to Las Vegas. “People always want to know where tips come from,” Honea says. “Really, it’s everywhere, including family. Everyone has friends, family and acquaintances and those relationships leave deep tracks. Who is lying? Who is covering? It gets very tangled.”

Motels, abandoned houses, bus stations, and police departments, Honea hit the pavement and tightened the net, confident the activity would flush his fugitive from hiding. Honea spent days staking out Lawhorne’s relatives in Nashville and Sand Mountain. But…no Lawhorne.

Honea checked in with Dog Chapman, hoping for a new angle and fresh perspective. “Especially when we’re dealing with high-profile or dangerous individuals, Dog and I call each other often. Why? We ask, ‘What am I missing about this skip?’ We never let our pride or ego get in the way. All the guys involved in this business bring something to the table and we listen to each other. The small details always matter. Always.”

Truly, the small details. Another morsel of obscure information lost in the pile. One more wafer-thin lead. On Feb. 20, Honea’s cell rang with a tip: Lake Mary, Fla.?

Along with another bail agent from his team, Honea geared up with an FN 303 riot gun, bulletproof vest, cuffs, shackles, multiple cannisters of pepper spray, and an extensive amount of additional equipment, and the pair hit I-75, bound for Lake Mary—after notifying Florida authorities. “I was driving a vehicle that fit the situation, and that may be different each time. In this case, I made sure we didn’t attract any attention. Everybody wants to be safe at end of the day and I don’t want to hurt anybody. I didn’t know if Lawhorne would resist or fight. I didn’t know if there were children, schools or families around. We had to move fast and then research before moving in. Otherwise, we’d be liable if things went wrong.”

Hardest to Hunt

Once in Lake Mary, Honea began poking around, and almost immediately caught scent of Lawhorne’s trail. To Honea’s surprise, Lawhorne already had the framework built for another Ponzi: “I got hold of flyers advertising a business called Pockles Pickles looking for investors. Growers would produce the cucumbers and get paid by Lawhorne, very similar to what he did with tomatoes and worms. Everything matched up and I knew he was close—very close.”

After a buy-in investment just under $5,000, Pockles Pickles growers would receive seed, fertilizer, containers, and more, along with a 10-year contract and an attractive $30,000 per year profit possibility. At its core, the cucumber/pickle fleece was taken almost directly from the tomato and worm template.

“I talked with some Lake Mary real estate guys and found a warehouse Lawhorne was leasing that was fixing to open,” Honea explains. “He actually had a team hired with a couple of legit people to make himself look clean. It was almost a repeat of the other scams. We got information about package deliveries and addresses, and knew we were right on top of him. It only took a few questions to a couple of key people, and they recognized his picture. We were closing fast, but it’s tricky keeping everything quiet 24 hours before you make an arrest.”

With addresses, additional tips, mail, and photo confirmation, Honea cranked up one final stakeout outside the Candlewood Suites, positive of Lawhorne’s presence. “Bushes, woods, cars, old houses, restaurants, sleeping several nights with homeless people, and you name it, I’ve been on every kind of stakeout imaginable. No matter how simple it looks, nobody is caught until they’re caught. The hardest thing you hunt in life is a man, because he’s smarter than any animal.”

How’d You Find Me?

In balmy Florida temperatures still clinging to the low 70s, Honea made his move, entering the Candlewood Suites hotel on 1130 Greenwood Boulevard, as his assisting agent entered from another door, in a two-pronged pursuit of Lawhorne residing on the second floor. Already having eyeballed Lawhorne on the day of the bond, Honea’s memory bank was locked in on a 53-year-old male with a nondescript figure—medium height, slight build, and balding gray hair—the pedestrian traits of a blender who could melt into the crowd.

Reaching the second floor before Honea, the assisting agent encountered a fully-clothed Lawhorne walking down the hall, bull-rushed the fugitive, and slapped on the cuffs. Textbook. Lawhorne never had the slightest clue of Honea’s presence. “He dropped his head and the confidence was gone. He had no idea and was in total shock. He’d never seen me since the day I bonded him out. Over and over, and it seemed like a thousand times, Lawhorne kept asking me, ‘How’d you find me? How’d you find me?”

Honea walked Lawhorne outside and gave him a cigarette, as police (summoned by Honea) searched the hotel room and gathered evidence. From Lake Mary Officer Les Crawford’s official police report: “On 2/22/15 at approximately 1834 hours I, PFC. Crawford responded to the business of the Candlewood Suites in reference to a request by Bill Honea, a bonding agent from the state of Alabama. Upon arrival at the hotel/motel, I made contact with Mr. Honea who advised there was a subject by the name of James Lawhorne inside the building with a warrant out of Alabama. Honea stated that Lawhorne had failed to comply with his bond conditions and he would be taking him into custody…Within a matter of minutes, Honea and his partner exited the building with Lawhorne in shackles. Honea searched Lawhorne and provided this officer with two Alabama licenses that bore Lawhorne`s likeness but not his name.”

Lawhorne admitted his true identity to police, despite possessing two Alabama drivers’ licenses with fake or stolen identities. In the associated Lake Mary police report, all license identification is redacted, but one of Lawhorne’s license aliases was evident, according to Honea: “He was running the scam business, Pockles Pickles, under the name, ‘Jamie James.’”

Among an assortment of items located in room 310, police found two laptops, an assortment of computer related equipment, and remarkably concrete evidence revealing Lawhorne’s brazen intentions for a surreal cucumber emporium: two boxes of freshly emblazoned business cards for Pockles Pickles.

Tiger by the Tail

Cuffs removed and replaced with a transport belt (hands in the front), Lawhorne was buckled into the front passenger seat of Honea’s vehicle, with the assisting agent sitting directly behind, and Honea behind the wheel.

All in, factoring fuel and bathroom breaks, Honea knew he was in for an approximate 12-hour ride north to Huntsville. However, he didn’t realize Lawhorne would spout tales every mile of the ride, recount his criminal exploits across a 30-year window, or attempt to escape by bribing the same agents responsible for his apprehension. In short, Honea had a “tiger by the tail” and was only just waking up to the background of his passenger.

“I was in that vehicle for hours with him and I literally can’t remember all the stories he told about crime. He started in about being hooked up with all sorts of bad people and kept on, from check-scamming cons to money laundering to buying a $500,000 stolen boat with a check forged with the U.S. Secretary of Treasurer’s name to robo-calls,” Honea describes. “He stole things from the Army, did time in Leavenworth, and graduated from prison with many, many lessons on how to commit more crimes. Honestly, after I picked him up I realized he was more dangerous than I thought. I had a tiger by the tail and didn’t know it.”

Lawhorne did his best to turn Honea’s ear: “It’s kinda ironic, because Lawhorne admitted to a life of crime, but claimed total innocence related to his agriculture theft. He was banging away with all these explanations that got crazier and crazier. About halfway on the ride, he flat out tried to bribe me and promised big money within a week. Specifically, he said a lot of growers had answered the pickle advertisements and he already had a lot of money he could give me.”

“Lawhorne was one of the craziest pickups of my life and I’ve done thousands and thousands,” Honea continues. “I’ve had wild ones with Dog, and many cases stick in my mind, but I’ll never, never forget Lawhorne.”

On Feb. 23, Honea handed Lawhorne over to Alabama authorities. Five months later, on July 22, 2015, Lawhorne was sentenced to 15 years after pleading guilty to two counts of securities fraud. Less than three years later, in a red tape release related to overcrowded prisons, Alabama set free a large number of white collar criminals— Lawhorne included. Despite a chain of schemes and scams, Lawhorne walked in 2018 and is currently on probation.

Horses and Cowboys

Honea insists the role of bounty hunters in criminal apprehension is largely unrecognized by the public. “If the average person knew what we did, picking up criminals tax free, they’d be sincerely appreciative. I’m so blessed to be involved in bail bonds in this country and I take nothing for granted. I thank Jesus Christ for protecting me every day. I thank my coworkers and friends. I thank my family and my wife, Renee. If I didn’t have her, I couldn’t do anything.”

Honea’s reputation in bail bonds speaks volumes, emphasizes Dog Chapman. “As a person, Bill is a fine man and people in this business know he’s on the up and up. He’s a man of honesty and strong character, and I’d also add a great friend, father and husband.”

As for Lawhorne’s apprehension, Honea plays down his role in bagging one of agriculture’s most prolific con artists. “I’m just an old country boy, and I didn’t do anything anyone else couldn’t have done, but I did work my hardest. There ain’t a horse that can’t be rode or a cowboy that can’t be throwed.”

For questions or to read more stories from Chris Bennett (cbennett@farmjournal.com), see:

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