Missouri AG candidate Teresa Hensley’s campaign thought it found a juicy connection between Kurt Schaefer and arrested payday loan magnate Scott Tucker, but they whiffed

Ever since Leawood payday-loan mogul Scott Tucker got arrested by authorities Wednesday, folks in political circles have been buzzing about which local politicians had connections to the indicted multimillionaire.

Some rumors seem more promising than others. One that hit my inbox today made no bones about it. It came from Teresa Hensley, the Democratic candidate for Missouri attorney general. The blast to the Missouri press corps came with a very Law & Order-sounding subject line: “A Criminal. A Billionaire. A Senator.” 

It claimed that Kurt Schaefer, the Republican senator from Columbia who is also running for attorney general, had taken campaign contributions from Tucker-related businesses and then turned right around and voted against proposed regulations on payday-lending interest rates.

It sounded like the kind of thing that could definitely happen in Jefferson City, particularly because the payday lending industry has a strong lobbying presence there. But a detail from Hensley’s e-mail nagged me. It highlighted a $250 donation from a company called CLK Services LLC, made to Citizens to Elect Kurt Schaefer in 2012.

CLK Services sounds an awful lot like CLK Management, one of the many corporate entities that Tucker allegedly used to operate a wide-ranging payday-loan enterprise that authorities say charged usurious interest rates to consumers.

I don’t really know what CLK Services does, but a big red flag for me was that the company was registered to do business in the state of Missouri. That’s a big distinction from the way Tucker’s companies operated. Almost none of Tucker’s enterprises register with secretaries of states, as businesses and nonprofits are required to do. Instead, Tucker incorporated his businesses on Native American tribal land, where they could sidestep state regulations on payday loans. It also made Tucker’s businesses harder to find. The feds don’t spend a decade working to track down a suspected criminal enterprise that left a paper trail anyone with an Internet connection could find.

For example, AMG Services was one of the main companies that Tucker used to run his payday enterprise. But if you search for AMG Services in the Kansas Secretary of State’s business database, nothing comes up. That’s despite solid evidence that AMG Services had about 600 employees working out of an office tower in Overland Park. 

I placed a call to Hensley’s campaign manager, David Woodruff, to ask if he was sure they had the right company. Woodruff called back a bit later to say they’d made an error and were retracting their press release.

Then I got this statement:

Today my campaign sent an email accusing Senator Kurt Schaefer of accepting contributions from Scott Tucker, a convicted felon and payday loan businessman.

That email was incorrect. Senator Schaefer has not accepted contributions from Mr. Tucker.

Mr. Tucker’s CLK entity is a Kansas-based business and we identified a Missouri-based LLC by the same name.

I apologize to Senator Kurt Schaefer for the error and to anyone adversely affected by it.

Sincerely,
Teresa Hensley

Ah, silly season.