He certainly didn't come across
as anybody who was out to swindle you.
We just brainstorm and then we execute ideas
and we fine tune them.
He didn't come across as anybody
who had evil in his heart.
You know, how can we be better in this?
How can we be better in that?
Or wanted to hurt anybody or who you couldn't trust.
We've been doing this for some time now
and we immediately respond to those concerns.
He didn't come across as any of those things.
It doesn't become less bizarre.
When I tell you the details.
He was running a nursing home company
and he all of a sudden becomes
one of the biggest mine owners in Appalachia.
I guess I would almost call it a restoration economy.
We're restoring the environment.
He called himself an environmentalist.
He was going to save the planet and save the coal industry.
He had a scheme to fund reclamation.
To us it seemed like circular logic from the beginning.
Struggled to make his loan payments to the state,
abandoned his plans, dashing hopes
he had raised in the town.
It was always just some great thing
that was about to happen.
The check was in the mail,
but it never was.
If somebody asked me my advice
about doing business with Tom Clarke,
I'd say, run and hide.
What's going on, man?
Why?
So what you going to do?
I don't really believe in missions for papers.
Just try to be an honest, old fashioned newspaper.
Print what's interesting and true
and informative and there we are.
I first heard about Tom Clarke,
first heard his name, in February 2014,
when he bought the Natural Bridge of Virginia.
It's what Rockbridge County is named after.
So Natural bridge is a big deal here.
And the bridge was up for sale,
and it's about 1,600 acres of land
and it was going to get chopped into
a pile of different pieces and auctioned off.
And people around here were horrified with that notion.
Tom Clarke, the community viewed him as someone
who rode in here on a white horse with a white hat
who would save Natural Bridge and could do
God knows what else to help with the community.
Then he fell behind almost instantly
in his payments to the state.
And one of the things that he told the state,
and he told me, was he was going to get into
the coal business to make the payments for Natural Bridge.
To the extent we can make thermal coal cleaner.
We've got an opportunity to actually
be able to sell more coal out of West Virginia.
When Tom Clarke came along,
the coal industry was in a really deep downturn.
All the big coal companies went broke.
They were out of cash, and they had a lot of old mines
that hadn't been cleaned up yet.
Federal law requires that
when a coal mine operation is complete,
that they restore the land back to its original condition,
restore it to its original contours and plant grass on it,
and clean up all the poisoned water
caused by the mining activity.
And so, the big coal companies came up with this plan
to essentially shift those obligations onto other people.
And Tom Clarke was one of those other people.
He had no background in coal whatsoever.
He was in the Navy.
He worked in finance and accounting jobs.
He built a nursing home company
that got really big at one point,
like 100 nursing homes, and then sort of went broke.
And he ended up taking a few of those homes
and forming a company called Kissito.
At Kissito Healthcare, over 96% of our patients
would refer us to a friend.
And to me, that's...
Certainly the most unlikely person
to take over 100 Appalachian coal mines.
Tom Clarke, we had not heard of him before.
He did not own any coal companies
and hadn't really been involved in mining,
but he took on a bunch of permits
that were previously owned by Patriot Coal.
Patriot Coal in the coal fields
is sometimes called a liability dump
Two of the biggest coal companies,
Peabody and Arch, spun off kind of their unwanted mines
and a lot of their healthcare
and pension obligations as separate companies.
And then those two companies merged
and that's what Patriot is.
And some people believe that from the very beginning
these companies were set up to fail.
So Patriot went bankrupt in 2015
and that's where Tom Clarke came in.
He swooped in and said,
I'll take all those mines that nobody else wants.
He said he was going to clean up
all these old derelict mines,
but he was also going to develop this new market
for carbon neutral coal where the carbon emissions
from the coal would be offset
by planting trees somewhere else.
When he said he was going to save the coal industry
and save the planet all at once,
I burst out laughing,
because it doesn't make any sense.
Well, I'm going to get these mines,
I'm going to sell the coal for a little bit more,
because I'm going to plant trees all over the place.
And the consumers of coal are going to be
happy to pay a little more knowing
that I'm going to plant trees.
Well, there wasn't any indication that he was planting trees
or that he could plant trees.
And so, this notion of somehow I'm going to be
a wonderful shade of green coal mine operator,
just gimme a break.
The idea of trees plus mines has challenges.
It's unclear who would buy this greener coal,
again, Tom Clarke.
I guess we're sort of betting the farm
that we're going to create a market.
Environmentalists hated his idea.
They didn't want him to find new ways to dig more coal.
And so, really from the beginning,
there was no prospect of a market
for this kind of coal package with carbon credits
that he was selling.
I don't know if he had a grand plan.
You know, part of me thinks
what he did with Natural Bridge established his cred
in the environmental world.
I'm this great environmentalist.
I've saved Natural Bridge and I've done it
by setting up the Virginia Conservation Legacy Fund
for God's sake.
Who could argue with a name like that?
Tom Clarke and Kim McCoy
of the Virginia Conservation Legacy Fund.
Let's give this team a round of applause.
Part of me thinks that he got Natural Bridge
in order to climb into the coal business.
And part of me thinks he just
stumbled from one thing into the other.
Clarke had a lot of stuff.
He had an iron mine in Minnesota.
He had a gold mine in California.
He also tried to corner the market
on offshore oil and gas platforms.
He owned a historic Coast Guard vessel,
definitely more than a billion dollars of assets.
He was totally a mogul,
but it was all other people's money.
Clarke did do a lot of coal mine reclamation.
He spent tens of millions of dollars.
However, eventually he just ran out of money.
He just didn't have anymore
and was unable to even do basic maintenance.
Towards the end of his operation,
he stopped paying the company
that took all the water samples
to test all the water around his mines.
When the state finally put
his company in receivership in 2020,
they said that they had issued something like
160 notices of violations.
It's a great question.
Did he somehow find a way of making money
off of all these deals?
They all ended up in bankruptcy or receivership
of one kind or another.
But is there some way he could have shifted money
to himself somewhere where that nobody knows about.
Mr. Clarke, you on the phone?
I am, Your Honor, good morning.
Good morning.
For his part, he was forced to go into court
and basically say, I'm totally broke.
It's all gone.
And if you look at the dozens of lawsuits
that creditors have brought against him,
they've accused him of improperly moving money around a lot.
But oftentimes it's to take money from one doomed project
that's about to go bankrupt
and put it into another doomed project
that's also eventually going to fall out of his control.
Anything else we need to take up
in this AP at this morning?
No, your Honor. All right, thank...
Thank you, Your Honor.
Thank you very much.
Thank you all.
At the time Clarke was doing all this stuff,
he was actually very chatty.
He was talking to the media all the time
about his grand plans.
Reforestation in West Virginia.
It puts people back to work.
It's part of a transition economy, a restoration economy.
You know, we'd talk on the phone fairly regularly.
He'd say, my lawyers tell me I shouldn't talk to you.
And then he'd sing like a bird.
But since things went south
and virtually all of his companies collapsed,
he's kind of not apparently in a position
to talk to anybody right now about it.
Hi, it's message for Tom Clarke.
This is Zach Mider calling from Bloomberg News.
I called, emailed and sent a number of letters
to various addresses he uses,
but I never heard back.
This has been kind of
an uncomfortable topic in West Virginia,
because when Clarke's company went broke
the state actually had to step in
and place it in this kind of
unusual unprecedented receivership,
because they were afraid that the damage
that this company could cause if it was just allowed
to go into an uncontrolled bankruptcy,
could kind of take down the entire coal industry.
So they had to sort of get control of it
and essentially, have a court-appointed receiver
control it to keep it from causing collateral damage.
Tom Clarke was an extreme example,
but he is not unique.
We have seen a lot of mines transferred to coal companies
that don't seem like they're really up
for managing or reclaiming those mines.
And in theory, regulators should be able
to stop these transfers from happening.
If they don't think it's a good idea
or it won't work out,
they can try to stop the transfers.
And perhaps more importantly,
the states want the coal mines transferred as well,
because they don't want the reclamation liability
to fall to the state agencies.
So there's a lot of incentive for regulators
to approve mine transfers,
even if they're to really weird guys like Tom Clarke.
So, in some ways, Tom Clarke is kind of the fall guy.
He's the one who the coal industry found
who was willing to kind of ride
these old mines into the ground.
He was the guy willing to hold the hand grenade
when it was about to go off.
Tom, you and your vision for what this can be
is truly a blessing to Southern West Virginia.
He obviously, was seen as a visionary,
because he was written up
in all these high-powered newspapers around the country.
Coal miners lives would be better again
and the environment would get straight
and he'd fix all these things.
So yeah, anybody who says they're going to do that,
if you believe it, they're a visionary.
Whether he was a visionary or not, time will tell.