Swindling seniors.

• Author: Martin, Edward

Scams and deceits could cost North Carolina's elderly residents $100 million a year. Bankers and state officials are on the case of the 'crime of the century.'

As the winter nights grew longer, pain replaced the laugh lines that once crinkled his face. They'd been married 53 years, he and Faye, with three grown children and a plain little brick house that doubled as Pierce's Plumbing Co. on a treeless Roanoke Rapids street. More than two decades before, Faye had left a nursing job to become the helpmate, keeping house, answering phones and hand-addressing bills. Figures flustered her, so her husband handled the money.

When cancer claimed him in January 2010, Jordan Oliver Pierce Jr., 75, was laid to rest behind the stone gateway of Cedarwood Cemetery. Junior, as he was known, grew up here and had been a plumber since 1977, so scores came to mourn. One was in his 40s with dark hair and a warm smile. Flis attentiveness touched Faye, then 73.

It was nothing romantic. After Junior's death, Tony Martin, who had a wife and three kids and aspired to open a furniture store, would sometimes drop by with flowers. "Mama would say, 'Look what Tony brought!'" says daughter Wanda Cooke. "Mama never thought she could take care of herself without my daddy." In fact, the Pierces had always been frugal, and Faye was left well off. Two months after burying her husband, she bought a modest, 26-year-old house on Steeplechase Run to be across the street from her daughter.

Cooke cringed when Martin, who billed himself as a designer, charged Faye $80,000 in interior-decorating fees for the 1,482-square-foot, six-room, vinyl-siding house for which she'd paid $135,000. Martin had suggested furniture, colors, curtains and other items.

"I said, 'Mama, that's way too much,' but she trusted him," Cooke says. "I tried not to meddle in her personal stuff. I didn't know that she didn't know the difference between $1,000 and $10,000." Then, in March 2012, came the burglary at Pierce's Plumbing.

In papers police found strewn on the floor were uncashed checks to Faye, beginning about a year after Pierce's death. Cooke helped mind the company's finances after her father died, but had never seen the checks. It's all right, Faye told her daughter. Tony, she said, had written them as his way of assuring her he'd repay the tens of thousands of dollars she'd lent him. Don't cash them until I tell you to, he told her. Cooke was floored. "He'd drained one account completely dry and started on the others."

In March 2013, Tony Linwood Martin Jr., was convicted of a crime little known outside the ranks of bankers, credit-union managers, domestic attorneys and families of victims. Found guilty of elder exploitation and obtaining property under false pretenses, he'd taken more than $160,000 from the plumber's widow in the roughly 18 months after Pierce's death. N.C. Department of Corrections records show he served 16 months in prison.

Faye Pierce's family credits Amy Broughton, an assistant district attorney in Halifax County, for her aggressive prosecution of Martin under elder exploitation laws. "If you stick up a 7-Eleven, at least you don't know the other person," says Broughton, now a private attorney in Raleigh. "It's so much sadder when you look into somebody's eyes and know they're suffering and grieving, and then use that against them."

Nobody knows how many senior citizens get ripped off in North Carolina. Based on a 2010 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office that estimated annual national losses at $2.9 billion, the yearly Tar Heel toll is probably $100 million a year or more. This summer, the federal Consumer Financial Protection...