Snowed A ski resort, a dream and greed: How a $350M fraud happened in Vermont’s poorest region Dan D'Ambrosio and April McCullum, Burlington Free Press Published 8:59 pm UTC Dec. 28, 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.