The attorney representing the owners of the Scottish Rite Cathedral in East Wheeling believes Roxby’s indicted developer Jeffrey Morris truly believed he could deliver on the deal he was selling to investors, vendors, and to more than 100 employees.
Morris, 37, was charged with 18 federal counts of wire fraud and 10 counts of tax evasion in September after serving as the president of Roxby Development, a start-up real estate company founded in Wheeling in 2020. Morris partnered with his parents in 2019 to buy the Mount Carmel Monastery and then directed the firm to purchase the Scottish Rite in September 2020, and then the McLure Hotel in July 2021.
David Croft is the Member in Charge of the Spillman, Thomas & Battle office in Wheeling, and he represented the Scottish Rite Masonry in June for the foreclosure process against Roxby Development. Morris also lost the McLure Hotel to foreclosure this past summer.
While his interactions with Morris were limited, Croft did develop impressions.
“As an attorney who has handled a lot of acquisitions in this area for a number of years, I don’t think Jeffrey came into all of this with ill intent at the very beginning,” said Croft, who also is one of five members of the Ohio County Board of Education. “I think he honestly believed, at the start of it all, that he could make it all work out, but then I think he got under it and couldn’t get out.
“I don’t know, but maybe if took on one project at a time, (Morris) would have had a better chance,” he said. “Finish the monastery, and then move on to the Scottish Rite, and then the hotel. But that’s not how he went about it, and toward the end, there was even talk about the Kaufman building and the Mull Center, too.”
The Roxby operation began with only a mingling of employees, a group that included some of his best friends dating back to high school. In the summer of 2021, however, following the acquisition of the McLure Hotel, the company’s workforce swelled to more than 100. On a few occasions, however, paychecks were not delivered as scheduled.
“I think Jeffrey Morris absolutely believed he had a plan. I think he thought he could get a return for his investors. But, at some point he had to know he was robbing Peter to pay Paul, and when the employees had to wait to be paid, red flags went up for a lot of people,” Croft said. “He saw value in the buildings, and his ideas were sound, but it appears he lost control of it somehow and that’s when laws started being broken, allegedly.
“There was a lot of excitement surrounding the projects, and about the improvements the people could see like the painting of the hotel,” the attorney recalled. “But because of the bankruptcy filing, we now know the painting company didn’t get paid, and a small business can’t take a hit like that and they weren’t the only ones.”
A Pot of Gold?
The Chapter 11 paperwork filed in May by Roxby Development seeking protection from creditors indicated the amount the company was in debt to be between $10 and $50 million, but those pages also revealed Morris had not properly insured the Scottish Rite and McLure properties.
That fact, Croft learned from a colleague, was concerning to federal officials.
“The most significant thing we accomplished at Spillman was to get his request kicked out of bankruptcy court because that process would have given him a long period of time,” he explained. “But he failed to have adequate coverage on the properties and that’s what allowed us to file the motion to dismiss. Once it was, it allowed (lawyer) David Delk to move forward with the foreclosure on the hotel, and me to move forward with the Scottish Rite.”
Croft’s dealings with any legal matters connected to Morris and Roxby Development are minimal at this point, but he still finds some factual information pertaining to the rise and fall of the company very interesting.
“I believe part of the problem as far as the investors are concerned was that it appears they accepted internally generated data instead of third-party information like actual bank statements and documents similar to those,” he said. “Internal information, as far as what I have found, is historically unreliable.
“Right now, I’m sure the federal investigators are putting together all of the numbers, and once they do, I’ll be curious to see the bottom number to see if there are funds missing. I don’t know if that’s a fact or not,” Croft insisted. “If there is, where is it? That’s a fair question.”
According to federal guidelines, each guilty verdict for tax fraud carries a prison sentence up to 20 years and a fine up to $250,000. The penalties for tax evasion depend on the nature of the committed offense.
“I get the impression this case will continue to grow in charges as the investigators continue their work,” Croft said. “But I honestly believe (Morris) still doesn’t think he did anything wrong. That’s the upside of being pathological.”
