I must return to Mark Johnson’s epic interview slash psychodrama with convicted EB-5 fraudster Bill Stenger, seen here standing next to a gent whose name I cannot quite recall. This time, let’s take a look at how Stenger explains himself as a naive, trusting soul whose biggest sin was that he wanted so desperately for the projects to work that he ignored some very obvious signs of trouble.

Johnson did his level best to hold Stenger’s feet to the fire, and Stenger repeatedly responded by steering down what John Ehrlichman called the “modified limited hangout route.” Stenger admitted complicity but not criminality, depicting himself simultaneously as perpetrator and victim. Neat trick, that.

The problem is, even if you believe Stenger’s account — which would be a dangerous thing to do — he seems to be guilty of gross negligence instead of overt criminality. That’s not a great consolation prize. Neither does it make me feel sorry for him that he had to serve a short sentence in a relatively comfortable federal facility.

Which he describes, as often as not, in the second person, a subtle way of deflecting the fact that this happened to his own self. “You” reported for prison. “You” were welcomed by fellow inmates. “You” got time off for attending courses. And so on.

But that’s a minor point. Time for a deeper dive on how he describes his role in the EB-5 scandal and his timeline, which serves to make his own story less believable.

Stenger first met Quiros in 2002, when the latter bought a townhouse at Jay Peak. The two began working together on EB-5 in 2006. At the time, EB-5 was a small, obscure federal program. It would mushroom in size following the 2008 economic collapse, when investment money was looking for secure havens and well-to-do foreign nationals were eager to obtain legal residency status in the US.

This gave Stenger and Quiros what seemed like an unmissable opportunity — to take advantage of this global gold rush to strap a jetpack to the Kingdom’s economy. The rapid growth of EB-5 left Vermont’s regulatory structure in the dust, a fact that didn’t stop then-governor Shumlin (not to mention the three members of our Congressional delegation) from loudly promoting the Quiros/Stenger projects.

And it fueled Stenger’s desire to raise money as quickly as possible in case the EB-5 firehose suddenly ran dry. “We needed to act when the capital was there,” he explained. “The market would have gone elsewhere.”

In the process, as he tells it, he buried his growing misgivings under a mountain of work. “What I’ve got to do is finish these projects,” Stenger told Johnson. “Raise the money, create the jobs, get these [investors] their green cards, and once that’s done, I can exit.”

That’s all well and good. But Stenger was raising hundreds of millions of dollars and overseeing massive projects. He was an experienced developer. His role required a certain measure of due diligence. He failed to exercise it, and the results were catastrophic.

And that’s the charitable interpretation of his role in EB-5.

In Stenger’s own telling, he first began feeling “uncomfortable” with Quiros as far back as 2008. That is, need I point out, a long time ago. Eight long years from then to the collapse of the enterprise. At the time, Stenger and Quiros were partners in the most minimal sense: Quiros had business contacts in Korea, accompanied Stenger on a trip there, and helped arrange meetings with potential investors. Despite his discomfort, Stenger got in deeper and deeper with Quiros.

The next stage in Stenger’s discomfort came when Quiros bought the Burke Mountain resort without telling Stenger, changed its name to Q Burke, and installed his son as general manager. The son had no experience in running a ski resort, and Burke began to lose money. “I became concerned with what I saw him doing [at] Burke,” Stenger said.

What’s more, Quiros asked Stenger to make good Burke’s losses with funds meant for EB-5 construction.

Um…

I don’t know, that seems a little fishy.

Still, Stenger persisted. “There were so many projects, I got caught up in trying to complete them.”

This brings us to May 2014, when Stenger was summoned to the Vermont Agency of Commerce. A Korean-speaking intern there had discovered via the Internet that the Korean company that was supposed to be involved in the proposed biotech plant in downtown Newport was essentially insolvent and had been so for at least two years. Stenger referred to this as “some problems in Korea.” You think?

This also says something about the state’s level of diligence. They happened to have a Korean-speaking intern around? If not, would they ever have found out about the “problems in Korea”? What kind of penny-ante operation was this?

Stenger’s response to the Korean mess was to contract with an expert firm to review the science behind the Newport plan. He convinced himself that the Korean company’s problem wasn’t scientific, it was a lack of capital. And EB-5 had plenty of capital. Or so he thought.

I’ll just pause here and point out that the idea of a cutting-edge global biotech firm choosing to locate in Newport should have raised questions from the start. Nothing against Newport, but it’s a long way away from major technology centers and it isn’t exactly easy to get to. I have previously written of a similar story that played out in the year 2000 in the New Hampshire seacoast. A retired military man came to Dover and said he was going to open company called Alliance Aircraft in the town’s abandoned mill buildings that would build a revolutionary new type of passenger jet. You can read the whole story here; suffice it to say that he never got close to building a single plane, and exited the scene in less than a year.

That’s what the Newport biotech plan reminds me of. And that’s without considering anything we now know about the Korean company or Ariel Quiros.

In 2014 Stenger faced the necessity of gaining state re-authorization of two EB-5 projects, Burke Mountain — sorry, Q Burke — and the biotech plant. After months of research, Stenger presented the information requested by the state. In the spring of 2015, the state reauthorized the projects with a caveat: Investor funds had to be placed in a state-moniitored escrow account until they were spent.

Stenger accepted this condition readily because, in his telling, he had no idea Quiros was commingling funds meant for different projects and skimming off tens of millions for his own use.

And he didn’t wonder why the state insisted on the escrow arrangement when it had never sought such a thing before?

A few months later, Stenger was told by a Quiros underling to “slow down” on signing construction contracts. A curious order, considering that the necessary funds were supposed to be held in escrow.

And yet, Stenger pressed on. He continued to raise money. He raised more than $50 million after that.

Then one day in the spring of 2016, the Securities and Exchange Commission arrived in force at Jay Peak and showed Stenger proof of Quiros’ misdeeds. “I’m reading he purchased Jay, Burke, condos I didn’t know existed, airplanes, there was 40-some-50 million dollars worth of stuff that he paid for with the money I raised.”

In summarizing his role in the EB-5 scandal, Stenger used words like “careless,” “naïveté” and “ignorance.” He described himself as “too trusting to a fault,” and said “I don’t have a history of being involved in legal matters except the closing on a condominium.”

All of which makes him seem unqualified to manage a project involving some $400 million in other people’s money. You just can’t be careless or naive when you take on that level of fiscal, legal and moral responsibility.

Again, this is the charitable interpretation based on Stenger’s own account. There are other wasy to interpret events that are far less flattering. But even if you believe him and you think his cardinal sin was being “trusting to a fault,” then he deserved to go to prison and he deserves to see his reputation in tatters. Those are reasonable consequences for what he did.

Even if you do take him at his word.