FOX 6 ANCHOR REPORTER BANKRUPT

[Updated Monday, June 9th, 2008: It looks like the Repo Man got Chrystina's car! On Monday, June 2nd, 2008, Head filed an "emergency motion for return of vehicle, sanctions, punitive damages and attorneys fees relative to violation of the automatic stay," in the court of James E. Shapiro, [Harvard '54] U. S. Bankruptcy Judge, Eastern District of Wisconsin, case # 08-24510. --Ed.]

Student Loan, Consumer Purchases Hobble Head to Tune of $89,000 While
Developer Fergus Sinks to $80 Million in the Hole

Special to the Readers of milwaukeeworld.com

By Michael Horne

Chrystina Head, an Anchor / Reporter for Fox 6 News is probably not on the short list for promotion to consumer reporter at the Brown Deer television station. In fact, she could use a little consumer advice herself. She owes Crown Asset Management $2,263 for a court judgment, and Harris Bank is garnishing her wages for the devilish sum of $7,076.66. She owes Juneau Village Towers $126, and those are merely her debts in Milwaukee County Circuit Court.
Head's paycheck has also been garnished to the tune of $220 per pay period since April, 2007 to satisfy an outstanding $52,361 student loan from when she attended Valparaiso University, graduating with the class of 2001.
Head's $9,000 2005 Pontiac Grand Am has been repossessed, and she now gets around in a 1997 Lexus with a $3,000 lien against its title. She owes the East Side Pick 'n' Save $164 for a couple of bad checks written in 2006, and has a host of other debts totaling $89,270 according to the bankruptcy petition she filed in U. S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin on May 13th, 2008.
They include $1,400 to WE Energies, $468 to a cash advance store, another $3,806 to Juneau Village, $1,001 to Suncom Wireless, $346 to Sprint, $859 to Time Warner, $409 to Victoria's Secret and around $850 to The Limited. The debts date to 2002 when she was a young reporter in Atlanta at WAGD.
Head's assets consist of $50 in wearing apparel and $25 in costume jewelry. (Who knew that merchandise from Victoria's Secret and The Limited depreciated so rapidly? )Elsewhere on the very meager plus side of Ms. Head's ledger is her monthly paycheck of $4,624.36 from Channel 6. She pulled in $48,771 in 2006, her first year of employment in Milwaukee, and earned $52,179 in 2007. She claims a 401(k) value of $516, but apparently is now contributing to it at the rate of about $900 per month, which along with the garnishments helps drag her monthly take home pay down to $2,458.
The bankruptcy will clear up many of those debts; and it could be argued that $52,361 is quite a hefty sum to pay just to be educated in a Lutheran college. But Head has racked up an additional $36,909 of what appear to be largely frivolous charges since she graduated. That's $100 per week on a $600 paycheck. Perhaps most troubling are her experiences with the Pick 'n' Save store and with the cash advance outlet, both of which appear to involve bad checks, which can be treated as a criminal offense in Wisconsin. So much for the glamorous, high-paying life of a television personality.

ANATOMY OF AN $80 MILLION BANKRUPT

Of course, being eighty grand in debt is a drag, but it could be worse. For failed developer and former representative to the assembly Scott Fergus it is a whole lot worse. Nearly a thousand times worse, in fact, since his bankruptcy petition filed in March, 2008, lists debts of $80,899,786 plus change. His residence in a home in a newly converted Oconomowoc cornfield has a 2007 assessment of $661,700, but a footnote sets its current fair market value at $550,000 max. Who cares? There are three mortgages on the place totaling $1,701,184, or three times the home's worth. Plus, he owes the city $6,100 in taxes on the place. So much for home sweet home. Other Fergus assets include $29 in an Associated Bank checking account, and $21 in a Marine Bank checking account. His clothing has "no resale value," he sleeps in a $600 bed, owns a pair of $50 bicycles and hunts his vittles with a $100 shotgun. His "media room" is outfitted with 26-inch, 32-inch, 42-inch and 50-inch flat screen televisions, all the better to watch Chrystina Head. He owns a "Stickley chair, $250," (probably reproduction) and a $900 pool table. The sum total of the books in the Fergus library is $250. They probably are all titles about how to succeed in business.
His debts include a "personally guaranteed" loan to him from Alliance Builders Group, via Marine Bank, in the sum of $11,381,073 and another $56,000,000 personally guaranteed loan to Anchor Bank. You can imagine what those loans are worth now! Most of his other bank debt, and there is millions, comes in six-digit chunks. He also hit up family members for like sums, and among his debtors are mom Delores J. Fergus ($200,000) and Jeff Fergus ($215,000) along with DJF Investments and JLF Investments, which share addresses with their namesakes. That's a long way from asking mom for $20 to put gasoline in the car.
The banking industry can probably absorb the shock of the Fergus bankruptcy, (although you never know these days) but its ripple effects could prove devastating to the many subcontractors Fergus used at his First Place on the River and 601 Lofts condominium developments. He owes Hurtado Consulting $800,000 for fees; HGA Architects $478,933;Graef Anhalt Schloemer and Associates, Inc. Architects $47,990; Current Electric $31,857; Holton Brothers $9,736 and Earth Tech $10,846. The list goes on, at length, for 32 pages. True, there is a tangible asset involved in the real estate, which has been taken over by the lender and being managed by the Mandel Group. Still, you take the $80 million and divide it among the 150 or so unsold units at First Place, and you get a sales price of about $533,333.33 per unit just to break even. There are not many (if any) units in the building that could command such a price, according to real estate experts familiar with the property.
--Michael Horne