News

Print exclusive: The Sam Neill files

By Bill Moss, Published: June 7, 2012

In hindsight, clues abounded that Sam Neill was going underwater.

He had loaned his campaign $213,000 when he ran for Congress for a second time, in 2002. The Democratic nominee, Neill counted prominent Democrats among his friends and supporters. He missed both tries when he tried to knock out Charles Taylor, the popular Republican incumbent, but ran respectable campaigns.
As time went on, court records show, Neill's financial difficulties piled high. He was known as the convivial owner of Flight, the popular Main Street restaurant in a historic bank building. Flight used the old bank vault as a wine cellar. He had plenty of legal work in wills, trusts and estates, his firm's specialty.

But his public persona as a busy estate lawyer and successful restaurant owner hid the dark side of his work on the trust accounts and estates of older people who came through the door of his office on Third Avenue West. He was stealing from them, state and federal prosecutors say. ... 

Read the rest of the story in the print version of the Hendersonville Lightning.