July 25, 2008: 'Joe' fleeced couple of $400,000

Even now, Naomi Ressler glows when she recalls how "Joe" would drive her to the grocery store, the doctor and the post office. How on Valentine's Day he gave her roses.

"When we were out, some people thought that he was my son and that I was his mother," she says.

Quickly, the 84-year-old's smile turns into a scowl.

"You never would have thought he'd be such a crook."

Naomi Ressler and her husband, John, hired Joseph W. Hughes to protect their life savings -- earned milking cows, sowing fields and harvesting corn on their 1,280-acre farm in southeastern Minnesota.

Instead, over the course of three years, the 46-year-old financial planner defrauded the Elkton couple of more than $400,000, according to federal court documents and family members. Hughes pled guilty in federal court this month, specifically, to mail fraud and tax evasion. At a sentencing hearing yet to be scheduled, he faces a potential maximum penalty of 25 years in prison.

The Resslers' story is a classic case of financial exploitation, experts said.

Hughes struck at a vulnerable time -- after John, 85, had a stroke. He gained Naomi's trust -- by doing favors. He isolated the couple from their family -- by helping them move off the farm into an apartment. And then he used his access to suck their savings dry.

"He wooed Mom and she was just falling right for it," said Lisa Ressler, who is married to the Resslers' son, John Ray. "And the rest of the family, we were dealing with the stroke. He slipped in."

Hughes declined to comment for this story. His attorney, Andrew Birrell, said Hughes has "accepted responsibility" for his actions and is "very remorseful."

"He is overcome by a sense of guilt and remorse to the point that he was hospitalized last week," Birrell said.

Naomi and John Ressler met Hughes at an estate-planning seminar in 2004. The next year, John suffered a stroke in a Fleet Farm parking lot. The stroke, which left John nearly mute, threw the Ressler family and their farm off balance.

Since buying the land in 1974, John and Naomi had run the business while John Ray focused on the fields. So when Naomi invested more than $400,000 with Hughes, a representative with AXA Advisors, the younger Ressler generation knew little about it.

"We didn't question her at that point because Mom and Dad always did the farm business," Lisa Ressler said.

Suddenly, Hughes was constantly stopping by, John Ray and Lisa said. He fixed things and took Naomi to town.

He also made a point to pick up the couple's mail, the family said. They now believe he was intercepting AXA statements, which showed their checking account depleting, often in chunks of about $9,000. Nearly 40 checks, with signatures the family believes Hughes forged, were written out to GGLP, Hughes' own private investment company.

"It became a race to get to the mailbox," Lisa Ressler said. "Soon he started meeting the mail down the road."

Without the statements, it was difficult to determine how much had been lost. Using an Internet log-in she said Hughes kept changing, Lisa Ressler began to backtrack through his web of transactions over almost two years and realized the extent to which Naomi and John had been victimized.

When Hughes began urging John Ray Ressler to buy the farm from his parents for $4.5 million -- in spite of the fact he was due to inherit it -- the family decided to hire an attorney. At his urging, they went to the authorities.

Counties around the state report growing numbers of cases of financial exploitation of vulnerable adults. In Hennepin County, allegations of such abuse have risen 116 percent in the last seven years. In 2007, there were 700 new reports. Statewide, there were 1,788 reports of financial exploitation in 2005, the most recent year available.

In Mower County, where the Resslers' farm is located, the number of reports of elderly abuse and neglect has grown along with its elderly population, said Brent Gunderson, the county's social services supervisor.

While the county does not separate out financial exploitation cases from others, the total number of abuse and neglect cases the county investigated in 2007 was 42, up from 27 in 2006 and 29 in 2005.

Putting together the pieces

On the Ressler farm, John Ray and a helper have been busy filling trucks with corn through noisy chutes. They sold their corn too early this year, he says. Other farmers now are getting paid a lot more per bushel. Each season's like this, with some uncertainty.

The money Hughes stole was the family's safety net, and the search for what happened to it was stressful. Lisa Ressler spent many a night working into the early morning hours, scouring the Internet for Hughes' dealings, accessing the Resslers' account records and printing out her evidence.

The company that employed Hughes from May 2004 to December 2006, AXA Advisors, has been conducting an internal investigation of him. This month, without a lawsuit, it repaid the Resslers, making them "whole" in an amount both the company and the family declined to specify.

So far, it doesn't appear Hughes had other victims, said Jo Ann Tizzano, an AXA spokeswoman.

In a story Naomi Ressler has recounted on the backs of envelopes and other scraps of paper, she recalls asking Hughes how many clients he had.

One hundred, he said, including a 105-year-old woman.

She asked him if he treated them all equally well.

"'No, you're special,'" she recalls him saying. "'I treat you like my mother.'"

Since then, she's often mulled over those words. "I've thought to myself since: 'You're not treating your mother very nicely.'"

Jenna Ross • 612-673-7168