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Lawyer’s Specialty: Fraud

Kelly gordon rogers

 of Frisco was licensed to practice law in Texas in 1986 and once 

listed “oil and gas” as his only area of practice—an accurate assertion if you consider  

his schemes to steal $1.3 million from investors in oil and gas programs a specialty.
Rogers raised money from investors who thought they were purchasing interests in  

oil and gas drilling projects that, in at least two instances, turned out not to exist.  

The victims included an Oklahoma oil and gas investor, two partners in a separate 

Oklahoma investment company, a neighbor of Rogers, and a longtime acquaintance. 

Rogers spent a significant part of investors’ money on his personal expenses and trying 

to acquire interests in unrelated projects, such as a coal mine in West Virginia.
Rogers shuffled investor funds to try to keep his scam afloat. When one investor  

demanded a refund of the unused portion of the money he had invested, the bank 

account of Rogers’ company, Land and Minerals, was virtually empty. As soon as two 

other investors wired money to Land and Minerals, however, Rogers diverted most of 

their funds to meet the first investor’s demand.
As is the case with many fraudsters, this wasn’t Rogers’ first regulatory rodeo. In 2007, he 

consented to a final order in a suit that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed 

against a group of financial companies and promoters, Rogers among them, who were 

offering fraudulent high-yield securities offerings. Rogers was ordered to pay $150,000 in 

restitution and civil penalties.

In a case prosecuted by the Texas State Securities Board and the Collin County  

District Attorney’s Office, Rogers was convicted of felony theft on May 28, 2014,  

and sentenced to 20 years in state prison. Facing automatic disbarment for his  

conviction, he surrendered his law license.

Exploiting the Elderly

Even after he was indicted in Hood County in 2012 for engaging in the fraudulent  

sale of stock and promissory notes, 

Eddie Lacy stivers iii

 kept at it.

Stivers sold fraudulent promissory notes through a company called Life Style Protectors  

and Advisors LLC. The notes, sold in the form of investment contracts, supposedly 

would have given investors shares in Patriot Insurance Co. and affiliated companies,  

all owned by Stivers, and allowed them to participate in the profits of the company.
The son of one elderly investor in the fraudulent notes sold by Life Style Protectors  

testified at trial that his mother, who died before the trial, invested more than $117,000 

with Stivers and lost it all.
In selling the stock and notes, Stivers failed to disclose that he had not issued shares to 

previous investors in Patriot Holding and in fact spent their money to pay some of his 

and his wife’s personal expenses and to pay an IRS debt owed by an insurance agent 

involved in a Stivers company. Stivers also used investor funds to make payments to  

his criminal defense lawyer.
The Texas Department of Insurance in 2013 revoked Stivers’ insurance license for  

misappropriation of money belonging to an insured person.