The day Robert Emmett Newsholme shot himself in the chest–on August 24, 2021–he was supposed to pay clients and friends who had hired him as their tax accountant at least $70,000 in payments. The long-time owner of Flagler Tax Services had looked up how to load a gun on the internet shortly before he shot himself. The suicide attempt failed. He was taken to Halifax hospital in Daytona Beach, some 10 hours after the shooting.
It would be almost exactly three years of dogged pursuit and two investigations by the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office–one before the IRS got involved, one after the IRS informed the Sheriff’s Office that it was ending its investigation because of a “federal technicality,” as the Sheriff’s Office put it–before detectives secured a warrant and had Newsholme arrested on August 7.
Newsholme, the investigation found, had essentially been running what amounted to his own Ponzi scheme, taking money from clients who thought they were paying their IRS taxes, using that money to pay debts from lending companies, then borrowing more money from different lending companies to pay previous lending companies while putting off his clients who wanted their money back, plying them with promises and bad checks.
He was arrested in Las Vegas, where he had evaded sheriff’s detectives even there, refusing to speak with them when they first knocked at his door at 7575 West Diablo Drive, then moving from that house and into an independent living facility for seniors. Newsholme is 71. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, in collaboration with the United States Marshals Service Nevada Violent Offender Task Force, located him on Aug. 7. He was arrested on nine counts of grand theft and one count of organized scheme to defraud. He is being held at the Clark County Detention Center in Las Vega on no bond before his extradition to Flagler County.
His wife Linda and his son Thomas had apparently been clueless about the mountain of debt he owned clients. They told Flagler County Sheriff’s detectives a few days after the shooting that they’d located paperwork at the business, at the time at 608 East Moody Boulevard in Bunnell, that showed some people were suing Robert, others were demanding their money back. Robert’s phone had been “blowing up” since the shooting, in his son’s words, with calls and texts from clients wanting their money.
By the time detectives tallied the money he owed, the sum came to $305,600. Clients with losses in the tens of thousands of dollars included local individuals and businesses, among them Davidson and Sons Automotive ($10,000), Geraldo Malagisi of Malagisi Enterprise ($31,250), ESV LLC ($21,900), Istvan Gergely of Serenitas Construction ($35,000) and David Ayres, president of Flagler Broadcasting, who’d been a friend of the Newsholmes, and to whom Robert owed $65,000. Newsholme defrauded Ayres’s daughter Natalie Ayres’s business, Massage by Natalie in Palm Coast, of $13,150, according to the investigation.
All the clients were under the impression that Newsholm was properly filing payments with the clients’ taxes. If Newsholm was filing the taxes, he was not including the payments that the clients were giving him, pocketing the money instead, according to the sheriff’s investigation. Clients would discover that something had gone wrong when the IRS would contact them and let them know that unpaid taxes were accruing fines and interest. The amounts listed above do not include those costs, which in most cases were not disclosed to the investigators.
Newsholm would make promises to his clients again and again, assuring them that the money would be returned, only to write bad checks.
“There is no evidence to support the fact that Robert paid or attempted to pay the taxes of the listed victims in this case,” the sheriff’s investigation states. “Robert was confronted by the victims in this case and would make excuses and promises to make things “right.” Robert displayed a consciousness of guilt and even attempted to take his own life after being confronted by the multiple customers of his business.”
Why the debts and the alleged fraud? The sheriff’s investigation examined Newsholme’s bank accounts and discovered that he had essentially been racking up debts to high-risk lending companies such as Green Capital, Fox Business ACH, EBF Partners and ROC funding Group, and through his credit cards. Subpoenaed records showed that he charged up 181,278 on an American Express credit card in his and his wife’s name between December 2019 and September 2021, paying over $180,000 of that, $14,226 to the IRS.
Flagler Tax Services at one point had its bank account at Ameris Bank. Subpoenaed records show that for the 2019 calendar year, the account accumulated $910,000 in deposits, but only $1,500 was paid to the IRS. Meanwhile, $112,500 was withdrawn in cash, and over $300,000 was paid to the high-risk lending or funding companies, from which the majority of the deposits had originated.
In the 202 calendar year, the same pattern emerged: There were nearly $1.2 million in deposits, mostly from deposits from some of the same–and some new–funding companies, such as Crystal Springs, AJ Equity, Money Store Factor and ML Factors. That year he made almost $30,000 in payments to the IRS (it’s not clear if those payments were for his own tax liabilities or on behalf of clients), while taking out over $80,000 in cash, and making half a million dollars in payments to the funding companies. “The last month this account was active,” the investigation found, “Flagler Tax Services accumulated over $154,000 worth of returns due to not sufficient funds.”
Newshomle’s financial conditions were getting worse quickly.
Newsholm closed the Ameris Bank account and opened an account at Intracoastal Bank in November 2020 in the name of Flagler Tax Services. The following 10 months–leading up to the time when he shot himself–$1.25 million was credited to the account, though many of the deposits in June and July were “returned items with insufficient funds which inflated the amounts deposited,” the investigation states. He paid $13,281 to the IRS on clients’ behalf during those months, but the investigation notes that the checks were directly to the IRS, with none of the victims’ names on the checks. “Many of the charges on this account were paid to companies that do high interest loans for businesses as well as other large payments to his American Express card.”
After initially cooperating with detectives, Newsholme’s family members and Alessandra Heffern stopped speaking, saying they would do so only with an attorney present, as is their right. They do not currently face charges. “All these individuals worked at Flagler Tax Services during the time of the fraudulent activity and prepared many of the tax forms that were presented to the victims,” the investigation states.
Three years ago, Linda had told detectives she was not sure where the money was because “Robert then took all the money from Intracoastal Bank,” according to the investigation, which paraphrased Linda’s account. She didn’t know which bank he was using by then.
“This was an extensive and thorough investigation that kept our detectives busy with thousands of documents, many subpoenas, and dozens of interviews starting in 2021 and then again over the past year after we took the investigation back from the IRS,” Sheriff Rick Staly was quoted as saying in a handout from the Sheriff’s Office that included few of the details above. “Although we were disappointed to learn that federal authorities would not be pursuing charges, we knew when we took back over the investigation that our General Assignment Unit had a solid case that would result in an arrest.”
The sheriff added: “The arm of the law is long, and this thief learned that hiding out and trying to be a hermit in Las Vegas was not far enough to get away. I thank the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and the U.S. Marshals for helping us find and apprehend him so that he can face justice for stealing the hard-earned money of Flagler County residents that trusted him with their taxes.”
Atwp says
Will he go to prison? The laws in this country make it easy for crooks and very hard for the victims.
Donald McDonald says
He didn’t do anything. Stop dragging this generous upstanding man through the mud.
AuntPatty says
Atwp: To me, your response misses the point though I am sure you are likely just making a statement that the victims won’t get justice which I agree with. The reason though, is to me, the more important part: I.e. the laws in this country were written by crooks (the ones impacting us the most right now were written by the modern-day GOP to benefit their rich sponsors and do so with the side effect of torturing the slave class – what we use know as the working class) and the problem perpetuates because profit over people is the name of the game and always has been. So grand distractions and distortions of the truth are used to keep everyone in a lively debate about nothing while they make out like the true bandits. This guy made terrible decisions but the tragedy is he did it because he lives in a country that necessitates survival and reduces people down to marks in scams to make that survival happen in many cases for many people from even the most legitimate of careers. For example, most of Wall Street, our medical system, the meat grinder of military industrial complex and many industries in between. Try getting a job in N Florida that you can earn a wage on, even with a college degree and experience, it’s incredibly hard for many to do and those that do have one (myself included) mostly had luck of opportunity not because we have higher skills than the thousand other applicants that were overlooked because an AI HR hiring bot decided the wrong keywords were used in their resume. Not saying we should tolerate excuses of this person rather look to root causes to see why these things keep happening, anything else defeats the point of even keeping informed by the press in my opinion. Perhaps he was living a lavish lifestyle (unclear but doesn’t sound like) and he may have been a sociopath, and it seems likely he was horrible person but I believe he was also just a guy who made dumb choices and distanced himself from the consequences of those choices by telling himself lies and thinking he would die before he had to worry about them. However, whatever the reason which we will never know, the issue most of us can learn from remains clear to me. If you want to fix these sorts of things and about thousand problems too: raise taxes on the rich, pay for a social state that makes life fairer for all, and crimes by and large will become rare enough that when they do happen they are national news rather then an everyday occurrence that we all just accept as normal. It will be cheaper as well because we don’t need to waste so much money on other public services that are needed to pay for the fact that we have no real social state. This fact has been proven out in every other western country that did just that and brought them decades of peace and prosperity. It’s not socialism, it’s a mixed market economy that simply works they way ours used to when it was there for whites only but we stopped doing it the moment we had to deal others in who were not white. The USA – whether we want to admit it or not – is a deeply racist country where the system was set up to let a ruling class enjoy life and the rest must worry at best about getting by or worst suffer a cruel fate of bad luck and some take to crime to try and change that fate out of desperation and exasperation of seeing others enjoy the good life. Once rights were afforded to minorities (a long and slow process not yet complete even), the GOP took to ensuring new traps prevented those people from ever knowing that good lifestyle which the ruling whites knew for so long. Are things better, yes thanks to the Democrats but their are modern forces ensuring that it continues to be tough for many, and even poor whites suffer from those forces, and the GOP are the billionaires lapdogs aiming to make sure it happens for their sponsors (they even have a 2025 playbook they are openly sharing now since they feel so emboldened) and baby boomers continue to vote these crooks in so long as they don’t have to take responsibility for those votes but also they do it to just ensure they can survive and live their life, no different than the man in this story. Those boomers are equally not fully to be blamed, they are doing what’s in their best interest and are simply paying the “game” just like this schmuck in the article. The polices voted in by boomers for the last 50 years have left many victims typically on minorities. Are they to be blame too? I would say that misses the point as well. Fact is until taxes in this country change, these sorts of crimes will continue to be a regular occurrence. And that is the reason the victims here will not get justice. Because these sorts of things happen to begin with as the “laws” were written by a group that are not concerned with the slave class whether victims or working stiff and they were mostly put into place by their stooges in the GOP. So if you want change, vote democrat and do the most noble thing you can – save the country!
Ed P says
I’ve paid quarterly estimated taxes since 1973, used multiple CPA s to file my taxes and never once did they offer to pay my taxes and I pay them. Never. They provide the quarterly voucher and the tax payer is responsible for making the timely payments.
Lorie Robinson says
Wow!! Nice summation.
I’m sure you are getting pushback from certain corners of the electorate.
I agree with you wholeheartedly.
Mr. Bill says
What Marxist load of crap. I have an idea. Why don’t you move to the workers paradise in Russia. Leave my country alone.