On a cool November day in 2010, an Eagle man stepped to a podium in front of the large fireplace at Cottonwood Grille in Boise. TV cameras rolled. Photographers snapped photos.
He announced an audacious plan. He would buy the then-troubled Tamarack Resort near Donnelly.
Six minutes earlier, his firm, Green Valley Holdings, emailed a letter of intent to Jean Pierre-Boespflug, then the controlling owner of the resort.
Matthew D. Hutcheson, the man behind the podium, said he made a $40 million offer to buy the resort, which was then in bankruptcy. He claimed, according to an Idaho Statesman article at the time, that he had financing secured.
The episode was just one of many chapters in the saga of Tamarack, before the resort was purchased by its current owners in 2018. Hutcheson never made the deal to take control of Tamarack.
Convicted of wire fraud
Instead, he found himself in a federal courtroom in Boise in 2013.
A jury found him guilty of 17 counts of wire fraud, and sentenced him to more than 17 years in prison. The jury found that Hutcheson defrauded more than 250 people. They said he used more than $3.2 million in retirement plan savings “for his own personal benefit and in an attempt to purchase an interest in Tamarack Resort, a failed ski and golf resort in Idaho.”
According to Associated Press reporting at the time, prosecutors said Hutcheson used some of the money to “buy cars, all-terrain vehicles and remodel his home,” and used other proceeds to purchase the mortgage on Tamarack’s golf course.
“He funded a life of luxury at the expense of hundreds of people who were just trying to save for retirement,” then-Assistant Secretary of Labor for Employee Benefits Security Phyllis C. Borzi said in a news release. “This case is indicative of our close and continued partnership with fellow federal agencies to vigorously pursue those who abuse their positions of trust and commit crimes against employee benefit plan participants.”
Sentence commuted
But Hutcheson is no longer in prison, well short of the 17-year sentence handed down.
President Joe Biden commuted Hutcheson’s sentence in December as part of a raft of similar actions near the end of his term. The White House at the time did not explain the action.
According to federal prison records, Hutcheson left a federal prison in Colorado just before Christmas.
In a 2018 document posted to a website set up by supporters of Hutcheson, he asked then-President Donald Trump to pardon him.
He described himself as a “political prisoner for a crime that the Obama administration fabricated against me, which I did not commit,” he wrote.
He claimed that the Boise jury was “not a jury of my peers, but of local laymen who understood nothing of the complex nature of the financial transactions in question, and were predisposed to a guilty verdict because of the prosecution’s use of a false narrative about a defunct ski rostra that the people of southwestern Idaho we are already emotional and angry about due to a previous scandal that happened there.”
Hutcheson, in the letter, accused the Obama administration of engaging in a scheme to “destroy my reputation” and threatened prison.
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Trump took no action on Hutcheson’s plea, and he remained in prison.
Tax case
After Biden took action to free him, another legal case related to the same series of events caused new problems.
The US Tax Court handed down a decision against Hutcheson and his wife, Anette, early this year.
“We do not find Mr. Hutcheson credible,” the court wrote. “Often, his testimony was contradicted by documents in the record and the testimony of credible witnesses. There is no credible evidence in the record that the G Fid and RSPT transfers were invested for the benefit of the plan participants. Mr. Hutcheson abused his position as a fiduciary of G Fid and RSPT to take $5.3 million for his own benefit. We hold that petitioners have embezzlement income of $5,307,688 for 2010.”
The court found the Hutchesons liable for unpaid taxes, as well as a $1.38 million fraud penalty.
