Rumors: A Historical Record of Mystery

[PhilmerPhil]

I can't find any evidence of Obadiah or the Bread and Butter Project. The charity I was referring to is God's Blessings.

[trkaiser]

Just found this, fwiw:

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/derek-m/7b/743/9a

Looks like a consummate professional to me.

[Tyler]

I can't find any evidence of Obadiah or the Bread and Butter Project. The charity I was referring to is God's Blessings.

I just didn't understand what you meant by "Everyone else so far has been certifiably flesh."

[twincitizen]

Hmm, nice digging. The mystery continues. The connection between Retiredbanker and Rick Christenson is really central to a lot of this.

David kept asking this question as well, so here's what I know:

1. retiredbanker used to use an avatar on this site, and it was of his face! Of course, that doesn't prove anything, but it would be pretty weird for a random forum poster to use an image of this Rick Christenson fellow.

2. Admins can see the email address you used to register. When rb started making crazy predictions, and got upset about people being skeptical (this is like a year ago, long before the Texas_RE stuff on SSC), Nick Googled his email address to try to find out who the hell he was. Rick Christenson was the result of that search.

Nick can correct me if I'm wrong on either point, but I'm pretty sure that's right. It still doesn't really tell us how he got wrapped up in the whole imaginary people drama with Texas_RE/Ryan. retiredbanker's posts were pretty normal for the most part, and he never posted all that frequently before he left urbanmsp. It was only towards the end that his predictions got really outlandish and people became skeptical. I wasn't on Minnescraper, so I can't comment on what his posting history was like before June 2012. Can anyone check the archives or recall what he was like on there?

EDIT: Also, fun fact - retiredbanker never said "consortium" - that crap didn't get started until Texas_RE hit the scene on SSC.

[DFPegg]

Great find, Phil.

Rick Christenson is definitely a real person (as opposed to Ryan and Texas RE, et al). It would be great to hear from him about all of this. It would also be great to hear from other posters who were supporters of RB, perhaps later.

My two cents,

1. This is an elaborate hoax carried out by Rick Christenson. He either carried this out alone or with support from others. Reasons: Rick Christenson/RtiredBanker was first persona created in this saga, then came Texas RE and Ryan, and perhaps others (the purportedly fake SSC accounts), to support the yarn being spun (out of control). Since he is retired, he may have actually had the time to do all of this. Motive: Mental illness, need for validation, whoknows???

2. Someone else who used the Rick Christenson persona as a basis for the RB straw man, i.e. a mirage behind a mirage. Who would be that person behind the person behind the person? Who knows?

Anecdote: Back in day a friend and I used a childhood friend of mine to create an art persona. We liked his name, Douglas Fleischut. In other words, Fleischut was a real person, but we turned him into a performance artist that was even accepted as legitimate in the real world. I never saw my original friend so he probably has no idea. NPR even did a story on him once. Why did we do it? Just for giggles

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... Id=1452203

[PhilmerPhil]

Have we ruled out that Rick is the man behind Texas_RE, Ryan, and all the fake LinkedIns? I'm starting to think that he created all of those characters, and he is the hoaxster. I mean he created a myspace back in the aughts, so he's been on the internet for a while, and he has a seperate LinkedIn for his charity, so maybe he's figured all this account creating business and decided to create more characters to spill his development beans with. Is that possible? So far it seems like every theory has had significant holes in it, but I can't think of one for this one, except that it takes a really sick and delusional person to go through all that work to trick a few message board readers.

EDIT: ^^What DFPegg said in number 1.

[MNdible]

My two cents,

1. This is an elaborate hoax carried out by Rick Christenson. He either carried this out alone or with support from others. Reasons: Rick Christenson/RtiredBanker was first persona created in this saga, then came Texas RE and Ryan, and perhaps others (the purportedly fake SSC accounts), to support the yarn being spun (out of control). Since he is retired, he may have actually had the time to do all of this. Motive: Mental illness, need for validation, whoknows???

This is my operating assumption as well. Per Occam's Razor, it's the answer that rises to the top.

EDIT: Thinking about it a little bit more, June spent an awful lot of time talking about what a great man Retired Banker was. Seems like if somebody were feeling under-appreciated, it wouldn't be a big leap to create a persona to help puff yourself up. I could envision that that's how it started, and maybe not necessarily with the original intention for it to become as elaborate as it eventually did.

[DFPegg]

Oh, and this editorial written by Rick Christenson on the same subject: http://www.postbulletin.com/col-rochest ... 58354.html

I thought this editorial also was very similar in logic and strategy to the whole Consortium thing. He talks about investing his own money to get flights directly to Rochester

[MN Fats]

EDIT: Also, fun fact - retiredbanker never said "consortium" - that crap didn't get started until Texas_RE hit the scene on SSC.

Funny you say that, because after finding that DerekM mentioned that avian and nasa talked about the consortium before Texas Re did, I searched the minneapolis dev thread on SSC for the word "consortium". That claim turned out to be false of course, the first use of the term "consortium" was indeed by Texas RE in this post made in September of 14.

However at the beginning of that post, Texas mentions the "Comprehensive Plan," which was the scheme being carried out by the consortium. The first time that phrase popped up in the dev thread was in this post in October of 13 by Avian001. That post by Avian was a copy/paste of some Q&A retiredbanker did on urbanmsp.

So I do think this was put into motion earlier than you might think.

[FISHMANPET]

And RetiredBanker posted on Minnescraper, right? So how far back does this go really?

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

[PhilmerPhil]

EDIT: Thinking about it a little bit more, June spent an awful lot of time talking about what a great man Retired Banker was. Seems like if somebody were feeling under-appreciated, it wouldn't be a big leap to create a persona to help puff yourself up. I could envision that that's how it started, and maybe not necessarily with the original intention for it to become as elaborate as it eventually did.

Yea, although it doesn't jive with this elaborate buildup of the June character: https://forum.streets.mn/viewtopic.php?f=6&t ... 908#p78908

[MNdible]

Interesting. Even when those posts were originally posted, I always drew a connection between the "Comprehensive Plan" and the Downtown 2025 Plan. The timeframe (both of when the plan was released and the 15 year outlook) and the content seemed very similar. I think in some instances, there were some specific elements that were noted that seemed to be direct quotes from the plan.

[Nick]

2. Admins can see the email address you used to register. When rb started making crazy predictions, and got upset about people being skeptical (this is like a year ago, long before the Texas_RE stuff on SSC), Nick Googled his email address to try to find out who the hell he was. Rick Christenson was the result of that search.

Not quite--got his last name (he had previously used his first name in messages) from an undisclosed member at a Happy Hour, looked the full name up, and the LinkedIn was sitting right there. I can say that the member who provided the name is cleared of wrong doing. At some point a few months ago I added a forum filter to change "retired banker" and "retiredbanker" to "Rick Christenson" for, as they say, the lulz. Scrolling back on both PMs and forum posts from way back, I think there's definitely a case that the tone changed about a year ago, but he also signed one of his PMs to me something like "Off to email some development executives now!" so eh.

Judging from the body of evidence so far, it's clearly either Rick himself, or some sort of bizarre Talented Mr. Ripley situation with a personal care attendant or a grandkid or someone else taking advantage of him or something. Him having dementia or being knocked up on pain pills doesn't sound plausible given the huge amount of effort this must have taken, his age, and the technical ability needed to create all the accounts etc. While it's been clear for some time that this situation is fake as hell, the person does appear to have at least a working knowledge of real estate and development terminology, so it seems unlikely that some rando could just fake it completely out of the blue.

One of my main questions is where those grainy renderings of that Convention Center Hotel came from. I don't know that I believe that any person or organization would seriously propose a building that ridiculous-looking, but which is more realistic: Our perpetrator also knowing how to create the renderings, or someone that outwardly crazy managing to wrangle them out of someone real? I'm not sure. Or I guess it's possible that that was actually completely random, and June just claimed responsibility for it.

[MNdible]

Yeah, so it goes back to Minnescraper, and RB is a real person who maybe had some peripheral involvement in financing and probably knew some actual people and knew some actual stuff. He's got a lot of big ideas, but not enough money or connections to turn them into anything, and now he's retired and feels out of the loop. He posts on Minnescraper, and he likes the fact that people pay attention to him and he feels important.

Then, on UrbanMSP, some people question what he knows, and he takes umbrage at that.

So, he shifts over to SSC and decides to make up a new character that will prove that he's important and knows what he's talking about and has a lot of money. It's not unreasonable that you'd take a little time (20 random posts isn't much) to establish some baseline credibility for the person that's going to talk you up. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that he originally had plans to post as much as he did, or to create Ryan or the other characters. But he found that he really enjoyed the attention, and he got sucked in.

It would seem that the creation of all of the LinkedIn accounts would be the point in time when he doubled down on building this into a full blown hoax. Not sure how that timing corresponds to the other posts.

The other connection that would be interesting to dig into is the Rochester connection to Gus Chafoulias that Derek M mentioned, and June confirmed. Assuming that Derek M is another sock puppet, this might be the only real, potentially verifiable connection that was noted. It would be interesting to try to find a copy of the Regional Impact study that he apparently did for the Rochester Airport -- a quick google search doesn't reveal anything. You'd like to think that the Rochester newspaper would have done some fact checking before letting a guy have a featured opinion piece.

[Nathan]

The only thing I don't get though if it is JUST Rick... is he's fairly old, and I never got the impression he was super internet literate. Anecdotally, my parents are considerably younger and can barely understand linked in. How does this old retired guy really get this far into it? Granted it's elementary weird use of linked in, it's just a comprehensive knowledge of recommendations and comments and people. I could see someone that had been in contact with him asking for permission to post on his behalf or something in the guise of protecting a reputation and getting WAY out of hand, facilitating more and more stories. Convinced that it would give viability to the rumor's or spawn some sort of confidence in our market then making local developers strive for more?

[IllogicalJake]

Well that would explain the renders that couldn't be found elsewhere. This has at least gotten farther than past theories.

[MNdible]

So, speaking of renderings, did we ever get better detail from Avian? Didn't he say that at some point he had done some renderings for RB?

[nate]

I mentioned this a few pages back, but Texas_RE was always talking about RBs failing health. To me this points to the hoaxster recognizing that the story has spun out of control and trying to distance himself from the situation.

This story is all so interesting.

[Avian]

So, speaking of renderings, did we ever get better detail from Avian? Didn't he say that at some point he had done some renderings for RB?

See the top of page 38 for my take on the situation.

The rendering of the weird CC hotel is one I saw well over a year ago now. It was posted on LinkedIn by the mysterious Ryan Nelson and picked up by Rick on his feed. It was implied - though not explicitly stated - that this was the Middle Eastern firm's schematic design. Someone leaked it on SSP last Fall IIRC. Who knows who but it sure irked "June" and Rick, which perhaps was the real intention all along? Let me be completely clear: I did not do that rendering for Rick, lest anyone is thinking so, even though what I do for a living is to create CG images for projects. I can do a helluva lot better job than whoever created that monstrosity. He did hook me up with Shorenstein to create a few night-lighting renderings for the City Center tower but I have never had any paying jobs from Rick himself. If you recall, I did do my own version of a potential CC Hotel and posted it in the fantasies thread. But I made clear it was just a fun exercise.

The Ryan Nelson situation was really strange. I agree with everyone who thought his post on SSC was poorly written. To play Devil's advocate, June did say online that she re-wrote and edited Ryan's lengthy "plan" before she posted it, so maybe we are hearing her voice 'cause I agree it sure sounds like her. I have seen other posts on Linkedin purportedly by Ryan and he sounds a lot more professional, but I am skeptical anyway.

I have had a couple of e-mail exchanges with nasa since this all came to a head. He's as perplexed about it as I am. As much as some would like to implicate him I really don't think he's involved at all. As annoying as he can be, he's legit insofar as I can tell.

But here's a thing. Early last spring Rick told me the names of the stores he was supposedly negotiating with to set up shop on Nicollet. He asked me to keep it confidential (though I know a couple other forum members know as well). But at this point I don't care. So, if the as-yet unnamed additional major tenant at City Center is Steen & Strom, Ahlens or Von Maur, then maybe Rick is legit too. I'm not holding my breath though.

Edit: I'll add Barney's to that list as well, since they were supposedly going into Renaissance Square before negotiations with CBRE broke down according to Rick.

[Anondson]

Avian: when was your last communication with Rick? Had you heard from him about his being in poor health?