The Road to Corruption

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Nov. 22, 2009

It is easy to see why Tony Young coveted a place at the Unionville table so greatly that he went to swindling people he knew just to get his Chippendale chair there.

I attended the auction that was held recently at Young’s former home in West Marlborough, covering the event for the paper. I had driven by the place just once before out of curiosity, the allure of seeing a mansion that theft built drawing me there. I was left somewhat unimpressed by the place. No Xanadu of Citizen Kane, the mansion can be seen plainly from the road and strikes one as more nouveau riche splendor than classic grandeur.

But the drive to and from Young’s place was more than worth the trip. I have spent a wealth of time on the back roads of Chester County on my way to and from West Chester, but never have I been tempted to stop and stare in wonder at the landscape as often as I had on the trip west from Unionville out Route 82 as when I went in search of Young’s home.

What you see as East Marlborough melts into West is not picture-postcard beauty, or generic rolling hills landscape painting beauty, but a vista of quiet green elegance that extends across the horizon. The view that unfolds is like Chester County’s own Big Sky country, where the meadows and fields and stands of trees fill your eyes and the turns in the road bring new pleasures in an instant.

Driving that road I admit to feeling the pull to be a part of it, to wish that I could feel at home in it. Obviously those who have grown up in that slice of the county feel protective of their world, and try their best to ward off changes. I imagine as well that there is an insularity to the community because of the beauty that encompasses it. The betrayal that Young visited on those he called friends was exacerbated strictly because of he cast a cloud on the landscape they love, at least for some fleeting time.

Young, pardon the interruption, is the boyish looking investment financier who swindled people he knew in the equestrian community of greater Unionville for millions and millions of dollars. According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, he used the money he funneled from those who invested in his investment firm for the specific purposes of living as they did – with horses and polo silks and mahogany furniture and Audubon prints and foxhunting ephemera and – most striking for me -- a classic Triumph TR-3 convertible. I assume that Young took rides in that car with the top down, imagining himself an English landowner sporting his way across the fox hunting hills and valleys of that countryside the fields of Unionville are so reminiscent of. I assume that he loved the fact that he could buy fifty boxes of shotgun shells and just leave them in the storeroom for whatever time he wanted to go shoot at skeet or trap or pheasants or quail of whatever it is they shoot at out there in the land beyond the Po-Mar-Lin Fire Co. firehouse.

A silver-haired man I spoke with at the auction told me he thought the piles of possessions that were for sale spoke to him of one thing – guilt. Young spent the money he stole on whatever he fancied at the moment because for him there was no future to save for. He must have known, the man said, that it was only a matter of time before the truth would close in on him like a pen, and so why not acquire as much as he could beforehand?

Just a few days before the auction took place, an article on Young appeared in Fortune magazine, and was a topic of conversation at the event among those who knew Young and knew those who trusted him with their cash. One man I spoke with expressed relief that the scheme had been laid bare in detail as an explanation for those who wondered at the crassness of it all, but another had a more bitter reaction to it. “Why,” he wondered, “did the article have to paint all of the people in the community as possible criminals?”

To explain that I turn to Wendy, a writer and colleague who is wiser in the ways of that world than me.

"It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience,” she wrote to me after hearing of my visit to the Young auction, quoting Sherlock Holmes at his most arch, “that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside."