Mountain Pure Has New Owner After Stacks Conviction

John B. Stacks’ rough year continued last week when his Mountain Pure operations were handed over to a new owner after a foreclosure auction on the steps of the Pulaski County Courthouse.

Clear Water Holdings LLC is the new proprietor, but we couldn’t find out too much information about the LLC.

Its registered agent is attorney R. Tom Hillis, a partner in the Tulsa law firm of Titus Hillis Reynolds Love Dickman & McCalmon P.C. He formed the LLC at the end of June.

We couldn’t reach Hillis last week to confirm this, but we’re told the person behind Clear Water is J. Scott Dickman, an attorney of counsel at the firm.

Back in March, as you may recall, Simmons First National Bank of Pine Bluff sued Stacks, Mountain Pure and related entities for defaulting on $16.5 million worth of loans originated by Metropolitan National Bank, which Simmons acquired a year ago.

As he was preparing for trial on federal criminal charges, Stacks reached a consent foreclosure decree in September for Mountain Pure’s Arkansas and Mississippi water bottling plants.

In exchange for settling the case, Stacks got to keep his Texas water bottling plant, Mountain Pure Texas, and some other assets.

Earlier this month, Clear Water bought the foreclosure decree and then went to the foreclosure sale on Oct. 16 with a $6 million bid for Mountain Pure’s Arkansas assets.

The order confirming the sale was signed last Tuesday by Pulaski County Circuit Judge Mackie Pierce.

Mountain Pure’s Mississippi property is in the foreclosure process, expected to be final in the next two weeks.

Meanwhile …

Meanwhile, Stacks was convicted on seven federal charges on Oct. 9 — three counts of wire fraud, three counts of making false statements and one count of making a false and fraudulent claim.

Another count of making a false statement was dismissed before the case went to the jury, but the jury hung on three counts of money laundering and a mistrial was declared.

All of the charges were related to $526,100 in loans he got from the U.S. Small Business Administration to replace Mountain Pure equipment that he said was stored in a barn on his farm at Damascus (Van Buren County) when a tornado hit in May 2008.

A new trial on the three remaining charges is currently scheduled for Nov. 10, but Stacks’ defense lawyer, Tim Dudley of Little Rock, told Whispers that it was “highly unlikely” that the trial would start as scheduled.

Dudley is still hoping to get U.S. Judge Leon Holmes to throw out the convictions against Stacks, filing a 14-page brief in support of his motion for acquittal or at least a new trial.

In response, federal prosecutors filed a 31-page response recounting six days of witness testimony against Stacks. (Whispers reads this stuff so you don’t have to.)

Lest anyone think this wasn’t a trial of an Arkansan by Arkansans, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Angela Jegley and Patrick Harris threw in this sentence: “Fraud is classically proven by evidence of what a defendant told a fraud victim orally or in writing and contrasting evidence of what former Senator David Pryor used to call the ‘true facts.’”