A Pair of The High And Mighty Take a Fall: TNB Detroit
sheets3inthwind
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Couple's
glamorous life explodes
They found fame, fortune. Now both are
behind bars
The Detroit News
Marie Jackson-Randolph, and her
husband, Thomas, lived a life of wealth, power, luxury. Thomas
Randolph faces a murder charge and his wife is in prison for
fraud.
Important dates in the Randolphs' lives
Thomas Randolph
and Marie Jackson-Randolph enjoyed success as respected business
people and professionals in Detroit during the 1980s and for
much of the 1990s before Marie Jackson-Randolph was sentenced to
prison for nine years for stealing millions in federal funds.
Thomas Randolph now faces a murder charge.
August 1981:
Sharron Randolph files two domestic-violence complaints against
Thomas Randolph with the Detroit police. No charges are pursued.
Jan. 8, 1982: Sharron Randolph is shot to death in the
parking lot of the Empress Garden restaurant in Southfield while
her husband was seemingly knocked unconscious by a robber.
October 1982: Thomas Randolph wins legal custody of Sharron
Randolph's two sons, despite the efforts of their biological
fathers to have them. The same month, he marries Marie Jackson,
his fourth wife.
November 1983: A federal judge orders
insurance companies to pay Randolph $228,000 for policies on
Sharron Randolph. The same year, he renounces custody of the
boys.
1987: The Avon cosmetics company names Marie
Jackson-Randolph, who owned and ran several popular 24-hour day
care centers in Detroit, one of six Women of Enterprise in the
nation.
1990: Thomas Randolph gets a law degree from Wayne
State University.
June 1999: Marie Jackson-Randolph is
convicted by a federal jury of 63 felonies stemming from the
fabrication of food bills for her day care centers. She receives
a nine-year prison sentence.
July 2000: Thomas Randolph is
charged with hiring Sanirrell Shannon to kill Sharron Randolph.
He faces up to life in prison if convicted. By Mike Martindale
and Ronald J. Hansen / The Detroit News
DETROIT -- For two
decades, Thomas H. Randolph Jr. and his fourth wife, Marie
Antoinette Jackson-Randolph, lived a privileged life built on a
web of lies, authorities say.
Marie Jackson-Randolph, 60,
stole millions from taxpayers and treated herself to fur coats
and gambling junkets. Thomas Randolph, 58, allegedly hired a hit
man to kill his third wife for insurance money, deceived his
mentally troubled brother and drove around in a Rolls Royce,
according to police and court papers.
But now the trappings
of success have vanished. Thomas Randolph faces an Aug. 17 court
hearing on a murder charge in the death of Sharron Beatty
Randolph on Jan. 8, 1982. Last year, a federal court jury
convicted Marie Jackson-Randolph of bilking the government out
of $13 million and a judge put her in prison for nine years.
It has been a rapid fall from grace for the Randolphs, whose
careers and ostentatious lifestyles once made them the envy of
many Detroiters. They led a successful business that won
national awards. They had the confidence and resources to run
for political office. They lived in a big house in the city's
most exclusive neighborhood. They attended some of the city's
most exclusive social events. They lavished trips on their
employees.
Interviews and a trail of court records reviewed
by The Detroit News outline how their lives unraveled. Randolph
and Jackson-Randolph declined to comment for this article.
The recent problems do not surprise Sharron Randolph's
family.
"He (Randolph) was a so-called pillar of the
community," said Kenneth Beatty, Sharron's brother. "What a
farce! He was devious. He was cunning. He was the devil
himself."
But they shock one of Marie Jackson-Randolph's
friends.
New York City businesswoman Gail Blanke featured
Marie Jackson-Randolph in her 1990 book Taking Control of Your
Life: The Secrets of Successful Enterprising Women.
"Good
God! That's unbelievable. She was incredibly determined and
seemed unstoppable," she said.
Their upbringing hardly
presaged the success they later achieved.
Thomas Randolph,
raised in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem and known as
"Tony," was a juvenile delinquent and high school dropout. He
went to prison in New York as a teen-ager, though court records
don't say why.
Jackson-Randolph fondly recalled summers on a
relative's Virginia farm, where water came from a well.
Randolph joined the Army, married Loretta White while
stationed in Hawaii, obtained his GED and focused on competitive
running. The effort paid off: Randolph was a four-time
collegiate All-American and was named an alternate to the 1968
Olympics.
Jackson-Randolph survived a 1979 fire in Detroit
that killed her three children, and went on to serve as a
Detroit Public Schools board member and work at Wayne County
Community College.
In 1970, Thomas Randolph also began
teaching at Wayne County Community College, where he worked
until retiring in 1993. Randolph continued his education while
he taught and received four college degrees.
His second
marriage, to LaSandra McKinney, ended in divorce in 1973. In
1975, he was a graduate student at Wayne State University when
he met Sharron Beatty, also a student.
"We were both buying
an ice cream cone at the same place, at the same time, so we
struck up a conversation," he testified in a 1982 court hearing.
Beatty had two children from two failed marriages when she
met Randolph. The men she divorced -- Michael Douglas Smith Sr.
and Charles James Banks Jr. -- testified in court that they made
low incomes the whole time she knew them. Randolph offered a
stability she had never known as an adult.
In 1979, Beatty
married Randolph in Las Vegas.
But three years later, on
Jan. 8, 1982, Sharron Randolph died from two gunshots to the
head. She was 26.
Thomas Randolph said at the time that he
and his wife had finished dinner at the Empress Garden
restaurant in Southfield when a man pistol-whipped him into
unconsciousness. When he awoke, he saw his wife slumped in the
back seat of their car. She died an hour later at Providence
Hospital.
Randolph stumbled inside the restaurant pleading
for help and collapsed.
Sharron Randolph's violent demise
was the final chapter of her short, troubled life. She never
earned more than $6,000 in a year except for the brief period
when she worked as a Detroit police officer. The department laid
her off in 1981.
Her brother remembers that she worked
briefly for one of Marie Jackson-Randolph's day care centers.
Family suspicious
The Beatty family suspected trouble
in the Randolphs' marriage before she died.
Sharron Randolph
filed two domestic violence complaints against Randolph in
August 1981 but never followed through with the reports.
About five months later, Sharron Randolph was dead.
The
custody battle for her sons, who were 10 and 12 when their
mother died, painted dismal prospects for the children if left
to their biological fathers, Smith and Banks.
Randolph's
only apparent blemish at the time was falling $6,600 behind in
child-support payments to his second wife, LaSandra. In October
1982, a judge awarded him custody of the boys.
Throughout
the custody battle, Randolph also fought the insurance companies
that held $295,000 in policies on Sharron Randolph's life.
Lawyers for the insurers, who noted in court papers that
they knew of the suspicions by police surrounding her death,
sued to make certain they paid only once and to the proper
person. Sharron Randolph had not signed all the policies taken
out within a few months of her death.
In November 1983, a
federal judge ordered the insurance companies to pay Randolph
$228,000 for the policies. The judge ordered that $10,000 be set
aside to establish a trust fund for the boys, as Sharron
Randolph's will instructed. The owner of the strip mall where
Sharron Randolph was killed paid Randolph $72,500 to settle a
lawsuit against them for not ensuring safety in the parking lot.
But that same year, Randolph abruptly gave custody of the
boys to their biological fathers.
Randolph "never explained
why and I didn't question it," Smith said. "My son wasn't real
happy about it. It was quite a come-down for him to leave his
house in Palmer Woods, where he had bikes and all kinds of
things I couldn't provide."
Married a year later
The
Detroit News
Marie Jackson-Randolph turned her Sleepy Hollow day
care centers -- popular with working-class families because they
were always open -- into a successful business.
Thomas
Randolph married Marie Jackson within a year of Sharron's death.
They traveled in the same circles because both worked at Wayne
County Community College as instructors and advisers.
Together, they rose to prominence in Detroit's political and
business arenas.
Each made unsuccessful bids for political
office. He ran for the state Legislature, while she ran for
Detroit City Council.
With the help of her husband, Marie
Jackson-Randolph turned her Sleepy Hollow day care centers --
popular with working-class families because they were open 24
hours a day, seven days a week -- into a successful business.
She treated the kids to year-end luncheons in limousines. Even
the federal investigators who would eventually file charges
against her noted the centers were well-run and filled a need.
The couple lived comfortably in a 4,700-square-foot home in
Detroit's exclusive Palmer Woods neighborhood, took exotic
vacations to the Caribbean and elsewhere and basked in the
accolades each received for successful careers. The Avon
cosmetics company named Marie Jackson-Randolph its 1987 Woman of
Enterprise. Clairol cosmetics gave her an award a year later.
Marie Jackson-Randolph, in turn, rewarded loyalty. She sent
36 employees on a three-day cruise to Nassau in the Bahamas to
show her appreciation.
By the mid-1990s, the Randolphs'
fortunes collapsed like a house of cards.
MAJCO, Marie
Jackson-Randolph's business holdings, filed for bankruptcy in
February 1994. By May 1995, it was out of business. Several of
the corporation's estimated 500 workers complained about
contracts in which the day care center was compensated by the
federal government for feeding low-income children, triggering a
state audit and, subsequently, a federal probe and seizure of
records at several of her day care centers.
Marie
Jackson-Randolph resigned in late 1993, and the corporate board
removed her husband as a vice president the following year.
In July 1996, the city seized 9195 Greenfield, where MAJCO
had operated, because of unpaid taxes on the building from 1986
through 1992. The debt totaled $6,183.
In October 1996, the
Randolphs agreed to each pay the city $10,500 for taxes they
failed to withhold while heading MAJCO. The company owed an
additional $219,459 in back taxes for 1993 through 1995.
Other cash problems
The Detroit News
Thomas H. Randolph is
accused of hiring a hit man to kill his third wife.
Thomas
Randolph had other cash problems, too.
In March 1996, a
judge ruled he breached a settlement with Wayne County Community
College that required him to pay back $15,000 he, according to
the college, overcharged the school while still teaching.
Randolph accused the school of amending the settlement and
"cutting and pasting" his signature on a bogus deal.
The
community college's attorney, James C. Zeman, noted Randolph had
displayed "a level of temerity I have rarely witnessed in my 25
years of legal practice."
Randolph had a rancorous split
with the community college. Its representatives said he took a
1986 sabbatical to write a research paper on student retention,
which he never wrote.
In 1997, Randolph's mentally ill
half-brother, James L. Davis, sued to recover $440,000 he said
Randolph kept for himself. The money came from a settlement
Davis reached with a mental institution, where he fell from a
window.
Earlier, a court in New York had entered a judgment
against Randolph for, in its view, improperly keeping the money.
But on July 17, 1997, the brother agreed to settle the debt
for $100, according to court records.
"He scruffed his
brother big time," said Pamela D. Hayes, Davis' New York lawyer.
"One day they got him drunk, and he signed it. What a tragic
case."
More problems
Marie Jackson-Randolph had her own
problems handling money -- especially money that was not hers,
federal investigators found.
She submitted inflated and
fabricated bills from her day-care centers to the U.S.
Department of Agriculture and lined her pockets with cash. She
lavished gifts such as large screen televisions and trips on
friends and relatives.
In September 1990 she sued the Trump
Plaza Corp. of Atlantic City, N.J., claiming Trump's guards
failed to stop a thief from stealing a purse, jewelry, cash and
airplane tickets from her room while she played blackjack in the
VIP Lounge of the Atlantic City casino.
In 1999, a jury
convicted Marie Jackson-Randolph in U.S. District Court in
Detroit of 63 counts of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering.
She received a $1.1-million fine, must pay $13 million in
restitution and is serving a nine-year prison term in Pekin,
Ill.
Federal seizures included 200 full-length fur coats
found in storage.
Once known as "Doc" and "Mama" to her
employees, today she is inmate 21989039.
Troubles ahead
Now Thomas Randolph faces trial.
Police say he hired a
former student of his, Sanirell Shannon, to kill Sharron. Both
face murder charges for her death and an Aug. 17 preliminary
exam in Southfield District Court. He is being held without bond
in the Oakland County Jail.
His attorney, William Mitchell
III, described Randolph as a strong man who has always been a
part of and involved in his community. Thomas Randolph III is
convinced his father will be acquitted of charges and notes how
he has "spent his life helping people."
Others are not as
kind.
"He was a husband who had a lot of gifts," Beatty
said, "and misused them all."
To Blanke, the New York writer
who profiled Marie Jackson-Randolph, the fall of the Randolphs
is a familiar story.
"It's such a shame, so Greek. The very
things that enable us to overcome anything and propel us forward
-- our courage and single-mindedness -- can also be our
downfall."
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Echolot Pinger
> My Aunt and Uncle were amazing people, this is pure bullshit.
>
--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ne...@netfront.net ---
dlor...@gmail.com
1gma...@gmail.com
jlis...@gmail.com
jlis...@gmail.com
Former Employee
leelee...@gmail.com
dama...@gmail.com
> My Aunt Marie and Uncle Tony were wonderful people. Y'all make it seem like they were monsters. They helped anyone in there path who needed it. May my Uncle rest in peace
dama...@gmail.com
> My Aunt and Uncle were amazing people, this is pure bullshit.
