Ricky Don Angel needed bundles of money at the end of 2020, and he told his cousin she had nothing to worry about when he asked her for a $350,000 loan.
Angel, a Saline County businessman and longtime owner of a central Arkansas insurance agency, told Sharon Wadkins of Waldron that the money would keep him from losing his four medical marijuana dispensaries to a management company.
“So just to be clear if I borrowed $350k I would pay you back $700k or even $1,050,000 which is 3 times your money in 90 days if that helps,” Angel wrote in an email to Wadkins, dated Dec. 11, 2020, and with a subject line that said “Confidential.” He promised the dispensary would be a “cash cow” and that another of his businesses was going to generate millions of dollars a week.
But Wadkins and her husband, Rory, had plenty to worry about.
They borrowed money and lent Angel a total of $390,000. He never repaid, and now they are trying to block Angel, who lives in Alexander, from discharging the debt in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy case he filed in March.
“We’re just hardworking, honest people,” Sharon Wadkins told Arkansas Business. “And really, I guess we trusted Rick. … We didn’t know he was in all this trouble.”
Angel “never had four dispensaries that he was in danger of [losing] to his management company because they did not exist,” according to a filing in Angel’s bankruptcy case, which was filed by the Wadkinses’ attorney, Keith Kannett of the Brister Law Firm in Alma. “The alleged reason for the request for money was a false representation or false pretense that Ricky Don Angel knew was false at the time he made it.”
Neither Angel nor his bankruptcy attorney, Dale Duke of Little Rock, returned calls seeking comment.
In the email to Wadkins, he wrote that money may not be everything, but “it’s very necessary to life and my Dad always taught me to seize every opportunity in life and work as hard as you can for the people you love.”
During several bankruptcy proceedings held this year, Angel said he used the money from the Wadkinses to pay expenses for his businesses. Those included Angel Insurance Agency Inc. of Little Rock, which operated from 1998 to 2020, and LRA Medical LLC. The LLC, a personal protective equipment company, began in May 2020 but has since been dissolved.
Missing Money
Sharon Wadkins told Arkansas Business that she’s seen Angel’s bank statements, which show that some of the money she lent him apparently flowed to Insurance Center Inc. of Little Rock, in which, she said, Angel was a partner.
She said she tried to meet with Insurance Center partner Clay Murphy for answers, but he refused to see her.
Murphy didn’t return messages seeking comment.
The Insurance Center’s website said it “represents a multitude of different insurance companies, which gives us the flexibility to craft our clients an individualized insurance program specific to their needs.”
In one of Angel’s bankruptcy proceedings, Angel said that “there was some things that happened. There was some issues” at the Insurance Center. He wasn’t asked to clarify his statements.
But Angel said that he wasn’t sure whether the Wadkinses’ money went to pay the Insurance Center. “There was a lot of different things happening during that time frame, and I really can’t remember where everything went,” Angel said.
Business Problems
Around 2020, it seemed as if all three of Angel’s businesses were either struggling or beginning to struggle.
Angel said that his insurance business expenses were due on the 15th of each month.
But he said he received a call on Sept. 1, 2020, that said all bills would be due by the 10th of the month.
“On the 10th, I did not have all the funds to pay,” Angel said. “And therefore I was voted out.”
He said the Angel Insurance Agency was done as of December 2020.
Angel’s Arkansas insurance producer license has been inactive since 2021. An Arkansas Insurance Department spokeswoman said it’s not conducting an investigation into Angel.
Angel said during a bankruptcy proceeding that the money he received from the Wadkinses was used for company expenses, but he couldn’t say specifically what. “There’s a lot of things that hit at one time,” he said.
His medical marijuana business also was in trouble.
He had a 4% ownership interest in River Valley Dispensary LLC, a marijuana dispensary in Morrilton in which he invested in 2018. He said that he wasn’t sure how much money he invested in the company.
In the email to Wadkins he said he paid $450,000 on Dec. 1 but needed another $350,000.
“There was an enormous amount of pressure on me … trying to get me to pay for other people’s interests, let’s put it that way,” Angel said. He “had a lot of pressure at that point.”
He said that when he asked Wadkins for money he was trying to “keep things afloat” and believed he could repay her by March 2021.
“We thought we had something with that medical marijuana scenario that was very good,” Angel said. “At the end of the day, we learned in April of 2021, that basically we would always owe more taxes than we ever would get in revenue. It’s like it’s a very long story, but we had a tax bill due of [$300,000] or $400,000, and it never made one single dollar.”
And the next year, in April 2022, the tax bill was more than $2 million.
He said the dispensary’s management company “relieved us of that tax burden.” As of November 2022, Angel was no longer an owner of the company, according to the Arkansas Department of Finance & Administration.
Meanwhile, Angel started another business, LRA Medical LLC of Little Rock, in May 2020. The company would provide personal protective equipment.
He told Wadkins in the email that he planned to sell nitrile medical exam gloves. “There is so much fraud and crazy ness in the PPE world but I wanted to build a real option for my buyers to get their much needed Nitrile Medical Exam gloves,” Angel said in the email.
He said he expected to receive $4.5 million weekly from the sale of gloves.
He said he thought the money he received from the Wadkinses could have been repaid by March 2021 because of the “done deals” that he had in place.
But when the financing for the gloves fell apart, so did the company, Angel said during the bankruptcy procedures. “It’s just crazy that none of those worked out,” he said.
Chips Start to Fall
Adding to the financial pressure from his struggling businesses, Angel was also being sued for not paying his bills.
In August 2021, SLC Financing LLC of Pine Bluff, the entity that provides financing for the jewelry store Sissy’s Log Cabin, filed a lawsuit to collect $125,000 owed for jewelry.
The items he bought included an 18-carat white gold, 21.65-carat-weight round diamond, 16-inch collar necklace.
Angel said that the items went to a girlfriend around 2018 and he hasn’t talked to her since 2021.
But he said he settled the lawsuit in August 2023 by using a $50,000 he received from a friend, Greg Hatcher, owner of the Hatcher Agency of Little Rock.
Angel said that when his mother sold her house in September 2023, she gave him $50,000, which he then used to repay Hatcher.
Kannett, Wadkins’ attorney, asked Angel why he paid Hatcher and not the Wadkinses or other creditors?
“It has nothing to do with the friendship,” Angel said.
“I was trying to get people paid up,” he said. “From 2020 on, … anytime I’ve been able to get any money, all I try to do is get my debt paid.”
Hatcher told Arkansas Business that he knew Angel from playing softball with him, but never worked with him. “I try to help people when they’re in trouble,” Hatcher said.
But Sharon Wadkins told Arkansas Business that when Angel didn’t repay the money in March 2021, she thought it was because of delays due to COVID. After a year, however, she knew something wasn’t right.
She called Angel’s brother and asked him what was going on with her cousin. “The first thing he said is, ‘You didn’t loan him any money, did you?’” Wadkins said.
She then confronted Angel “and that’s when the chips started falling.”
The Wadkinses filed a lawsuit against Angel, whom Sharon described as her favorite cousin, in Scott County Circuit Court in June 2023.
In March, Angel filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which leads to liquidation, and reported debts of $1.1 million and just $34,875 in assets.
In June, the Wadkinses filed a complaint in Angel’s bankruptcy case to prevent the $390,000 he owes them from being discharged. They said in the filing that had they known the truth about where the money was going, they would have never made him a loan.
Angel denied the allegations of wrongdoing in a court filing and said the Wadkinses’ complaint should be dismissed.
A hearing is scheduled to start Jan. 27 in U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Richard D. Taylor’s courtroom in Little Rock.
“The most we could get out of that would be a judgment, which I guess would be better than just throwing it out the door,” Sharon Wadkins said.
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