The plan to invest up to $27 million of Cree heritage funds in a questionable U.S. recycling scheme is now dead.
“For all intents and purposes, the project is dead,” said Bill Grodinsky, corporate secretary of the Cree Regional Authority.
Grodinsky said both Crees and promoter Walter Childress, a Texas entrepreneur, pulled back because it “was becoming an issue in the Cree world.”
Last year, The Nation contacted four top U.S. recycling experts who said the project was ridiculous and warned that Crees could lose their money.
“It sounds like a crock,” said Leone Young, a Wall Street financial analyst and one of America’s leading experts on the recycling industry.
At the time, however, Cree leaders were seriously considering the proposal.
Grodinsky said at the time: “It is feasible. We see it as happening.”
Promoter Walter Childress had come here to meet Cree chiefs to discuss the plan. He promised enormous profits if Crees gave him money to build recycling centres in major cities across the United States.
Chief Billy Diamond was the one who apparently brought the project to the Crees. We were informedhe met Childress through a New Orleans woman named Voyce Durling Jones, Liberia’s consul-general inthe U.S. Southeast.
