Lee Rood

lrood@dmreg.com

Without the benefit of a college degree, Robert Browning Lichfield parlayed his work into a multi-million-dollar industry.

Now 62, the former fundraiser for 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney worked in the 1970s at the Provo Canyon School, according to a 2003 profile published by the Los Angeles Times.

Lichfield eventually came to run the Brightway Adolescent Hospital in St. George, Utah, south of Salt Lake City, in the Mojave desert near the Utah-Arizona border. Youths from that facility would eventually feed into Cross Creek Manor, the first in Lichfield's network of such schools that became the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools, also known as WWASPS.

According to a series of stories published by the Deseret News in Salt Lake City, the Independent Mail in Anderson, S.C., and other media, WWASPS referred families to other residential facilities owned or run by Lichfield’s founders, trustees and relatives. It also reaped payments for referrals, billing and marketing.

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Fifteen years after opening the first facility, Lichfield had 10 other schools and several other related businesses based in St. George or nearby La Verkin. They included referral and marketing websites TroubledTeens.com, TeenHelp.com and Adolescent Services that directed parents and their children to the schools, according to Utah secretary of state records.

In 2003, Lichfield bought the old Lee County Home near Keokuk for $500,000 to transform it into Midwest Academy.

Though Midwest Academy owner Ben Trane denied any ties to Lichfield or WWASPS, he has said he got his start in the industry at Cross Creek Manor.

Lichfield has been a principal, partner or trustee in about 40 other businesses in Utah — some serving the troubled-teen industry, including Adolescent Programs Consulting, Parent Teen Guide and Midwest Outsource Services.

Efforts by The Des Moines Register to reach him over two weeks by telephone, email and mail for comment were unsuccessful.