Grave Robbers

In 1999, the Tisdale brothers bought five houses as investments--in Dallas, Flower Mound and Sugar Land, outside Houston--under the name Gazelle International Corp. and quickly resold them to themselves, as individuals. In the process, they mortgaged the properties to the hilt, pulling out all the equity they could.

Whether their plan was to resell the houses at a profit, or rent them, or make them pay off in some other way, it didn't work. In the second half of 2000, deed records show, banks took over the Tisdale houses in collections on unpaid loans.

Early the next year, Michael Tisdale's wife, Jada, who also works in the insurance business, filed a divorce petition to end their four-year marriage. In the contentious proceedings, she claimed her husband had been cheating on her. "There really weren't any assets to divide," recalls Stanley Mays, a lawyer who represented Jada Tisdale. "They lived right up to their means."

Mays says his client put up much of the down payment the couple used in 1998 to buy a new 4,500-square-foot house in upscale Southlake. When the divorce became final this past May, she came away with a promissory note from Tisdale that he will pay her about $40,000 when the house is sold. Michael Tisdale lives there today, in the largest house on a cul-de-sac named Thistle Court. He declined to return messages left on his home phone seeking an interview.

"No comment" was William Tisdale's response when he answered his phone at the North Dallas offices of America's Team Mortgage, a home loan brokerage he started up last fall with former Cowboys Lockhart and Smith. Deed records show Tisdale remains involved in Dallas real estate, buying and selling houses for KLT Properties, another company he formed last fall with Lockhart and Smith.

The brothers' lawyer, Henry L. Campbell III, declined to return several Dallas Observer messages left at his office.

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The ID theft conspiracy the Tisdales are accused of leading--the looting of the dead--exploded into action in the summer of 2001, less than a year after their real estate business appeared to fail.

The mechanics of it were simple and built on one critical fact: One's credit lives on for a while after one is dead.

Typically, it takes a week or two for relatives to notify the Social Security Administration of a death, and a few more days for the agency to verify that information. Until Social Security's death notices are passed on to the three major credit-reporting agencies, lenders don't know someone has passed away.

From the evidence the U.S. Attorney's Office says it has ready for trial, the conspirators used as their starting point newspaper death notices and obituaries in Dallas, Austin, Houston and elsewhere, culling from them myriad personal information describing the individuals' occupation and station in life, which in turn give a clue to their personal wealth.

They turned then to computer databases and insurance "risk scores," which are tied to creditworthiness, to narrow the field further and gather more specific information, such as Social Security numbers and dates of birth. They ran these checks on at least 27 people, the government alleges. Finally, they ordered full credit reports giving detailed information on the people's accounts and credit limits--then the buying sprees began.

On July 23, 2001, for instance, a 54-year-old Dallas man died, and a brief death notice appeared in The Dallas Morning News two days later.

Before he was buried in a small town in Louisiana, the ring printed out his Farmers "risk score" and went to work. Over the next several weeks, they ran his name repeatedly through PublicData.com and two credit-reporting agencies--checking perhaps whether the Social Security death notification had posted yet.

In this case, it took more than a month.

The indictment alleges that on September 13, 2001, Michael Tisdale went to a Bank One branch in Dallas and handed a loan officer a fake drivers license bearing his photo and the dead man's name. Tisdale walked out with $70,000 in financing for a Mercedes-Benz roadster and a $25,000 loan.

It didn't stop there.

The government alleges Michael obtained an American Express Gold Card in the man's name and that William used it to fill out an online credit application at Neiman Marcus.

It appears from the evidence the government collected from the pair that they weren't even sneaky about how they transferred money from the victims to themselves. Michael Tisdale simply deposited checks made out to them in his own account. The government says it has evidence of nine such checks--totaling nearly $100,000--that Tisdale deposited.

After William Tisdale's arrest at the Jaguar dealership, the conspiracy seemed to take a new and slightly different shape. Rather than using the stolen identities themselves, the Tisdales began relying more on accomplices, and women, especially in purchasing cars. In all, the ring of 11 people stole 23 cars, nearly all luxury imports.

"I believe the evidence is going to show most of these people grew up in the same neighborhood," says defense lawyer Richard Anderson, whose client, Gary Allen Grace, pleaded guilty in the case in late September and is awaiting sentencing. "My client knew the Tisdales for a very long time."