The insider: he wanted to buy their stock, but investors say Mark Boyd never mentioned his bank was merging with theirs.

AuthorMartin, Edward

On the Saturday morning after Thanksgiving 1997, Marion Jones drove along Asheville Road to a branch of Community Bank & Trust Co. in Sylva. Jones was born in the Jackson County town, and he and his wife, Wanda, a librarian at Smoky Mountain High School, have never outgrown it. "If I didn't live here," Jones, 61, says, "I'd move here."

The stranger they were going there to meet was their age, with thin gray hair and from a small town, too. He had surprised them when he called a few days earlier to ask if they'd sell him their stock in Community Bank.

At the branch, Wanda Jones remarked that they had never made anything on it. "What do you know that we don't?" she asked. Her husband nudged her under the table. Nothing, the stranger said. He was buying it for his grandchildren.

The Joneses had 2,000 shares, more than the man anticipated, and the certified check he'd brought didn't cover it. But he seemed pleasant enough, so Marion Jones took his personal check for the remainder. They settled on $8.25 a share.

In April, when the stock rocketed to $25 after Carolina First BancShares Inc. of Lincolnton announced a $32 million buyout, the question Wanda Jones asked would return to haunt the couple and trigger a five-month criminal investigation that would lead to the indictment of a prominent banker - a member of one of Lincoln County's oldest and most respected families.

In September, state investigators charged Mark Boyd III, then chairman of Carolina First and a member of the N.C. Banking Commission, with four counts of securities fraud. He failed, they allege, to tell the Joneses and nine other Community Bank stockholders he bought shares from that he was chairman and CEO of Carolina First and that his bank was preparing to buy theirs.

Within days, Gov. Jim Hunt began pressing him to resign from the Banking Commission. Initially, he resisted, but after six weeks stepped down. In December, still pleading his innocence, he surrendered his titles at the bank he had chartered 17 years earlier, walking away from its headquarters, a blue-fronted building a block from Lincolnton's 1921 courthouse and town square.

In his hometown, the possibility that the former county commissioner, community benefactor and church leader could face 10 years in prison has left many shaken. "For a small town like Lincolnton," says Ann Gaither, a local businesswoman, "this is big, big, big." Some don't believe what they're hearing. "Everybody thinks something's up," says Ken Kindley, president of the Lincoln County Chamber of Commerce. "Mark is the cleanest guy I've known in all my life."

Gaither, president of J.H. Heafner Co., a tire distributor, has known Boyd since they were teen-agers in the 1950s. "If he were a young guy, you might think he was just too ambitious, but this is something I'm sure Mark can eventually explain. Something has got to be forthcoming."

At Lincolnton's 350-member First Presbyterian Church, where Boyd has been a deacon and treasurer, the Rev. Mary McKey is incredulous. When the education building's furnace began belching smoke last winter, Boyd paid for a new tank and fresh oil. He and his wife recently pledged $100,000 for a new position, director of Christian education. "Mark is quiet and tends to do everything behind the scenes," McKey says. "But when the church needs something, he just sees to it that it gets done."

Most dismayed of all, however, is Mark Boyd. Up a quarter-mile driveway lined with boxwoods, his two-story Lincolnton house is fronted by white, rectangular columns. Frost has browned the fairways of the Lincoln County Country Club on the opposite hillside. With touches of weathered and powdery paint, the house has the comfortable, worn feel of old wealth. On a late-fall afternoon, the smell of Diane Boyd's baking fills a small den. Wooden tennis rackets from the age before graphite hang on the wall.

"Why?" he asks. "It would be like petty cash. With my net worth, I'd never notice it." He leans forward on a couch with his wife at his side. In a black knit shirt, hounds-tooth-checked slacks and brown loafers, he is noticeably thinner than in April, when the merger was announced.

Diane Boyd winces. The public scrutiny of her husband has been painful to watch. "In this family, the rule has always been that you didn't talk about family things outside, good or bad, at parties or whatever," she says. "You celebrated in private, you cried in private."

The Boyds raised five sons here, but the place still has the unmistakable feel of the 1950s, bobby socks and homecoming football games. Boyd played football and was in the Latin...

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