Brenda Wood, local businesswoman already under indictment, faces new charges

Brenda Wood, a woman who rose to short-lived infamy during a botched attempt to buy the New York Life building in downtown Kansas City, faces a series of new federal charges.

Wood, a 47-year-old from Leavenworth, is accused by a federal grand jury in Kansas of carrying out a check-kiting scheme, misappropriating someone else’s Social Security number to open a commercial checking account, and falsifying information on a loan application, among other things.

Federal authorities charged Wood with 10 financial crime-related charges last year. Those charges stemmed from several attempts to carry out real-estate transactions in Bonner Springs and Basehor through fraudulent documents and phony financial records, as well as dipping from her company’s employee pension plan. The new indictment layers on 16 additional charges.

Wood puzzled real-estate investors and local reporters in 2010 when she was the apparent buyer of the historic New York Life building at 20 W. Ninth St., which at the time sat empty. Just prior to her bid, the utility then named Aquila merged into Great Plains Energy, and the building transferred to Kansas City Power & Light.

KCPL wanted to sell the building, and Wood, who ran a janitorial service, seemed to have the resources to buy it. But multiple deadlines to come up with the money came and went before KCPL sold the building instead to the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph. 

A similar plan to buy an office building at 10th Street and Main, the one that AMC used to occupy before moving to Leawood, subsequently collapsed.

Wood had a knack for convincing people, even some who might otherwise be considered sophisticated investors, to buy into her schemes. One way to do that was kiting checks from one bank account to another to make it appear as though she had funds to support her endeavors.

Inevitably, she started getting sued up and down by bilked investors before the feds charged her nearly a year ago.

Wood was arrested on August 7, 2014. She was released from custody for a few months while her case was pending but got arrested again on December 1, 2014, for violating terms of her release.

From the new indictment, the grand jury alleges that while she was out on bond, Wood purloined someone else’s identity to open a bank account and fraudulently obtain loans.

Wood has remained in custody since then. 

Wood isn’t even getting along with her attorneys. A Kansas City lawyer named T. Christian Cox withdrew from representing her after she asked a federal judge to take him off the case in March. In a filing, Cox suggests that Wood wanted him to break rules of professional conduct for attorneys, including one that says lawyers should stop their clients from doing illegal things and another that says evidence shouldn’t be falsified.

Wood is now working with a federal public defender, who probably now has her work cut out for her.