Two Kentucky men have been fined $171,000 each for taking part in rigging bids at a farm auction.
Barry D. Dyer, of Warren County, and Mackie E. Shelton, also were each sentenced to pay $79,000 in restitution to the estate of the woman whose farm was involved in the sale.
In addition, U.S. District Judge Greg N. Stivers sentenced the two, who are both 70, to be on probation for three years and serve 26 weekends in jail, according to court documents.
The sentence bars them from seeking reinstatement of their real-estate auctioneer licenses, which they gave up.
Stivers entered final judgments in the case last week.
The auction involved in the case took place in Allen County in April 2018 and involved a 367-acre farm and timber rights, according to court documents.
At the end, there were two teams of bidders left — Mackie and Shelton against two men who had leased the farm and wanted to buy it.
Dyer approached one of the other bidders and told the man to pay him and Shelton $40,000 in order to stop bidding, federal prosecutors said in one court document.
James Cook, a real-estate broker and auctioneer in Bowling Green who was helping conduct the sale, said in a letter to the judge that he saw Dyer and Shelton talking to the two other bidders. He went to the men and they told him about the demand for a payoff.
Cook went to Mackie and Dyer and told them what they were doing was illegal and not to do it, “but they laughed at me,” he said in the letter.
Cook said he talked to a lawyer who was at the sale to confirm that what the two men were attempting was illegal, and then approached Dyer and Shelton a second time, but they told him to mind his own business.
Cook said that in more than 45 years as an auctioneer, he had never seen or heard of anyone demanding money to stop bidding against someone else.
After agreeing to pay Dyer and Shelton $20,000 apiece, the two farmers placed a final bid and Dyer and Shelton didn’t raise them, allowing them to get the farm at an “artificially suppressed price,” according to court documents.
The estate of the woman who had owned the land charged in a separate civil lawsuit that the bid-rigging cost the estate more than $150,000.
Dyer and Shelton each pleaded guilty to conspiring to rig bids.