The founder of RVCA, world tour surfer and star of
Taylor Steele's Momentum series faces felony charges for
fraud…
If you’re younger than thirty there’s a fair chance that
you’ve never heard of Conan Hayes. The nose-ringed,
tattooed-before-it-was-hip, altitudinally challenged member of the
Momentum generation was a big deal in the early-to-mid
90-s, featured alongside Slater, Dorian, Machado, Knox, and all the
other Taylor Steele-hyped rippers who rode rockered-out elf-shoe
boards and reshaped the very notion of what constituted
high-performance surfing.
For a while Conan was everywhere. His company,
Seventeen, made the coolest t-shirts of my high school
sophomore year, before being killed by the pre-tween girls’
magazine of the same name.
He married Malia Jones, lost a
soul crushing heat to Koby Abberton at Teahupoo (too high, too
soon, scores from the judges put Malik in an uncatchable early lead
despite a rising swell and dominant performance from Hayes), then
moved to California and, at some point, grew a long scraggly
beard.
While some of his peers went on to become dominant forces for
the next two decades, and others faded away into obscurity (what
ever happened to Jay Larson anyway? Last I heard the dude was
selling real estate in SoCal), Conan moved behind the scenes,
co-founding RVCA and using the popularity of its art/mma/soul
approach to branding to line his pockets and move up in the
world.
(Click here and click here for RVCA and
post-RVCA stories)
But the latest news out of the hellish honky pit known as Orange
County spells trouble for Mr Hayes. He is currently facing a
felony warrant for his arrest stemming from alleged misinformation
provided to Bank of America (Click here).
“Hayes is charged with short-sale fraud on a house in Costa
Mesa. In a short sale, a bank agrees to the sale of a home for less
than the amount owed on the loan. The warrant says Hayes gave Bank
of America false information regarding his net worth, ‘which was in
the millions of dollars.'”
Hayes wound up in a program for people suffering financial
hardships, even though prosecutors contend that in the previous
nine months he sold his interest in a business for about $8 million
and bought a $1.39 million house in Los Angeles County for cash.
The felony complaint says the bank lost $586,245 on the short
sale.”
Astute readers may appreciate the irony of B of A being the
source of a felony charge for fraud. The bank was the beneficiary
of a $45 billion bail out, in addition to the US government
assuming an additional $118 billion worth of loss on its behalf,
only to be handed a fine, in 2014, of nearly $17 billion for, among
other things, a policy of conducting grossly illegal home
foreclosures.
A sweetheart deal to be sure, considering the fact they did an
estimated $700 billion worth of damage to the US economy.
