What Goes Around Comes Around (and It’s Not Always a Bad Thing!)
St. Louis is a small town with lots of wealthy people whose shit is not supposed to stink.
One such family is/was the Morriss family, initially consisting of Reuben Morriss and his wife Barbara, long-time members of the social and financial elite. Reuben was head of the largest trust company in the city, and Barbara had inherited tens of millions from a family interest in Weyerhaeuser.
Early in my career I had a case involving that company and met Reuben. When I left, I thought to myself, "If his name had been Morriss Reuben instead of Reuben Morriss, would he have had that position?” Back then, no Jew would have been hired by that firm.
They had a son, Burton Douglas Morriss (known as Douglas), who never had to work a day in his life. He became a financier, leading a life of privilege. From helicopter rides to Canadian hunting trips and tailored suits, he had a taste for adventure and luxury.
Douglas had graduated from Ladue Horton Watkins High School in 1981, and then graduated from Drake University in Iowa in 1985. According to a Forbes magazine profile of the Morriss Family, Douglas worked as a broker at Oppenheimer & Co. He founded a successful company called Kinexus, which sold online wealth management tools and services, at first to individuals and later to banks.
From 1998 to 2000, Douglas served as the "managing member" of MIC Aircraft LLC, a Chesterfield-based firm. But the aircraft company filed for bankruptcy less than two years after his departure from the firm, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the federal bankruptcy court in St. Louis.
Douglas had raised tens of millions of dollars in private equity and venture capital funds. He also had served on the boards of a dozen companies, including some of the firms his investment funds had bankrolled.
Later, a group of Texas investors, including polo-playing millionaire John B. Goodman, filed a lawsuit accusing Morriss of diverting investor funds for his personal obligations and debts.
Douglas and three of his companies then filed for bankruptcy, listing more than $35 million in debts and at least forty creditors, including a Swiss investment banker, a leading U.S. bank and some of his employees.
Later, in a civil complaint filed in federal court in St. Louis, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accused Douglas of misleading and defrauding his investors.
Morriss lived in a Tudor-style mansion overlooking the golf course of the St. Louis Country Club (not only were no Jews allowed, but no Catholics either). The home, appraised at about $4 million, included a swimming pool and guest house.
In 2013 Douglas was sentenced to five years in Club Fed, but as one would expect in a mention of the “born wells” (although he won the lottery by being adopted well), his sentence was reduced to three years by District Judge Rodney Sippel, who received his federal appointment as a reward for serving as chief of staff for Richard Gephardt, former U.S. Speaker of the House.
Barbara Morriss was one of Douglas’s victims in that he pledged all of the trust assets for loans. Douglas was co-trustee with Wells Fargo Bank. Barbara’s trust then sued Wells Fargo for failing to protect the trust assets in a much-publicized trial. Her husband Reuben predeceased her in 2006.
Barbara died in 2018. Although I have not been able to confirm it, it’s a reasonable conclusion that Douglas, as one of Reuben and Barbara’s two children, was a principal beneficiary of the trust (which had been established many years before his crimes) and indirectly was the beneficiary of the money he mismanaged or simply stole. It is a bizarre outcome of the phrase, “What goes around comes around.”
The next time you see a story about some poor Black or White person indicted for mail fraud for keeping his/her parents’ Social Security check after they passed away, remember Douglas. If you are going to steal, steal big and your dreams may come true.