Thomas’s $267,230 RV and the friend who financed it
Justice Clarence Thomas met the recreational vehicle of his dreams in Phoenix, on a November Friday in 1999.
With some time to kill before an event that night, he headed to a dealership just west of the airport. There sat a used Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon, eight years old and 40 feet long, with orange flames licking down the sides. In the words of one of his biographers, “He kicked the tires and climbed aboard,” then quickly negotiated a handshake deal. A few weeks later, Thomas drove his new motor coach off the lot and into his everyman, up-by-the-bootstraps self-mythology.
In a documentary financed by conservative admirers, Thomas, who was born into poverty in Georgia, waxes rhapsodic about the familiarity of spending time with the regular folks he meets along the way in RV parks and Walmart parking lots.
“I don’t have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States, and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States,” he told the filmmakers, adding: “There’s something normal to me about it. I come from regular stock, and I prefer being around that.”
But there is an untold, and far more complex, backstory to Thomas’s RV — one that leaves unanswered a host of questions about whether the justice received, and failed to disclose, a lavish gift from a wealthy friend.
His Prevost Marathon cost $267,230, according to title history records obtained by The New York Times. And Thomas, who in the ensuing years would tell friends how he had scrimped and saved to afford the motor coach, did not buy it on his own. In fact, the purchase was underwritten, at least in part, by Anthony Welters, a close friend who made his fortune in the health care industry.
He provided Thomas with financing that experts said a bank would have been unlikely to extend — not only because Thomas was already carrying a lot of debt, but because the Marathon brand’s high level of customization makes its used motor coaches difficult to value.
In an email to the Times, Welters wrote: “Here is what I can share. Twenty-five years ago, I loaned a friend money, as I have other friends and family. We’ve all been on one side or the other of that equation. He used it to buy a recreational vehicle, which is a passion of his.” Roughly nine years later, “The loan was satisfied,” Welters added. He subsequently sent the Times a photograph of the original title bearing his signature and a handwritten “lien release” date of Nov. 22, 2008.
But despite repeated requests over nearly two weeks, Welters did not answer further questions essential to understanding his arrangement with Thomas.
He would not say how much he had lent Thomas, how much the justice had repaid, and whether any of the debt had been forgiven or otherwise discharged. He declined to provide the Times with a copy of a loan agreement — or even say if one existed. Nor would he share the basic terms of the loan, such as what, if any, interest rate had been charged or whether Thomas had adhered to an agreed-upon repayment schedule. And when asked to elaborate on what he had meant when he said the loan had been “satisfied,” he did not respond.
“‘Satisfied’ doesn’t necessarily mean someone paid the loan back,” said Michael Hamersley, a tax lawyer and expert who has testified before Congress. “‘Satisfied’ could also mean the lender formally forgave the debt, or otherwise just stopped pursuing repayment.”
Thomas, for his part, did not respond to detailed questions about the loan, sent to him through the Supreme Court’s spokesperson.
The two men’s silence serves to obscure whether Thomas had an obligation to report the arrangement under a federal ethics law that requires justices to disclose certain gifts, liabilities, and other financial dealings that could pose conflicts of interest.
Richard W. Painter, a White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, said that “justices just should not be accepting private loans from wealthy individuals outside their family.” If they do, he added, “You have to ask: Why is a justice going to this private individual and not to a commercial lender, unless the justice is getting something he or she otherwise could not get.”
At the time of the RV purchase, the Thomases’ primary source of income was the justice’s salary, then $167,900. He had yet to sell his autobiography, and property and other records show that the couple had significant debt: They had purchased their house in 1992 for $552,000 with 5 percent down, then refinanced it two years later, taking out a 15-year mortgage of $496,000. Plus, they had at least one line of credit of $15,000 to $50,000.
The title history records held by the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles do not contain detailed information about the loan itself. What they show is that when the Thomases drove their motor coach back home to Virginia, they registered it in Prince William County, which does not charge personal property tax on RVs stored there, unlike Fairfax County, where they live.
And as of late last month, when the Times reviewed the records, they still listed Welters as the lien holder, notwithstanding the signed release he said he gave Thomas in 2008 so he could obtain a new, clear title.
Welters said he could not explain why he was still listed as the holder of the lien. After he gave Thomas the paperwork, he said, “I don’t know what process the borrower should have followed.”