Black Mountain Retiree Lost $150,000 in Real Estate Fraud, Ended Up in Motel

Richard Helbig spent 16 years paying the mortgage, insurance, and property taxes on his Black Mountain home, an estimated $150,000 in total, and came away with nothing. The Black Mountain retiree ended up living in a motel and working as a dishwasher after losing his property in a real estate scheme now at the center of a Buncombe County criminal case.

Lisa Roberts-Allen, 64, and Ilesanmi Adaramola, 41, are charged with obtaining Helbig's property by false pretenses and other felonies related to property transactions documented in the Asheville Watchdog's investigative series "Equity Erased." Both have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial. Adaramola's attorney declined comment; Roberts-Allen's attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

"I was paying the mortgage, insurance and taxes, everything after she left," Helbig said. "It became difficult."

Helbig moved in with a friend in Asheville around 2014 but continued covering the expenses on the Black Mountain property. He paid off the mortgage entirely, but by 2018 had fallen behind on property taxes. Buncombe County began foreclosure proceedings in May 2018.

Roberts-Allen and Adaramola did not act alone in the broader scheme documented by investigators. Asheville lawyer Robert P. Tucker II, 63, was convicted of conspiring with the two in a separate case that resulted in a former Buncombe law enforcement officer losing his Arden home and more than $40,000. Tucker began serving a 4- to 6-year prison term on Feb. 27. His lawyer maintained that Tucker "has done nothing illegal."

The Watchdog's review of more than four dozen of Tucker's real estate transactions since 2014 found his companies acquired interests in Buncombe properties for as little as $250, and sometimes for nothing at all. Nearly half of the affected property owners were Black. A judge returned one house to a family after finding Tucker's company, Asheville Holdings, obtained it by fraud. The North Carolina State Bar has opened an investigation into Tucker's transactions.

Court clerks described Roberts and Tucker as regulars at the Buncombe County Courthouse who scoured foreclosure and estate filings for leads on vulnerable properties. At Tucker's trial, a witness named McCullough testified that she took a foreclosure notice to her attorney, Adaramola, after worrying about the impact on her credit rating.

The losses documented in "Equity Erased" fit into a longer history of displacement in the region. Studies have documented land loss among Asheville's Black community through urban renewal policies dating to the 1950s, which displaced families and neighborhoods to make way for development. Buncombe political leaders have vowed to make amends for those policies, but as the Helbig case illustrates, homes continue to be lost to individual investors with little public scrutiny.

Roberts-Allen and Adaramola remain awaiting trial while the North Carolina State Bar's investigation into Tucker's broader transaction history continues.