Hee Hee...Montana Jail Town Gets Conned Big-time

And ever so publicly!

An update to yesterday's Hardin, Montana post:

Hardin Jail Entrepreneur Has Checkered Past

He wore a military-style uniform, and as a gesture to local law enforcement offered up the use of three Mercedes SUVs.

But the man who styles himself as a military veteran turned private sector entrepreneur and a California defense contractor with extensive government contracts also has another image, and that one is provided by public documents and interviews with associates and legal adversaries.

The record says that he is a convicted felon with at least 17 aliases, a string of legal judgments against him, two bankruptcies and a decades-long reputation for deals gone bad.

American Police Force is the company Hilton formed in March to take over the Hardin jail.

"Such schemes you cannot believe," said Joseph Carella, an Orange County, Calif., doctor and co-defendant with Hilton in a real estate fraud case that resulted in a civil judgment against Hilton and several others.

"The guy's brilliant. If he had been able to do honest work, he probably would have been a gazillionaire," Carella said.

So first the fine petty rulers of this little town build themselves a jail, hoping to revive their economy quick and easy by locking other people up. That falls through, but only after they've gone in major hock to build the horrible thing.

Then they offer their shiny new empty jail to the feds to lock up the Gitmo prisoners without checking first to see what the Montana state government thinks of that, and get shot down again.

Finally this Serbian poser puts on an impressive uniform he probably bought at Costumes4less.com and shows up at their door to take the whole thing off their hands - oh, and he'll also build them a homeless shelter and a dog kennel, patrol their streets, and make it rain skittles and unicorns. And without so much as the due process you'd expend looking over a used car, these fine Solons swallowed the hook all the way to the backbone.

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch. Here's hoping the voters of Hardin remember this humiliating fiasco come election time. I don't really know anything about it so this is blowing smoke, but I'm gonna guess that if the "Two Rivers Authority" and the city council had spent half as much effort getting out of the way of Hardin businessmen as they did dreaming up horrible quick-fixes like yet another prison, the town's economic problems would have taken care of themselves by now. As it is they're not only another day older and (much) deeper in debt, but the whole country gets a nice laugh from it.