Finally, a response

The address for Bristol was now an insurance office, and the man who answered the door said he’d been there for years. The home address Dick submitted in bankruptcy filings was a $500,000 house in a shaded cul-de-sac in northwest Atlanta, owned by yet another LLC.

The North Druid Hills Road office listed on the website of Dick’s lending business was actually a UPS store in a strip mall next to a Great Clips. Its “Suite 106” was a mailbox about the width of a pack of playing cards.

No one responded to any of my calls, notes or emails. Whitmore gave me a tip that someone in her volunteer group thought Dick had been in Ashview Heights to recruit real estate investors, but I could find no proof. The teens who filmed the hooker on Ashby Grove said they hadn’t seen anyone matching the man’s description.

Eleven days into my search, Dick finally picked up his phone. He didn’t want to talk about Ashby Grove.

“That was a long time ago. I had a lot a lot of houses but I don’t own it,” he told me, adding that he doesn’t know who owned Ilimite. When I replied that the $1 million loan made that hard to believe, his story began to shift.

“I had a friend say they will buy it and that’s what happened,” he said. So who was Ilimite?

“I don’t know.”

Dick also told me he was a lender, not an owner, for Ashby Grove. Then he said Bristol might have foreclosed on the loan and taken ownership of it. He added that he sold the house in 2011.

“There’s no ownership by David Dick. Bristol was a lender. And beyond that it was sold to another company that I have no affiliation with.”

Then: “I don’t recall if Bristol did own it.”

This was probably my only chance at getting answers from Dick and I was getting nowhere. I tried a new approach and told him about the hooker I found.

“That’s not good,” he said. “I would find the owner and talk to them. Because it’s not me.”

My chance was slipping away. I blurted out about Whitmore and her team of volunteers, and how she said people in Ashview Heights are humans and need compassion. I told Dick that kids live nearby and there’s a school a block away.

“I’m trying to be cooperative,” he said. He apologized, said he was busy and then got off the line.

Presentation by Kiersten Schmidt