In another bizarre development at his trial for fraud,
Pigeon King International founder Arlan Galbraith said he planned to market
pigeon soup.
He originally told his sales staff that the pigeons he was
buying on contract could be sold to pigeon fanciers and people who keep pigeons
to race or as a hobby.
But when that no longer seemed plausible and a newspaper for
Amish farmers in Pennsylvania began questioning the viability of the business,
he switched his sales pitch to raising pigeons for meat, known as squab.
He is accused of defrauding hundreds of investors to whom he
sold breeding pairs of pigeons for as little as $50, or as much as $500,
accompanying the deal with a contract to buy back offspring at profitable
prices.
He could only afford to buy offspring as long as he could
continue finding investors for breeding pairs.
Iowa State officials banned him because they called his
business a Ponzi scheme – i.e. with no ultimate profitable market for pigeons.
That and extensive and multiple awards-winning coverage in Better Farming raised enough questions to dim the company’s prospects.
Galbraith put the business into bankruptcy in the summer of
2008, seven years after he started selling pigeons as breeding stock.
There was testimony that he told Mark Wolfe, one of his
salesmen who was a recent university graduate, that he would retire when he had made $10 million and then
would turn the business over to Wolfe.
But in cross-examination after Wolfe testified that he
thought Galbraith was well-intentioned, Galbraith called Wolfe lazy.
Earlier he accused another salesman, Bill Top of Drayton, of
conspiring with “the Amish mafia” to bring down the business. Top countered that
there’s no such thing as an Amish mafia.
Top was successful in marketing pigeons and contracts to
more than 100 Amish and Mennonite farmers in Pennsylvania.
Crown attorney Lynne Robinson says Galbraith garnered about
$40 million in revenues and when he stopped selling, he had signed contracts to
buy $340 million worth of pigeons.
Besides one count of fraud, Galbraith faces four charges
under the Bankruptcy Act, infractions such as failing to turn in a credit card
and drawing advances from a bank account.
