Businessman who shut down his N.H. newspaper last summer is indicted on federal fraud charges

Last July, I noted that the Eagle Times in Claremont, New Hampshire, had shut down. I also observed that Todd Bookman of New Hampshire Public Radio had produced an unusually harsh story on the former owner, venture capitalist Jay Lucas, which suggested there might be more to the story.

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Indeed there was, and thanks to Media Nation reader Christian Avard for tipping me off. Last month Lucas was indicted on federal fraud charges. Arielle Mitropoulos reports at WMUR.com:

New York investigators have accused Jay Lucas, 71, of Newport, of scamming investors out of $50 million by lying to them and saying that their money would be invested in health and wellness companies when it was actually being used to cover personal expenses, promote unrelated ventures and make Ponzi-like payments to other investors.

A Republican politico who ran for governor in 1998, Lucas purchased the Eagle Times in 2022. As Damien Fisher writes for inDepthNH, Lucas said he would “would focus on positive, uplifting stories.” Fisher adds:

Lucas didn’t mention that he bought the paper with other people’s money, as alleged. Instead, he presented it as part of his Sunshine Initiative, a vaguely defined venture to revitalize the local area through happiness.

Lucas allegedly took millions from people to be invested in startup health and wellness companies. But the investment money he took instead went to pay alimony, rent, fund his purchase of the Eagle Times, and hire political consultants.

This is a pretty wild story; unfortunately, it’s also left a community without local journalism. Jonathan Phelps reports in the New Hampshire Union Leader that The Granite Eagle a digital publication that Lucas helped found, continues to publish without his involvement, but it appears to be an aggregation site that pulls together mostly statewide stories. In an editor’s note published Dec. 22, Granite Eagle editor-in-chief Chris Thompson wrote that Lucas had not been involved “for some time,” adding: “We are excited about the future of the publication and remain committed to providing our readers with quality local journalism. We thank our dedicated readership for their continued support.”

As I noted earlier this year, the Eagle, later the Eagle Times, had been a star-crossed publication for many years. It was purchased in 1946 by John McLane Clark, a former editorial writer for The Washington Post who’d lost out in a bid to buy the Union and the Leader in Manchester; instead, those papers fell into the hands of the notorious right-wing hate-monger and pedophile William Loeb.

Clark died in 1950, drowning while canoeing in Sugar River, according to Steve Taylor of The Valley News in nearby Lebanon, New Hampshire. The Eagle Times closed in 2009, but was revived at some point by an out-of-state chain.

As Bookman wrote for NHPR last summer:

In the wake of the collapse, staff have claimed that Lucas repeatedly failed to pay overdue bills, and on occasion requested workers hold off on cashing their paychecks due to a lack of funding…. [T]he local boy who had made good, and decided to invest in his hometown, appeared to have harmed the very community he was aiming to help.

If the federal charges against Lucas are to be believed, now we know the rest of the story.

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