Snowed
A ski resort, a dream and greed: How a $350M fraud happened in Vermont’s poorest region
April McCullum and Dan D Ambrosio, Burlington Free Press
Published
3:22 pm UTC Dec. 18, 2020
No one would have recognized the man with icy eyes and a military bearing who drove through rural Vermont in 2007 with his lawyer in tow.
In anonymity, Ariel Quiros brought his real estate attorney, Fred Burgess, on a tour of the mountainous area near the Canadian border that’s known as the Northeast Kingdom. Laced with lakes and expansive forests, the Kingdom, as locals call it, is a silent fortress of natural beauty, hardscrabble dairy farms, and people eager for a return to prosperity.