In one of the climactic chapters of Robert Penn Warren’s classic novel, All The King’s Men, the narrator muses, “If anything is certain, no story is ever over, for the story which we think is over is only a chapter which will not be over.”
It’s an observation the celebrated poet laureate could have made about the saga surrounding the Prairieville home where he briefly lived in the early 1940s. For years, the turn-of-the-century farmhouse has been at the center of a dispute between its former owners, who still live there, and the bank, which foreclosed on the property in 2008. It now sits on the market, where it faces an uncertain future and, potentially, the wrecking ball.
But what makes this story interesting is not that it has dragged for years, but how this historic home came to be at the center of a bankruptcy case and a related civil suit. It’s a story of a business deal gone bad, and a family that got in over its head by signing loan documents they didn’t fully understand at the urging of a business partner who didn’t have their best interest at heart. It’s also a story of this family’s determination to keep their fight in the courts at all costs in a desperate attempt to hang on to the house they alone claim to appreciate.
“We will fight this to the bitter end because we know someone is not going to buy this house to live in it. It’s too valuable as a commercial property,” says Carolyn Carroll, who owned the house with her husband, Douglas, until the bank seized it last year. “You have to love it and appreciate it as a preservationist.”
There is plenty to appreciate from that perspective.
The home is dreamily named Twin Oaks and dates to the late 1800s, when it was built by a German cypress baron whose last name was Opdenmeyer. It sits on seven acres between Old Jefferson and Airline highways in Ascension Parish, surrounded by 25 live oaks that are hundreds of years old. It is adjacent to a five-acre tract and includes a swimming pool, barn, tennis courts, two smaller houses and a chapel, which was moved to the property from the River Road plantation Tezcuco.
From 1941-42, Twin Oaks was the home to Warren, the renowned poet, novelist and literary critic. He lived there during the final year he taught at LSU. It’s also reportedly the inspiration for some of his poems and, according to Carroll, one of his favorite residences.
Carroll came to love the place when she and her husband purchased it in 1988 from the bank that had repossessed it. They paid just $275,000 for it, though she describes its condition then “as a dump.” Over the next dozen years, they gradually made improvements to the property.
“Everything we did,” she says, “we always did with the future in mind.”
Though the Carrolls financed part of the home purchase, they long ago paid off the mortgage and funded the improvements themselves. They had what they describe as a successful business running an outpatient counseling facility, Charis Partial Hospital, “based on Christian principles.”
The Carrolls opened the facility in the early 1980s. By the time they purchased Twin Oaks, Charis was doing a brisk business, with nearly 100 employees and locations on One Calais Place and in Zachary.
In 2000, they decided to expand their business. Meadowood Hospital, an inpatient psychiatric facility on Perkins Road, was for sale, and the couple hired a health care attorney to help negotiate the deal. He introduced them to a Florida businessman named William Planes, who had experience running psychiatric hospitals, including one in New Orleans. With Planes on board, Meadowood’s owners were willing to talk.
Planes and the Carrolls negotiated a deal to purchase the hospital for $2.5 million. Bank One agreed to lend them $2.7 million, which included $200,000 for closing costs. The bank required the Carrolls turn over management of the hospital to Planes because of his experience in the industry. At the time, that didn’t seem like an unreasonable request.
“Honestly, we had not been involved in the billing and running of an inpatient facility, so we ended up taking it into consideration,” Carroll says. “Everything looked fine.”
But looking back, Carroll says, things weren’t fine. On the day in August 2000 on which the loan documents for the hospital acquisition were signed, Carolyn Carroll was laid up at home, recovering from chemotherapy treatments she was having for breast cancer. She concedes she wasn’t at her best, and her husband wasn’t clear on what was going on.
The bottom line, Carroll says, is they were duped.
“Planes and the bank officers were faxing all these documents back and forth and kept changing the terms of the loan agreement,” she says.
Among those changes were several personal guarantees the Carrolls were required to sign. They also agreed to put up their home, Twin Oaks, as collateral.
Within weeks of the sale, the Carrolls allege, the hospital started having problems. Occupancy began to decline, and bills were not being paid. The Carrolls blame Planes for mismanaging the facility. Suspicious, they hired a private investigator to look into his background, a search that turned up a list of problems in Planes’ past. Among them were two felony convictions in the 1980s for embezzlement and fraud. Carroll says they made bank officers aware of his problems, but no one seemed to care. Attorneys for the bank declined to comment.
In March 2001, Charis Hospital filed for bankruptcy. By the end of the year, it had closed. As part of a reorganization plan, it was sold for $3.4 million. That should have been the end of things, but it wasn’t. For the past eight years, the Carrolls and the bank—now JPMorgan Chase after its acquisition of Bank One—have been entangled in lawsuits in federal bankruptcy and state courts in Ascension Parish.
Among the issues that have been brought up in various courts are whether the bank should have better explained the loan documents to the Carrolls, warn them about business dealings with others and find a suitable replacement manager for them after Planes’ criminal record became known. The bank never was found liable on those grounds.
There also was a suit brought by the Carrolls against Planes for defrauding them. Though a judgment never was issued, Planes offered to settle for an undisclosed amount. The agreement is sealed in the court record. The St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, in an October 2008 investigative story on Planes, says the settlement was $700,000.
Planes returned to Florida, where he is one of the developers of a troubled $60 million, Main Street-style, mixed-use development, Trinity Town Center, in New Port Richey. As of October 2008, however, nearly 20 companies with contracts with Planes’ South Capital Construction had more than $5 million worth of outstanding liens on the project.
The Internal Revenue Service also had problems with Planes. It places two liens on his $1.3 million residence in Tarpon Springs, Fla.: a $1.1 million lien from May 2004 for unpaid payroll and income taxes, and a $2.9 million lien from November 2007 for unpaid payroll taxes.
“He doesn’t think we should really have to pay,” Douglas Carroll told the St. Petersburg Times. “And he wants to see if he can get away without paying.”
But the issue that has most consumed the courts for the past six years is how the bank applied the proceeds from the sale of the hospital. And this is where Twin Oaks comes in. Carroll says once the hospital sold for $3.4 million, they were led to believe their debt with Bank One had been settled.
“We were under the impression we were free and clear,” she says.
But several months later, Bank One came back to the Carrolls and informed them they still owed $400,000—a sum that today, with interest and attorney’s fees, is nearly $700,000 and climbing. The Carrolls remain mystified as to what the bank did with the proceeds from the hospital sale and why it didn’t apply all of the money to their debt.
“It seems like it would have applied to their debt,” says Pamela Magee, an attorney who currently is representing the Carrolls in their bankruptcy case. “But they have said they were not paid in full because they had to release up to $400,000 as part of the reorganization plan to various creditors.”
The bank has declined comment on the case. In court records, their attorneys have argued they couldn’t wipe out all of the Carrolls’ debt because the hospital had owed nearly $360,000 in delinquent payroll taxes to the Internal Revenue Service.
In court documents filed in February 2005, attorneys for the bank explained that, “Pursuant to the plan and the confirmation order, Bank One received $3 million of the [hospital] sale proceeds, while approximately $41,000 was paid for closing costs, including delinquent property taxes, and the balance of $359,000 was paid pursuant to the confirmed plan to the court-appointed liquidator. Of that amount, $350,000 was ultimately applied to the IRS … for unpaid payroll trust fund taxes.”
The court—after originally siding with the Carrolls—ultimately ruled in favor of the bank, though not unsympathetically. In a November 2007 state court hearing, Judge Guy Holdridge summed up for the Carrolls what appears to be at the heart of the problem in their case.
“I’ve been very sympathetic to your cause,” Holdridge said, according to a transcript of the hearing. “In fact, I have been on your side the whole time, you know … [but] all of those guarantee agreements that you signed … basically waived any and all rights you have. You said, ‘Bank, you can do whatever you want. You can come and seize any of the property we have. You can do anything you want.’ That’s what put you behind the box, that you signed all of these personal guarantees.”
The Carrolls’ attorney wasn’t representing them when they purchased Meadowood, but she agrees their problems stem from several factors that include entering into a bad business deal and signing loan documents—for whatever reason—they didn’t understand.
“It was a combination of all that,” Magee says. “One bad apple can really get the process going down the wrong path.”
In early 2008, the court officially upheld the bank’s judgment against the Carrolls, clearing the way for the bank to foreclose on their home. A sheriff’s sale was scheduled for May 20, 2008, but on the day of the sale, the Carrolls filed for personal bankruptcy. That move stopped the sale for the time being and enabled them to remain in the house. In another blow to their case, the bankruptcy court last summer converted their filing from a Chapter 11 reorganization to a Chapter 7, or liquidation, case.
As a result, Twin Oaks has been for sale since last October, along with the seven acres and the additional buildings, for $2.3 million. The adjacent five-acre tract also is in bankruptcy and is listed separately for $1.5 million. The tracts are being marketed by different Realtors. Though neither has sold, the tracts are generating interest in a rapidly expanding part of a fast-growing parish.
“We’ve had great activity,” says Realtor Hank Saurage, who is marketing the five-acre tract. “We’ve actually had a few contracts written on it.”
Carroll says one reason she is so determined to hang on to the house is to save it from developers, whom she is convinced would redevelop the property for commercial use. It’s not an irrational fear. The adjacent tract Saurage is listing already is zoned commercial.
“The interest is really from investor/developer groups that would sit on it or hold it for a while because there isn’t adequate commercial activity to develop today,” he says. “But it would likely eventually be commercial, retail or industrial/office.”
The fate of the house and its grounds is less clear. Andrea McKey, the listing agent for the property, says it’s unfair to predict what a buyer might do.
“I don’t think one can assume that it will be kept or torn down or anything else,” she says. “The bones of the house are great, and so that lends itself to it being used as a residence. I think that lends itself to it pretty strongly.”
What’s more, four of the seven acres lie in waterways or wetlands, according to Saurage, who says that would make commercial redevelopment costly and less likely.
“Given that, the best use of the house would probably be as a reception hall or some sort of a residence,” he says.
Still, if the adjoining five-acre tract becomes a subdivision or strip mall, what would happen to the home and the ambience it has by virtue of being surrounded by such large, lush grounds? No one can say for sure, but precedent doesn’t favor the preservationists.
“If the adjacent land is too commercial, that would probably increase the likelihood that the zoning for that property would change to commercial,” says Ed Kramer, who is familiar with the area and has developed several nearby subdivisions. “One thing governing bodies look at with respect to zoning is compatibility.”
It could help the home’s future that it’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places. But Twin Oaks doesn’t have status as a National Historic Landmark, the only distinction that would permanently protect it from being destroyed or significantly altered. Preservationists could ultimately become involved in a fight to save the home, but so far they’re just watching the situation.
“We do a list of Treasures in Trouble every July, and I bet this house will be nominated for it this year,” says Carolyn Bennett, the executive director of the Foundation for Historical Louisiana. “But at this point, the most we can do is to hope for a sympathetic buyer—or a sensitive developer.”
There’s one more round of hearings currently set for later this month, and that could ultimately determine the home’s fate. The bank has asked for the same court in Ascension Parish to throw out the Carrolls’ latest attempt for another hearing on the judgment against them.
If the court sides with the bank, the Carrolls—and Twin Oaks—will be at the mercy of whoever buys their home. But whether that will be the final chapter of the story remains to be seen. To paraphrase its former owner, don’t count on it.
WHO IS ROBERT PENN WARREN?
Robert Penn Warren was born in Guthrie, Ky., on April 24, 1905—the oldest of three children to Robert Franklin Warren, a banker and proprietor, and Anna Ruth Penn Warren, a teacher.
While spending six weeks during summer 1921 in the Citizens Military Training Corps at Fort Knox, Ky., Warren published his first poem, Prophecy. He entered Vanderbilt University that fall at age 16, and he graduated summa cum laude in the summer of 1925.
Warren received his master’s from the University of California in 1927, and that fall he entered Yale University on a fellowship. He entered New College at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar in October 1928. Warren taught at Vanderbilt, Southwestern College in Memphis, Tenn., University of Minnesota, Yale and at LSU, where he founded and edited—along with Cleanth Brooks and Charles W. Pipkin—the literary quarterly The Southern Review.
Warren was appointed the nation’s first Poet Laureate on Feb. 26, 1986. He published 16 volumes of poetry, and two—Promises: Poems 1954-1956 and Now and Then: Poems, 1976-1978—won Pulitzer Prizes. He published 10 novels, and one—All the King’s Men—won a Pulitzer. Two novels—All the King’s Men and Band of Angels—were made into movies.
In addition, Warren published a book of short stories, two selections of critical essays, a biography, three historical essays, a study of novelist Herman Melville, a critical book on novelist and journalist Theodore Dreiser, a study of poet John Greenleaf Whittier and two studies of race relations in America. He is the only author to have won the Pulitzer for both fiction and poetry.
From the 1950s until his death from cancer on Sept. 15, 1989, Warren lived in Connecticut and at his summer home in Vermont. He is buried at Stratton, Vt., and, at his request, a memorial marker is situated in the Warren family gravesite in Guthrie, Ky. SOURCE: robertpennwarren.com
