Ex-head of school for troubled boys faces multitude of federal charges
Robert Serge Gluhareff faces 36 felony charges including tax, wire, mail and bank fraud.
A Halifax County school for troubled boys was so broke that its director resorted to knowingly cashing rubber checks and lying to parents, a federal indictment claims.
Robert Serge Gluhareff, the founder and chief executive officer of the now-defunct Wellspring Academy, had an initial appearance Friday in U.S. District Court. He is charged with 36 felonies, including tax, wire, mail and bank fraud; money laundering; and making false statements before a federal grand jury.
Gluhareff declined to comment Friday.
Wellspring Academy was a residential school for youths located on 365 acres in Sutherlin near Danville, the indictment states. The school, which promised counseling in a Christian setting, was open from the late 1980s until April 2003. It became an all-boys school in about 1997.
According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, students came from all over the country to attend Wellspring. It is unclear how many students over the years were from Southwest Virginia.
Between 1999 and 2003, the academy experienced severe financial distress and could not cover expenses, the indictment claims, so Gluhareff began to pad school accounts by depositing bad checks into them.
Gluhareff wrote some of the checks from his personal accounts, while others were written by parents who were under the impression that their tuition checks would not be cashed until they had secured loans to cover them.
Between the spring of 2002 and the spring of 2003, Gluhareff allegedly deposited more than $662,000 in bad checks into Wellspring accounts, the indictment states.
From the time of deposit until the insufficient funds caught up with the checks, Gluhareff usually had about a five- to 10-day window when the school's account had an artificially high balance, the indictment states.
After the academy obtained nonprofit status in 1990, Gluhareff also advised some parents that a large portion of their tuition payments could be deducted on their taxes as a charitable donation, authorities say.
The U.S. Attorney's Office declined to say whether any parents would be held accountable for false filings.
At the same time, Gluhareff led parents to believe that their employers could match their "charitable donations" to the academy, documents show. As a result, four companies sent Wellspring Academy matches totaling $67,000.
Gluhareff is also accused of telling the parents of Wellspring students that children received counseling from licensed professional counselors on campus when in fact no one on staff was licensed as a counselor in Virginia.
The indictment charges Gluhareff with lying to a federal grand jury about the licensing status of his counselors and with faxing two letters to attorneys that claimed that "each student meets with his individual licensed counselor weekly."
The indictment states that some parents based their decision to choose Wellspring Academy in large part on the belief that their children would have access to licensed counselors.
Finally, Gluhareff sold timber rights to 90 acres of his land to a logger for $60,000. The problem, according to officials: Gluhareff had already pledged that land to BB&T for a $1.3 million loan.
Gluhareff declared personal bankruptcy on Aug. 7, 2003. The same day, he filed corporate bankruptcy on behalf of the school.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Urbanski on Friday released Gluhareff on a $25,000 unsecured bond. He was ordered to stay in either the Danville or Raleigh, N.C., areas and not to have contact with any witnesses in the case.
(Roanoke Newspaper)
