Norfolk-born lawyer works for justice

It may have seemed like an idle threat at the time in 2001, especially coming from a 28-year-old legal aid attorney working on behalf of a retired housekeeper. Ashby’s client, Elsie Williams, claimed that Stewart was siphoning the $530 monthly Social Security check that was her sole income.

But people were about to learn what many in Norfolk already knew: Adrienne Ashby rarely breaks a promise.

A 1991 Norfolk Academy graduate, Ashby found more than a dozen other elderly or disabled clients in the Atlanta area who got their government checks tangled in a Stewart Finance-controlled bank account as part of a short-term loan agreement.

The checks dwindled each month as Stewart collected interest rates that reached toward triple digits and fees for tacked-on extras, such as accidental death and dismemberment insurance and auto club memberships, some for clients who hadn’t owned cars in years.

Ashby said she discovered that the company, which had about 60 locations in five Southern states, strategically placed its offices in areas heavily populated by the poor, elderly or minorities and carpeted the area with fliers. The more Ashby found out, the angrier she became.

“The idea that they would take someone’s check before they even have a chance to get it was just so egregious that it became my personal goal to shut them down,” said Ashby, now 31. “I wanted Mr. Stewart to be as broke as our clients, so he could understand how expensive it is to be poor. You shouldn’t have to pay 95 percent interest simply because you’re poor.”

John Benjamin Stewart, the founder and president of Stewart Finance, was far from a pauper. He inherited both money and political power from his family, who ruled a rural Georgia town for generations.

Stewart ran his $30 million lending corporation from Union Point, a community of about 1,600 located 85 miles east of Atlanta. From its start in the mid-1980s, Stewart Finance began taking in millions of dollars in unsecured investments from townspeople and others across a swath of the South.

Nearly 1,000 people turned over their life savings to Stewart, happily receiving annual statements that highlighted returns of up to 10 percent. Stewart had become the civic and business icon of Union Point, serving for nearly 25 years as mayor in addition to his roles as bank president and dominant landlord in the business district.

Stewart frequently entertained friends by flying them to Las Vegas on his private jet and inviting them to watch University of Georgia football games from his skybox at his alma mater’s stadium.

When Ashby first declared war nearly four years ago, the leading citizen of Union Point had an army of lawyers and an arsenal of financial means. Ashby had the meager resources of the Atlanta Legal Aid Society and a University of Virginia law degree completed only two years earlier.

For Elsie Williams, it all started with a red sleeper couch and an enticing sale price.


In 2001, the 68-year-old retired pajama factory worker and hotel housekeeper went to a Stewart Finance branch in the East Point section of Atlanta to borrow $100 for the new sofa and left with a $200 loan. Williams thought the $160 in interest she had to pay over five months was steep, but the Atlanta woman said she had never taken out a loan and figured the whopping interest charge of a 95 percent annual percentage yield was normal.

“I thought the law had a set amount that they could charge,” said Williams, who returned to Stewart Finance a second time to borrow money for prosthetics that she needed as a cancer survivor. “I didn’t know they could charge me anything they wanted to.”

It turns out Williams had borrowed a world of trouble.

The person at the counter passed enough of the contract under the glass partition to allow Williams to sign it. She didn’t read it, believing the clerk had read aloud the pertinent information. With her cataracts, Williams couldn’t read the small print anyway.

She agreed to have her Social Security check deposited into a bank account that Stewart Finance set up. But she didn’t know she had agreed to the fees that kept cropping up – to set up the account, to access her own money, to use the ATM card. Some weeks later, frustrated that her ATM card repeatedly did not work, she headed to the Atlanta Legal Aid Society to see how she could get her Social Security check back.

“Are you really a lawyer?” Williams asked the first time she met Ashby.

Williams couldn’t believe the young woman in blue jeans and white All-Stars was old enough to pass the bar. Her attire was casual, but Ashby, who grew up in a Norfolk housing project dreaming of pursuing work embodied by the career of the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, was serious about helping those who needed it.

A few months before Williams’ visit, Ashby had given up a $105,000-a-year job as a real-estate attorney so she could focus on helping clients who couldn’t afford to pay for legal services.

Her annual salary now was $39,000. Williams was one of her first clients, and she really wanted to get off to good start.

Going toe-to-toe with a company like Stewart Finance would have been a bit overwhelming for a lone lawyer without much experience, but Ashby wasn’t by herself. She had friends in high places.

After getting the Social Security administration to deposit Williams’ check elsewhere, Ashby and her legal aid colleagues began compiling a list of potential plaintiffs.

One of the first daunting challenges was the arbitration agreement in each of the loan contracts, which stipulated that any disputes be settled by a mediator in Greene County – where Stewart had generations of influence – and paid for partially by the plaintiff. She met resistance at every turn, fueling her fire.

“Sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if he had just said, 'Here’s $1,000 for each of you. Go away,’” Ashby muses. “I still ask myself how he was able to sleep at night.”


Ashby pulled in an Atlanta law firm with deeper pockets than hers, Bondurant, Mixson & Elmore, to help with the case. She also put a bug in the ear of the right folks at AARP, the national advocacy group for senior citizens. Together, the three filed suit on behalf of 10 clients against Stewart and his company in July 2002, asking for actual and punitive damages based on a Georgia law that gives special penalties to those targeting the elderly and disabled with unfair business practices.

Ashby also placed a call to a fellow U.Va. alumna at the Federal Trade Commission. Ashby later tapped former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes, who was doing a six-month stint at the legal aid office after his re-election defeat in November 2002. Barnes had extensive experience in predatory lending cases.

Bill Brennan, a lawyer who has been with Atlanta legal aid for 36 years, said Ashby’s multi pronged approach gave the case the crucial leverage it needed.

“You don’t just want to fix the one case,” Brennan said. “You want to see what’s really going wrong in the entire system. She stopped this company from exploiting thousands of future victims. That’s the kind of advocacy that a person who wants to be a lawyer dreams about.”

Her dreams turned into Ben Stewart’s nightmare.

For all the time and effort he put into building and protecting his rural empire, Stewart’s world began to crumble in 2003 with alarming speed. Ashby’s legal team again sued Stewart and his company on behalf of four clients. Then Finova Financial, the company’s main lender with more than $10 million in secured debt, withdrew itself as a lender and demanded repayment.

In February 2003, Stewart Finance filed bankruptcy, effectively halting civil litigation against it. But the dismantling wasn’t finished. A few months later, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Stewart and his companies with federal violations for selling unregistered securities. The FTC followed in September 2003, charging Stewart Finance with illegal lending practices.

As word of the legal battles spread, Stewart Finance investors began hastily trying to cash in their investments, which for many amounted to their life savings. They soon found out that for years, the man many considered a friend had been accepting money from new investors to pay the interest he owed others. Some would call it a Ponzi scheme. In March of this year, Stewart filed for personal bankruptcy protection.

On May 13, the day that Stewart was to appear before a Greene County grand jury investigating criminal allegations of racketeering, securities law violations and theft by deception, the 54-year-old pillar of the community drove his Mercedes S500 to a house he owned, put it in park, and put a bullet through his head.

Ashby was stunned by the news of Stewart’s suicide, especially because one of the suicide notes he left reportedly said he had “few regrets” and had lived a “good life.”

“I was shocked, because he seemed so nonchalant in court,” Ashby said. “We doggedly pursue a lot of people, but they don’t kill themselves. We’ll never know, but I don’t think he ever really got it. His suicide letter sounded like he was still trying to spin it at the end.”

Of course, not everyone was thrilled to see Stewart Finance topple. There’s a 150-page list of investors who hope to one day see some of the $30 million they pumped into the company. The Georgia secretary of state is working on their behalf, but there are a lot of others hungrily circling the approximately $5 million still tied up in Stewart’s estate.

Nicholas Lotito, Stewart’s criminal defense attorney, points to the outpouring of love he saw at Stewart’s funeral, even from people who had lost money. A local doctor taken for about $100,000 in the Stewart debacle offered to put up his home to help bail Stewart out, Lotito said.

“He did a lot of good things for a lot of people, and sometimes that can get lost in this sort of deluge of publicity,” said Lotito, who works in private practice in Atlanta. “It really did generate a feeding frenzy of litigation that put an enormous amount of pressure on Ben and his family.”

Lotito, also a U.Va. law school alumnus, said he respects legal aid attorneys like Ashby. But he believes Stewart Finance’s problems could have been fixed without putting the company in ruins. “There are other companies in the same business, who are no better or worse than Stewart Finance in most instances,” said Lotito, whose legal representation of Stewart ended with Stewart’s suicide. “What they and Stewart Finance were doing is not in and of itself illegal. ”


The other key principal, Williams, now 71, continues to wait patiently for an outcome on the Stewart case and says she was pleased with the job Ashby did in representing her. She seems unaffected by the attention she has received and shrugs good-naturedly when asked whether she thinks she’ll ever be reimbursed for the months of payments she made to Stewart.

At night the widow curls up to sleep on the simple red couch that caused her so much drama, because her secondhand bed is too rickety to support her. Her small apartment is still sparsely furnished, but it is impeccably clean and everything in it is hers. And that’s the way she plans to keep it.

“That was my first and last time borrowing money,” Williams said with a small snort. “From now on, I’ll just do without.”

Why would a young lawyer trade in a cushy office on the 22nd floor of the law firm of Kilpatrick Stockton, complete with marble floors and walls, chic artwork and panoramic views of downtown Atlanta, for a windowless cubbyhole at a legal aid office?

In Ashby’s words, she took the 63 percent pay cut in 2000 because she followed her heart.

“I got sidetracked for a while,” said Ashby, whose husband, Solomon, also a lawyer, does asbestos litigation. “I wanted to use my skills to help people who needed me. I liked the pay and I liked the people, but ultimately, at the end of the day, I want to feel good about what I’m doing.”

The case has brought Ashby celebrity status – including a front page article recently in The Wall Street Journal – but there’s little evidence of that in her office, adorned with art work from her 2-year-old son. The phone rings more often, with folks on the other end wanting her to speak at civic engagements. Her middle school director from Norfolk Academy, Gary Laws, leaves a message saying how proud he is of her. Strangers extend congratulations and job offers.

Though she and her husband, who is also from Norfolk, talk about moving home one day, she doubts she’ll be leaving legal aid service anytime soon. Her desk is covered with the documents associated with nearly 60 open cases, and there’s no shortage of abuses that she feels obligated to correct.

“Maybe one day I will get back to private practice, but I’d still like for pro bono work to be a big part of it,” Ashby said. “I’ve always believed that if you stick with what you’re supposed to be doing, all the other things you want out of life will eventually come to you.” Ashby says she feels comfortable working among Atlanta’s neediest because of her roots in Norfolk’s Liberty Park, a public housing area that once sat where Norfolk State’s gymnasium is now.

Ashby’s mother, Kathleen Pruden, had her at 17, and Ashby never met her father. But what could’ve been a void became a positive for Ashby as her entire family pulled together to create a nurturing environment.

Her mother was determined to make sure Ashby never did without, so she worked three jobs to help put her through private school and pay for extras such as scouting, piano and ballet lessons, and braces.

“I wanted to put her in places where she could flourish and maximize her talents,” said Pruden, who has worked for the city of Norfolk for more than 20 years. “I realized that she was a statistic because she was born to a single black mother, and I didn’t want to perpetuate that. Sometimes it was hard, but look what it’s benefited now.”

Because her mother was often working, the daughter spent a great deal of time with her extended family, and as her grandfather Paul Pruden puts it, “Adrienne was a part of everybody’s budget.”

The whole family chipped in to send her to St. Mary’s Academy in Norfolk.

The emphasis on academic excellence was intense in a family where even her great-grandparents were college graduates.

As he talks about his granddaughter, Pruden reaches into a well-worn briefcase and produces Adrienne’s newspaper clippings, acceptance letters and even drawings. Pruden also has copies of the creeds and poems that once hung in the space he still calls “Adrienne’s room.” The lessons expressed in the writings, which have titles such as “Children Learn What They Live,” sum up the lessons the Sunday school teacher of 55 years tried to impart about leading a good life.

“We tried to teach Adrienne by letting her be exposed to things that mattered,” said Pruden, who at 76 still does substitute teaching for Norfolk Public Schools. “There were no earthshaking events that made Adrienne the person she is today. The fact that Adrienne shares some of the thoughts and aspirations that I had to reach out and help others really gives me a feeling of reassurance.

“It’s the one thing that I’m most proud of.”
Reach Benita Newton at 446-2667 or benita.newton@pilotonline.com.