VIRGINIA BEACH -- The spring night Ed Lindsley, a wily old land speculator, collapsed atop a pile of land deeds and slipped into a diabetic coma, some people in this resort town wondered if at last they were secure.
For decades, Lindsley built his fortune using long-forgotten land deeds to force homeowners, developers and business people here to pay him for land they thought they owned. Now, he lay hurting over the very same deeds that he might one day use against some unwitting landowner.
But within weeks, Lindsley was out of the hospital and working full throttle on his boldest, grandest plan yet: claiming ownership of a few parcels of the Virginia Beach oceanfront, the soul of the state's largest city and most popular tourist destination.
And it looks as if he has a case.
Virginia Beach has been mired in a frustrating battle to prove that it owns the beachfront that it built a boardwalk over, added sand to, kept clean and promoted as a sunny respite for vacationing families for decades.
Lindsley has forced Virginia Beach officials to admit that they hold no title to the beachfront parcels. A state and federal court have refused to throw out Lindsley's claim, leaving the city to await a judge's determination.
Lindsley doesn't really want the land. He wants two things: Nearly $4 million in damages and bragging rights that he could pull off such a bold move.
"He just likes to out-snooker everyone," says John Johnson, who got out-snookered by Lindsley when Johnson was forced to pay $3,500 for a part of his back yard. "This is gamesmanship to him."
To Lindsley, it's nothing personal. Just business. "The city makes itself out to be some saint and we as thieves," he says in his characteristic soft voice. "I love the beach. All I want is to be justified for what I own."
Many have learned the hard way that Lindsley plays to win.
His method is simple. Sniffing out a possible bad title transfer, he buys the assets, such as land, from the heirs of long-defunct and long-forgotten companies. He then alerts the current property owners that their deeds to the land that they believed they owned are not legally binding, because he now holds an earlier title to the land from the defunct company.
He will track down heirs all over the country who unwittingly own a piece of property and pay them for their divided share. Then he will force the current landowner, who thinks he owns the property outright, to buy Lindsley off.
To find these technical glitches, he spends months, sometimes years, searching old land records. The work is tedious and holds no promise of profit.
To be sure, Lindsley has not found a new way to torture landowners. Decades ago, enterprising businessmen built their fortunes from bad land-title transfers. But Lindsley takes advantage of the fact that title insurance isn't required in Virginia. So new landowners might not be aware of mistakes made long ago in the chain of ownership.
Profiting by mistakes
"I wanted to be a lawyer," says Lindsley, who dropped out of law school. "Then I decided I could make a better living off of lawyers' mistakes."
Indeed he has. Consider a few examples:
In 1975, Lindsley bought the rights from a defunct developer to a never-built street that was to run through the front yard of Dave Harris' two-story home. Harris, a salesman who had never met Lindsley, awoke one morning to find a for-sale sign posted on his property. He wound up paying $10,000 to become legal owner of his front yard.
In 1986, Lindsley forced the city to pay him $400,000 to end a dispute over ownership of another tourist haven, Ocean Park beach. Again, he bought the assets of defunct companies that developed the area around the turn of the century.
In 1991, Lindsley found out that upon the death of Henry Smith, a poor, uneducated lifetime resident of Virginia Beach, title to his house and land had not been properly transferred. Though Henry Smith's son John reared his family in the small house without indoor plumbing and had lived there for decades, Lindsley spent a year tracking down Henry Smith's other eight surviving children. They didn't know it, but they and John owned equal shares of their father's land. Lindsley paid them each $100 for their shares. By this time, John Smith was old and suffering from Alzheimer's disease. He too signed over his rights to the land for $100. Lindsley was declared sole owner of the property and house, assessed by the city at $32,000. The Smiths had to pay Lindsley to get the property back.
In 1992, Lindsley forced a neighborhood to pay $55,000 for a narrow grassy strip that separated a canal from five waterfront houses. The neighborhood thought the city owned the strip, but Lindsley discovered that a developer unknowingly owned the property. Lindsley bought it for $1,500, then told the neighborhood that unless they paid up, he wouldn't allow them to get to the canal, where many had their boats docked. And, he noted, the value of their $300,000 homes would plummet. The neighbors paid about $15,000.
"He has caused a great deal of pain and anxiety for a lot of folks, emotionally and financially," says Virginia Beach City Councilwoman Nancy K. Parker, whose Shadowlawn neighborhood in 1991 fought Lindsley when he bought a defunct company that had owned land in the area. "The sad part is that he is apparently working within the law."
A reclusive life
Even though he upset many in this seaside town, most people have never laid eyes on Lindsley.
At 75, he has spent his entire life in Virginia Beach. Friends and associates say he rarely ventures out of his house or his cluttered, dark little office in a residential neighborhood. A millionaire many times over, he lives in an extremely modest one-story house that his father, an iceman, built in 1922.
"He don't spend no money," says Ed Wood, Lindsley's closest confidant. "For him, a house is just somewhere to lie down and go to sleep."
Wood is eager to defend Lind- sley and says that the local news media, power brokers and homeowners have given the multimillionaire a bad rap.
"He gives away cars and money," says Wood. Lindsley, who never married, "devoted most of his life to his mother" until she died.
But, Wood concedes, Lindsley is an unsolved puzzle.
"You can't figure Ed out. I can't figure him out. You would think with all that money he's got "
Lindsley, recovering from a 60-day hospital stay after his collapse in the spring, blames the city for his health troubles.
"I am under a lot of pressure," Lindsley said at the time from a hospital bed, flanked by Wood and two of his lawyers. Lindsley can no longer walk and sometimes speaks with difficulty. Yet his mental faculties seem sharp.
In Lindsley's mind, he is the victim. He has spent countless hours and thousands of dollars checking bad title transfers and paying heirs. Why, he asks, should he be blamed for lawyers' careless mistakes?
He bristles when people characterize him as a land grabber.
"We view ourselves as land savers," says Lindsley. "It's like getting gold off a ship that has been sunk. We don't consider we have stolen anything."
Making enemies and friends
But the people who have been forced to do business with Lind- sley take what he has done very personally. They hate him.
"If I saw him lying near death in the street, I wouldn't step over him. I'd step on him. Hard," says Minnie Williams, whose husband, Tex, had to pay Lindsley $3,500 in 1989 for the right to use his own front porch.
Still, there are people who don't think Lindsley is all that bad. Of course, these are people whom he paid for a chunk of land they never knew they owned.
A. E. Krise Jr., the man whose family unwittingly held a title to the oceanfront parcels in dispute, has nothing but praise for Lind- sley.
"I think he is a pretty good person," says Krise, who lives in Suffolk, one of Virginia Beach's neighboring cities.
Krise's father was one of the early developers of Virginia Beach, shortly after the turn of the century.
Then, Virginia Beach was a tiny resort outpost that was built by the Norfolk and Virginia Beach Railroad and Improvement Company, which would eventually become railroad giant Norfolk Southern Corp.
Krise's father and his company, Virginia Beach Development Corp., bought all the land owned by the railroad, which had already mapped the entire oceanfront.
Though most of the land on the beachfront was sold and developed, the parcels in question -- which run between the ocean and the edge of the hotel lots, including the boardwalk -- were ignored, apparently because they were deemed worthless. No one could develop anything on those parts.
Lindsley saw something in those unwanted strips. Throngs of tourists have to use that land to get from their hotels to the ocean. If Lindsley owned it, he could prevent people from walking across it.
So he called Krise and paid him $2,500 for the land. Krise, 89, treats it as found money and had no interest in making his own case to the city for payment.
A threat to some
Virginia Beach officials see Lindsley as a threat and refuse to comment about the pending litigation.
In March, the city struck back with a suit that accuses Lindsley of fraud, saying that he lied to get a judge to revive the defunct Virginia Beach Development Corp. to get the land. The city wants $500,000.
The city has also filed court papers arguing that it owns the beach because the public has used it for 300 years without anyone's permission. Consequently, the city contends, there is a public easement on the parcels in question.
All there is to do now is wait for the court dates. None has been set.
For Lindsley there is no room for compromise. He says he is afraid that the city will pay, but then bar him from further claims.
"What I am afraid of is, we make this deal and then they make us go away," Lindsley says.
A settlement like that would ruin Lindsley's day. Unfortunately for Virginia Beach officials, Lind- sley says he has a lot more in store for the city.
"The city has bad title on many places in town," claims Lindsley. "It seems like a foolish thing to let that go by under our noses. We are talking about mega-dollars that they have messed up."
Pub Date: 7/05/99