Utah business owners convicted in $30M fraud scheme with Noah's Event Center

SALT LAKE CITY — Owners of an event center company that used to have a location in South Jordan before it shut down five years ago were found guilty of more than $30-million worth of fraud.

Christopher J. Ashby, 52, and Jordan S. Nelson, 45, both of Salt Lake County, and Scott W. Beynon, 49, of Davis County, were found guilty on May 15 by a federal jury of 17 counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The trial occurred over a five-week period.

Noah's Event Center, a Lehi-based event company, was located at 322 W. 11000 South in South Jordan before it suddenly shuttered its doors in February 2020. The company's locations in Lindon and 19 other states also closed abruptly, causing about 2,800 events to be canceled and hundreds of employees to be laid off.

The closure occurred after a U.S. District Court judge ordered operations to cease, as the company had filed for bankruptcy twice in a year and was continuing to suffer financial woes, including the closure of some locations prior to the major shutdown.

Related:

Utah-based event center company folds, creating havoc for customers nationwide

The Lehi-based event center company NOAH's has closed for good, leaving its employees without jobs and about 2,800 customers without venues.

Noah's was founded in 2003, but signs that the company was struggling began to appear in 2019, when a group of investors in Indiana filed a lawsuit against the company over a $6.2 million investment in an event space in Carmel, Indiana, according to Bloomberg News. They claimed the center was never started and their money was squandered.

Court records show Noah Corporation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy a month after the lawsuit was filed. In June that year, Bloomberg News also reported that a U.S. District Court judge ordered Noah's owner, William Bowser, to return $845,000 in proceeds from the sale of his home in Park City.

But according to a federal indictment filed in 2023, Carmel was not the only place where the company failed to deliver on its promises.

Between January 2015 and May 2019, Noah's Corporation worked with Utah company Rockwell Debt Free Properties to purchase and resell commercial properties to tenant-in-common investors.

Bowser would locate new properties and construct event centers through funds from Ashby, Nelson and Beynon, who were founding partners of Rockwell, the indictment said. Rockwell would own the properties and enter into lease agreements with Noah's Corporation as the tenant.

The defendants targeted investors who were older, retired and seeking low-risk passive income through 1031 tax exchange investments, the charges state. Rockwell used glossy marketing materials depicting luxurious event spaces, promising revenue that would well exceed operating costs, to dupe investors into funding five new event centers at about $6 million each, the indictment says.

The defendants, however, knew that Noah's had been operating at a net loss for at least three years and misrepresented the company's financial circumstances to investors, prosecutors said. Investor funds were not used as promised but instead paid off Noah's operations, prior investors and rent for previously sold event centers.

"Only by 'stealing from Peter to pay Paul' were the defendants able to conceal the poor performance of the event centers," the charges state.

In the end, investors who were promised new event spaces in Dublin, Ohio; Independence, Ohio; Toledo, Ohio; Carmel, Indiana; and Jacksonville, Florida, were left with empty, undeveloped lots while the defendants received approximately $30 million.

"Despite defendants' promises that the investments were 'safe' and 'secure' and that Noah's was a reliable corporate partner, Noah's Event Centers were, collectively, an unprofitable enterprise sustained only through infusions of new investor funds," the U.S. Attorney's Office of Utah said.

Bowser, 63, of St. George, pleaded guilty in the middle of the trial on April 16 to just the conspiracy-to-commit-wire-fraud charge.

"I knew Rockwell investors would ultimately pay building costs for buildings other than the specific projects in which they invested. By doing so, I knew that investors' funds would be misappropriated," Bowser said in his plea. "I participated in the scheme by using those funds for unrelated projects."

Scott L. Rutherford, 54, of Utah County, pleaded guilty last June to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Rutherford was the vice president of marketing for Rockwell and admitted in his plea that he solicited investors despite knowledge of Noah's financial difficulties and expressed those concerns to the other defendants.

"I sent brochures to potential investors touting Noah as a strong, reliable tenant and promoting the five unbuilt event centers as sound investment properties, even though the brochures contained misleading and false statements about Noah's profitability and financial health," Rutherford's plea statement says. His sentencing is scheduled for October.

John D. Hamrick, 67, of Franconia, New Hampshire, pleaded guilty on Jan. 21 to three counts of wire fraud. Hamrick operated in the New England states through the company Edmond & Wheeler, which specializes in Section 1031 exchanges.

He was cited in the indictment as being a major referral source of investors for Rockwell, but said in his plea agreement that he believes many facts were "deliberately withheld" from him by Rockwell, such as how he did not know the investor funds were not being used as intended.

"I accepted the excuses that Noah's was managing 46 properties and a couple of missed payments might simply be an administrative failing rather than — as I later learned was the truth — a symptom of a company that was failing financially and did not have funds to complete projects or operate centers for which it would pay investors lease payments," his plea said.

Hamrick will be sentenced in August. Sentencing hearings have not been scheduled yet for Bowser, Ashby, Nelson and Beynon.

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