Benefactor with a Checkered Past

You may already know the story of Mandi Schwartz:

[A] Yale hockey player stricken with leukemia, she needs a stem-cell transplant to survive, and her family and friends are searching everywhere to find her one.

Now, we read in the NY Times, there are Questions About Yale Cancer Patient's Benefactor:

Spearheading the effort has been Tedd Collins IV, who founded two charities to help leukemia patients after his 26-year-old daughter died last summer while battling the disease. By all accounts, Collins has been an untiring advocate for Schwartz, whose transplant is scheduled for next month.

But as Schwartz’s teammates and Yale officials suggested that people lend support directly through Collins’s charities, what they did not know was that he has spent the better part of a decade entangled in lawsuits and fraud accusations, according to court records and interviews.

In 2005, after a failed Internet venture, Collins founded Trust Management Associates. Allegations against Collins include:

• Offering a 35 percent return in little more than a year to a South Carolinian whose investment then vanished.
• Taking nearly $200,000 from a Florida paramedic to set aside in a trust for the paramedic's daughter. This fund also went missing.

At this writing Collins has not been charged with a crime. Federal prosecutors, the IRS and the Secret Service are continuing their investigation.

Postscript: Collins was a middleman linked to the collapse of Sam Israel's Bayou funds, the Times reports. Small world, isn't it?