A Nashville jury found Carl Tilley and his wife guilty on several counts and levied both compensatory and punitive damages against them jointly, individually and the two companies. Tilley made a splash in 2002 with the claim he could run a DeLorean he had converted to electric, powered by his device that could keep the car running indefinitely.
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Former NASCAR driver Bobby Allison drove Tilley's electric DeLorean in a 2002 demonstration at Nashville Superspeedway. (Photo courtesy of Doug Littlefield) |
Those of you who have been in the Free Energy community for years have heard of Carl Tilley and his claim to have a battery charger technology that could keep a system running indefinitely, though in fact he stole the technology, exaggerated its abilities, and was only interested in money, not in getting a working technology to market.
After silence for several years on the Tilley saga, I heard from Doug Littlefield the other day, a right-hand man who had been "buffaloed" by Tilley. He said that a Nashville jury has now found Carl Tilley and his wife guilty on several counts and levied both compensatory and punitive damages against them jointly, individually and against the two companies.
According to the Nashville Post, Jan. 19, 2010:
The jury handed down a $26 million judgment last week against the Tilleys and affiliated entities in U.S. District Court. The award, which includes $3.57 million in compensatory and $22 million in punitive damages plus pre-judgment interest, comes three and a half years after a group of investors filed suit against the Tilleys.
The lawsuit's plaintiffs said Tilley sold unregistered stock in his Tilley Foundation Inc. to them for $1,000 a share. They accused him of defrauding them and other shareholders by falsely claiming the motor recharged itself without fuel – and that he had been offered "billions of dollars" by major companies that wanted to commercialize it.
The complaint said Tilley and his wife perpetrated a fraud using "intricate schemes, promises and lies" and engaged in "a pattern of racketeering activity."
Back on Sept. 7, 2002, the Tilley Foundation first captured the attention of the Free Energy community with a demonstration they had planned for the Nashville Super Speedway. They were going to run a DeLorean they had converted to electric, powered by their technology that was going to keep the car going, lap after lap after lap after lap -- proving to the world that free energy had arrived. We arranged to have people on the ground to report in real time what was going on. The traffic on our news story reached nearly 80,000 hits that day, if I remember correctly.
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After just a few laps, a bearing supposedly failed on the car, bringing the demo to a premature halt (within a distance that could have easily been accomplished by batteries alone, hardly showing any drop in voltage). Someone in the crowd had a DeLorean in the parking lot and offered to provide the necessary parts to repair the car, but he was declined.
It was actually that story that launched me into my career as a reporter for the Free Energy community. I began by posting updates day after day on the latest developments in the Tilley saga. The image to the left is the logo we used for several years. Then I started including other things, and eventually http://FreeEnergyNews.com was born as a domain of its own, later forwarding to PESWiki.com where it now resides, as we aggregate Free Energy news from around the world into "the Wikipedia of free energy."
Despite the hampered Superspeedway demo, Carl Tilley continued to spin spellbinding stories and claims. They were converting all kinds of things to run on their system -- purportedly -- cars, trucks, golf carts, etc. Money flowed in, people's life savings were put on the line, but nothing ever came of the technology.
Or coverage switched from optimistic to negative by January of 2003, when we posted a series of stories documenting the operation as being fraudulent, including whistleblower testimony, video footage of Tilley in play, scamming the crowd, and other evidence. One whistleblower described finding a hidden extension cord running from Carl's house to the workshop that was allegedly being powered by the Tilley system.
At one point, at an annual stockholder's meeting, Tilley told shareholders that he had received a phone call from General Electric with an offer of 2 billion dollars to buy the technology "sight unseen." I posted a video of him saying that. When we contacted GE, they said they had never heard of Tilley, and of course they would never make such an offer without thorough due diligence.
I even had a daughter-in-law of Tilley contact me to tell me the stories of what it was like for her husband growing up -- moving suddenly, in the middle of the night, without notice, like 17 different times. She told of the mortal fear she had of Tilley, for reprisals for even talking to me, and threats he had made to her.
Tilley was the classic snake oil salesman, and he kept right on going for years. Even when he was run out of town in Tennessee in Oct. 2006 for some securities violations, he picked up again in Nebraska.
During all of this, he threatened to sue me a number of times, but I held my ground and did not back down. I had the evidence of his fraud, and I wasn't going to cower to his threats, even though I realized that he had a lot of money and had used some of it for lawyers against others. He had intimidated more than one whistleblower into changing their stories in court.
As for this most recent trial, the Nashville Post states: "The Tilleys did not attend the trial and had no lawyer. In a 2008 letter to Judge Robert Echols, they stated that they had no more funds to defend the lawsuit."
At some point, someone was talking about making a movie about this saga. It looks like the final act has finally been played out in real life.
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SOURCES:
- Doug Littlefield
- Investors win $26M award against alleged scam artist - Lebanon man had demonstrated supposedly self-charging DeLorean engine (Nashville Post; Jan. 19, 2010)
See also
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Comments
I am glad he got fined. I hope he goes to jail. That's what you get for playing with people's life-savings.
This man is clearly a criminal. And should go to jail, or at least be bankrupted for life. But perhaps his investors that thought a car could run forever without any sort of fuel source where a little overly-optimistic. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, so if you want to propel a 1 ton vehicle across the ground, at 60 mph apparently, the energy to do so has to come from somewhere.
But what about the gullibility of those who would throw money at any unscrupulous personality on the promise of imaginary technology? Personally, I think his investors deserve to recoup their loss about as much as any random peon sending their money to Nigerian scammers.
Mr. Sterling Allan,
What seems to be missing from this article is any self-examination regarding your own complicity and that of other reporters and promoters of "Free Energy". Now, I'm not showing tremendous sympathy for the "investors", as they should have known better too. Although they've won a big award, I don't yet see that the defendant has any of the money left to give them, so they have their own punishment. But what about folks like you who led them down the garden path?
A ton on humility and a diligent trip through physics education are called for.
Bruce
The investors got what the deserved. There is no such thing as Free Energy. That kind of stupidity is the price we pay for having been christians for 2000 years.
With due respect to Sterling Allen, I do find his posting style and comments a bit "odd". While he does post links to what the over unity crowd is doing, I don't think that's an endorsement of over unity. While I haven't bothered to keep an actual track of the numbers, just as many link leads us to articles to the "free" energy that exists for use to use, the energy provided by the Sun. Truly free energy in that it doesn't cost a cent to mine or process, before machines can use it to do work.
"though in fact he stole the technology"
Oh no, He stole something that doesn't exist. The Thief!
Unfortunately, Tilley is a fugitive with no assets so they can't collect but I'm glad they filed the suit. They should have done it much earlier.
And so should Steorn's investors. In many ways, Steorn is a copy of Tilley, even including the failed bearings (Kinetica, July 2007).
The only reason this man is a criminal is because he found it hilarious that people were stupid enough to believe him for years.
I'm horrified at this judgment. This poor man proved the authenticity of this technology time and time again and he has been hounded into oblivion not because of any flaws in his technology, but because entrenched energy interests realized his technology was a very real threat to their bottom line.
I find it very sad that none of the big 3 managed to work up the courage to defy their big oil masters and use this technology in production vehicles.
There is no such thing as free energy, other than Solar, Wind, Thermal, and others that we have not figured out how to tap into yet...
Do you think we have discovered everything there is to discover? What was Tesla working with that was causing lightning storms, and making sparks jump from people feet in nearby towns?
All truth passes through three stages:
First, it is ridiculed;
Second, it is violently opposed; and
Third, it is accepted as self-evident.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
"When you're one step ahead
of the crowd you're a genius.
When you're two steps ahead,
you're a crackpot."
-- Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, (Feb. 1998)
Their are a lot of crackpots out there, and a lot of scammers, but there is actual technology that still needs a lot of work to make it reliably repeatable that is real.
If you write it off, it's only the crazy people (Tesla, Edison, Einstein, etc) that will be left to figure it out.
Oh ya, and Bob Potchen and Bob Boyce have been hashing it out over on the fuel-saver org forums. (Still going as of 4/16/2010)
Boyce is winning, and Potchen is revealing himself to be a (supposed) lying scam artist (or maybe just a ticked off alpha male that doesn't let little things like facts bother him - Note to Potchen's lawyer. I did not make accusations, just stated my opinion!)
Potchen seems to (possibly) be worried about the quality of his product, since he is (supposedly) sending out take-down notices to websites with (false) negative stories about him, threating people (that deserve it) with lawsuits, and just generally being a bully.
("BS")=CYA fudge words :)
Open letter to the issue of why Bob Boyce is so adamant about discrediting Bob Potchen and The Cell.
After giving this much thought and consideration, and trying to determine exactly what it is, besides ego, that could be driving Bob Boyce and Sterling Allen to this frenzied attempt to discredit the cell,... I've determined there is only one single possibility... But first a little background;
All of the HHO scams all count on one thing, peoples desperate need to feel like they are in control of their own direction. This would include not being held hostage to the oil companies. However, the reality of life, at least for the time being, is that oil is an integral part of all of our society. So in an attempt to vindicate themselves from this perplexing dilemma of oil, people will turn to anything that is "free".
And that goes to the heart of the issue, free energy.... Or so they try and make you believe. Bob Boyce, Dennis Lee, Sterling Allen, and the hydrogen garages of the w
SO, anything new happening or has Tilley become a thing of the past?
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