A picture in the Sept. 17, 2011 edition of The Williston Herald—the local daily for rural Williams County in North Dakota—shows former NFL player and Louisiana native Jarvis Green standing shoulder-to-shoulder with his buddy and business partner, Nathian Hossley. The two are smiling, each flashing one of the two Super Bowl champion rings Green earned as a defensive end for the New England Patriots.
“Ex Pat helping bring man camp to Watford City,” reads the headline above the picture. An accompanying article enthusiastically describes the 80,000-square-foot “man camp” Hossley, Green and four other Louisiana investors were building for oilfield workers drawn to the area’s lucrative Bakken shale play.
But as Business Report details in its new cover story, the Watford City project was out of money less than a year after that glowing article appeared, the man camp sat half finished and the one-time partners were battling each other in court. Hossley filed suit first, alleging his former partners tried to cut him out of the deal he’d put together.
But Green tells a very different story about why the man camp went under. He says Hossley preyed on unsuspecting wealthy victims and used money from the business ventures he cooked up to fund a lavish lifestyle.
“Everywhere we’d go he had $10,000 in his pocket,” says Green, who has lost much of the fortune he earned during seven seasons with the Patriots and is now juggling a construction job with trying to launch a seafood business. “We’d go to gentlemen’s clubs and he’d be throwing money around and I was like, ‘Dude, where are you getting all this money?’”
Lawsuits are not unusual in the construction business, where one-time partners routinely wind up in court battling over completion dates, change orders and the timely payment of subcontractors. But with Hossely, there’s a disturbing pattern of deals gone bad. The Watford City project is just one of many botched projects to result in litigation. Among the most frequent allegations that show up in court records: He stiffed subs, left job sites unfinished, and defaulted on lines of credit—and those are just the complaints that have been filed this year.
Other civil suits date back to the mid-2000s. There were criminal cases, too. Twice Hossley has pleaded guilty to federal charges. Both times he went to prison.
Hossley could not be reached for comment by Business Report for its cover story, and the attorney representing him in several ongoing lawsuits, Steve Duplechain, declines comment. But those who have done business with Hossley say they wish they had known about his background before getting involved with him. Perhaps, they say, it would have saved them a lot of time and money.
“I remember being introduced to him, and he seemed like a nice guy,” says Chakesha Scott, president of Impact Charter School in Baker, where Hossley’s construction company did concrete and asphalt work and is now being sued for nearly $700,000. “But he’s not. He just lies. They need to lock him up.”
Read the full cover story by Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel, and see a list of lawsuits that have been brought against Hossley over the past decade. Send your comments to editors@businessreport.com.
