Bob McKee gave me my first job when I arrived in Humboldt County in 1969, a poor hippie with a broken down car and a few bucks in my pocket. In the early 70s I worked at his construction yard doing odd jobs such as nailing up wooden shingles on the sides of his country store and later ran a shovel and a chain saw behind his D6 bulldozer while it was building roads on his Briceland Ranch subdivision. In the 80s I bought and traded multiple parcels with Bob. Also in the 80s, Bob invited me to invest with him in his Black Oak Ranch subdivision in Laytonville, now partly the Hog Farm and the site of the Kate Wolf Festivals. A few years later I was a 50% partner with him in the Siri Property subdivision also in Laytonville and his Yorkville subdivision in the Boonville area.
Several years later and having gotten nothing out my investments, Bob shrewdly offered to buy me out with monthly payments. A month after signing this agreement, Bob declared bankruptcy. On the advice of my attorney, I signed his Chapter 13 Bankruptcy offer, along with nearly 50 other “unsecured” creditors, who were owed millions of dollars. We were promised 40 cents on the dollar, paid off over a 20 year period. Several of the creditors told me there was no point in hiring an attorney to become a claimant if you were owed less than $50,000 because of the attorneys fees, consequently many creditors simply abandoned the money they were owed. Remember, this was in the 80’s, when a million dollars was worth substantially more than now. After waiting 20 years to get paid back, my attorney had to go back to court. We were informed that the pay off now amounted to only 20 cents on the dollar, because it had been a fixed total amount owed creditors and additional creditors, some with special ties to the McKee family, had been added to the creditor list. After declaring bankruptcy, Mr. McKee made numerous promises to me, promises that were never kept. After I won in the bankruptcy court, Mr. McKee was forced to pay me. However, my attorney fees accounted for half the money recovered, which means I recovered 10 cents on the dollar 20 years later, which allowing for inflation actual amounts to pennies on the dollar.
Concurrently, Mr. McKee was suing me for a right of way across property he had sold me 20 years previously. Mr. McKee lost the suit. The court decided he had no standing, he simply wanted the right of way. He just knew he was right. Defending myself cost $30,000 and over a year of court appearances and the accompanying stress. I was deposed repeatedly for both legal actions, the right of way and the bankruptcy. I was on trial and appeared before the court numerous times and my credibility was attacked. I had to defend myself against numerous false and outlandish accusations. In a private meeting with only our lawyers present, Mr. McKee told me that in my line of business I shouldn’t be opposing him. Besides the drama and trauma of being in court, and although being vindicated in both trials, in the end I lost 10 years of hard earned savings that I invested with my friend and mentor, the charming Bob McKee. I met the man behind the curtain.
Watching Mr. McKee interact with the county planning departments in our subdivision projects, Bob would become enraged with the bureaucracy, and unfortunately would become entangled in endless, and in my mind needless fights about who was right. Bob had a bumper sticker that read “Bureaucracy, the process of turning energy into solid waste,” which he found amusing, and aligned perfectly with his attitude. Mr. McKee’s 13,000 acre Southern Humboldt [Tooby] Ranch subdivision around 1998 is a case in point. From my experience of more than 20 building permits and a half dozen subdivisions and working with multiple counties, I have learned to make the planners partners in your projects, asking them for direction and then following their lead and suggestions. On the other hand you can go into planning demanding your permits, try to can bully them, insisting you are smarter than they are. Mr. McKee by his own account spent many years and millions on attorney fees fighting the county over the Williamson Act cattle ranch property tax discount that was in place over the [Tooby] ranch when he bought it. Although he knew he was right, Humboldt County sued him and he lost. He might have considered their suggestion of selling 600 acre minimum lots, thus leaving the Williamson Act in place. Instead, Mr. McKee double escrow-ed the ranch selling the entire 13,000 acre ranch to unsuspecting buyers in roughly 160 acre lots. A double escrow means he simultaneously bought and sold the [Tooby] Ranch, the same day. He did not use any of his own money but used the buyers money, and charged 3 and 4 times what he paid for it, pocketing by my estimation $20 million. Thus he created hundreds of “gray” parcels, subdivisions that were not county approved, adding to the probable many 100s more across the north state. Many property owners had not received a clear title over a decade later, and often any subsequent permitting, including cannabis, was denied.
Mr. McKee could be charming and self effacing, and this enabled him to sell more property. He once confided in me that if he sold parcels for no money down, at 10% interest, that it was the equivalent to “giving a man enough rope to hang himself.” In later years he was the go to man for growers with bags of money, which often worked out to the equivalent of a lease until the property got busted. Mr. McKee often would get back grow parcels after a bust, then resell them again. He repossessed a neighboring parcel to mine and resold it 4 times. In private he bragged to me about the hundreds of parcels he had flipped. In my opinion, Mr. McKee was a man primarily motivated by greed and self aggrandizement. Men like Mr. McKee are often born wealthy, having inherited large tracks of property and thus feel entitled, having never had to start from nothing or earn their positions of wealth, and have no empathy for those with less. They get blinded by monetary success. These ambitious men have no feelings for those that have had to work and save. Lying to and cheating the county government or clients is just part of the game of getting richer, proving you are smarter than everyone else. This the same macho posturing and competing that is unfortunately common in our culture, and dare I say seems to be the same mind set that got our previous President elected.
My apologies if I have offended anyone who might hold Mr. McKee in high regard. I felt the same for many years.
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