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At one point four years ago, Bruce Wisan was a white knight.
Attorney General Mark Shurtleff picked the no-nonsense Salt Lake City accountant to wade into the United Effort Plan Trust, that spiderweb of communal property ownership and finances in Colorado City and Hildale. He would seize control from polygamist prophet-on-the-run Warren Jeffs, carve up the land and mete out justice for disaffected outcasts and faithful alike.
It all seemed relatively simple.
It's become anything but.
And now Wisan has sold the dairy cows.
This week, the attorney general and lawyers for the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints working on a settlement discovered Wisan's $360,000 fire sale of cow flesh in a footnote filed in court. Wisan's last-minute deal smells bad.
Four years on, the UEP property trust Wisan oversees is $3 million in debt -- most of that owed to his firm and his attorneys. No subdivisions have been drawn up. And homes have not been secured or distributed. But the heifers -- the future of the Harker Farm dairy, one of the FLDS' few money-making enterprises and a key part of any settlement between the sect and the state -- have been sold off.
Both the state and attorneys representing the 8,000 fundamentalists who live in the twin towns seem fed up with the trustee.
"The Reformed Trust is illiquid and heavily in debt. The ability of the Special Fiduciary to administer the trust
Attorney for the FLDS Rod Parker believes Wisan is trying to derail the settlement to keep his expensive gig going. Meantime, he says, the trustee is cannibalizing the FLDS assets.
"It's gotten to the point where the fiduciary's not answerable to the attorney general anymore. He's vastly outpaced his mandate," Parker says. "If the FLDS had sold $360,000 of cattle under the table, there would be hell to pay. There should be hell to pay for the fiduciary."
At the same time, Wisan is fighting charges of trespassing in Arizona after his employee entered two homes in Colorado City without the residents' permission.
White knight unmounted.
Despite both sides turning on him, Wisan insists he still is working in the best interest of the trust. With FLDS members reluctantly and haphazardly paying their $100 monthly occupancy fees, he said the trust was in dire financial straits. Essentially, he had to sell the cows.
Wisan says the sale has not reduced the overall number of milking cows on the dairy. And the FLDS can buy the cows back from Jonathan and Hyrum Harker, who broke with the group in the 1980s and have been running the farm since the trustee took over.
"There's absolutely no gain or loss. It's a sixes transaction," he says. "If somebody wants to make an issue out of this for publicity, they can."
More than 450 head of cattle seem to have brought this to a head.
Wisan plunged into a hot mess when he took over management of the land, homes and buildings held in the United Effort Plan trust. There are few money-making ventures in the polygamist communities. And many of the residents consider Wisan's authority illegitimate and, for a time, refused to participate in the process. But that has changed.
At a basic level, Wisan's commission is fracturing. Shurtleff and Parker are inching toward a settlement that would allow the state to pull out of the twin towns and leave the FLDS once again to their united effort -- hopefully without a imprisoned prophet at the helm.
But Wisan and the Arizona attorney general are resisting.
"We just don't think the settlement is workable. It's not one that I'm going to agree with," Wisan says.
Meantime, Lindberg has been tone deaf to the nuance of the case. She has set a July 1 deadline for public comment. At that point, she will accept or reject the settlement.
This was not supposed to go on for years. What Shurtleff started, the judge can finish. It's time for Lindberg to come up with an exit plan.
