As we told you Friday, Texas attorney and title company owner Nancy Jackson Carroll (Spinks) was arrested in Lake Forest, Ill., for theft and KXAS-TV’s Scott Gordon was fabulously on top of the story. Here’s a little more on Mrs. Spinks and her life in Lake Forest, one of Chicago’s most affluent suburbs.
Lake Forest is located along the North Shore of Lake Michigan and is an upscale suburb of Chicago, my hometown. It is loaded with affluent homes and well known for polo. Recall in The Great Gatsby when Tom Buchanan’s polo ponies were “bred in Lake Forest”? Some say the character of Tom’s wife, Daisy Buchanan, was based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ex-girlfriend, Lake Forest resident Ginevra King, whose family brought polo ponies to Lake Forest. The town was built around Lake Forest College, a private four-year liberal arts college in the center of town. If I had to compare it one-on-one to an upscale Dallas community, it’s Highland Park with the collegiate flavor of University Park.
So here was where Nancy Carroll Spinks (married name, new husband) was found and arrested and is sitting in a Lake County jail awaiting extradition. She is so lucky she is not in a Cook County jail.
Last week, mid-week, I received an email from a resident of Lake Forest who had read the blog and recognized Nancy Carroll from the post. We spoke by phone. The source told me that Carroll was living in a large Lake Forest home paying about $8,500 a month in rent, and had started a business there.
“Someone needs to turn her in,” said my source, and agreed to contact police.
According to my source, Carroll-Spinks was operating a moving truck business in Lake Forest and had rented a house in Italy for the summer.
According to Gordon’s report on KXAS, Carroll was not only renting the Lake Forest house, she was driving a Merecedes -Benz S63 (they retail for $143,250) and was buying jewelry. She sure had her pick, there are some fabulous jewelry stores in Lake Forest. And to think she told Scott Gordon in an email that she had to sell her car to pay her employees. According to the prosecutor Scott interviewed, the Texas Department of Insurance is pursuing a $1.2 million case against her and about $3 million is missing from Millennium Title Company.
What about the rest of the money in those 1031 Exchanges? Good question.
We are on this story because we think it is a vital real estate story and may expose some big protection gaps in the system. If you have any more information, please email or call. Thankfully, there are many fine, trustworthy title companies in North Texas.
Because if you cannot trust a title company to hold your funds in escrow, who can you trust?
