Dallas politico Adrain Noe accused of credit card theft in Iowa and Texas

By Matt Pulle | Monday, October 27th, 2008

Adrain Noe didn’t seem like he was going places. He was a soft man, not quite fat but close enough, and had a defiant cluster of thinning red hair on the back of his large head. The 20-something worked on a series of Democratic campaigns in Dallas, and when he was given an important task he usually failed. He made promises he couldn’t keep, and if he tried to explain why he fell short, he stammered a bit and smiled. Then there was his marriage, which often left people scratching their heads.

But people liked Adrain Noe. Usually well-dressed, Noe wore tailored suits, paid for dinner and had a charisma about him that belied his unremarkable stature. He was always cheerful and knew how to tease a pal without pushing it. When you work in local campaigns, putting in long hours at no or little pay for a candidate that none of your friends have heard of, you tend to appreciate guys like Noe. They can turn a staff into a team.

Today, few of Noe’s ex-colleagues fondly recall his modest charms. In fall 2007, a little more than a year after he emerged on the local political scene, some of Noe’s friends say he stole their credit cards to pay for massages, haircuts and replacement parts for his BlackBerry. If he was an outright thief, he wasn’t a particularly good one, and he skipped town just as his friends started taking their stories to the police. But today in Iowa, Noe’s luck has run out.

In August and September, the self-described fundraising consultant spent 40 days in the Polk County, Iowa, jail after he pleaded guilty to a pair of misdemeanor counts of credit card and identity theft. In December, Noe is scheduled to go on trial in Linn County on felony charges (read indictment paperwork in PDF here) in a separate case after a Republican candidate for state House, who employed him as an aide, linked him to a series of unauthorized purchases he made in her name. When the police caught up to Noe, he admitted in a videotaped interview to stealing credit cards.

Meanwhile, Noe’s former peers here in Dallas won’t be satisfied by a stint or two in an Iowa jail. They’re working with the police and a U.S. postal inspector to bring more charges against a guy they thought of as a friend.

“He was manipulative. He was a pathological liar,” says Pete Schulte, who ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic primary for sheriff earlier this year. “He would tell you anything he could to get you to like him.”

Full of confidence

Many of those who worked with Noe on a campaign or political event say that he was bad at his job, sloppy, unreliable and a bit shifty. Then there was his brief, undistinguished stint as an aide to U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson of Dallas. But Harriet Miller, a two-time candidate for the House District 102 seat in North Dallas, who nearly toppled state Rep. Tony Goolsby in 2006, actually liked the guy. She found him to be kind-hearted, charming and eager to please.

Noe served as the jack-of-all trades for the candidate and worked occasionally as her driver. Miller obviously trusted him. She gave him a key to her residence, which she would later realize was like handing your pension to Merrill Lynch.

Nearly a year or so after her campaign, Miller says she discovered that he had stolen her credit cards from her home and racked up thousands of dollars in charges. She says she’s talked to a Dallas police detective and does not want to compromise any investigation into Noe’s activities. So the former candidate and attorney declines to divulge too many details. But she says that Noe rummaged through her possessions when he was at her house and turned up enough information to compromise her financial identity.

Miller has since repaired the credit damage she says Noe inflicted.

“He appeared — and I stress the word ‘appeared’ — to be very capable and trustworthy,” Miller says. “Someone like Adrain is the most dangerous kind of criminal precisely because he engenders so much trust.”

Not long after the 2006 race, Miller recommended Noe to her friend Sam Coats, a former airline executive and ex-Schlotzky’s CEO, who was mounting a run for mayor of Dallas. At that time, Miller didn’t suspect Noe of stealing her credit cards or doing anything unethical or illegal. In the Coats campaign, Noe served as the director of financial operations. During the frenzied mayor’s race, which featured eight credible candidates including Coats, Noe talked like a player, boasting he could secure prized venues for fundraisers and imminent checks from donors.

“He was someone who over-promised a lot,” says Jason Stanford, who served as the lead consultant in the Coats mayoral run. “He seemed full of confidence, but he didn’t deliver a lot of results.”

And Stanford, who runs a successful political consulting firm in Austin, is being charitable. Keep him on the phone for a while, and he’ll tell you the story about the time the campaign gave Noe money to send out direct mail for a fundraising drive. Sure enough, no one sent a pledge back. Stanford says that was “unusual,” but, in the stretch-run of the mayor’s race, as Coats’ long-shot candidacy began to open eyes, nobody went back to see whether Noe sent out the mailers or if he just pocketed the cash.

Besides, at the time, no one had any reason to think that Noe was a thief. It seemed a lot more plausible to assume that he somehow flubbed the job.

“We knew we would never work with him again and were generally unimpressed,” says Stanford. “But we didn’t have the horrific experiences that other people had-allegedly.”

Bad fundraiser, worse thief

Shortly after the Dallas mayor’s race in the summer of 2007, Trent Hagler, a Dallas Realtor and prolific donor to Democratic candidates, met Noe through a mutual friend. Noe and Hagler were raising money for a fundraiser for John Edwards. The event was held at the North Dallas home of Laura Miller, the former mayor of Dallas.

Hagler says that when the host committee for the fundraiser collected checks from Noe, they found that the signatures on some of the checks were illegible. He also turned in pledges from donors’ credit cards, but in at least some cases, the credit card numbers weren’t valid.

After the fundraiser, Hagler had his suspicions about his new acquaintance, but Hagler’s partner had more faith in him. So when Noe needed a place to stay after saying he was going through a divorce, the two rented him the carriage house of their Oak Lawn neighborhood home. It didn’t take long for them to realize that they didn’t pick a good tenant. Noe was repeatedly late with the rent.

“What was curious about the rental situation — when he did finally pay, he always paid in cash,” Hagler recalls. “He never would write a check.”

Hagler gives this account of his run-in with Noe:

In late October 2007, she left Noe alone in his home. It couldn’t have been for that long. Noe was using Hagler’s computer to print donor cards for an event he was hosting for Hillary Clinton volunteers at the carriage house.

A few days later, Hagler came home and found a credit card that he kept at his desk — but he found it on the floor by the mail slot. There was also a package there for Noe, and when Hagler went to deliver it to his tenant, he heard an interesting story.

Without being asked to explain a thing, Noe said that he met two guys on bicycles who discovered his credit card on the street. The mystery men, who claimed to know Hagler, merely wanted to return it. As he told his tale, Noe seemed nervous.

Of course, he should have been trembling. After Hagler cancelled his card, he looked up its use from the day he left Noe alone in his home. Someone had racked up $2,300 worth of charges. A natural detective, Hagler grabbed a printed picture he had of Noe and headed to Supercuts, one of the first shops the thief had visited. There he showed a photo of Noe to a hairstylist who quickly recognized him.

“I remember him,” the stylist said. “He didn’t have much hair to cut.”

Of course, Hagler didn’t need that confirmation. Noe signed his own name on the reservation form.

Hagler says that Noe also used his own name to make a reservation at the Crescent Club, a luxury spa in Uptown Dallas. There he used Hagler’s credit card to pay for a massage and a facial. And remember that package Hagler delivered to his tenant? That was a replacement part for Noe’s BlackBerry that he brazenly had delivered to Hagler’s own home. Even dumber, Noe filled out his own e-mail and cell number on the purchase forms.

Immediately after Hagler filled out an eviction notice for his tenant. He was gone within days and had his friends move his stuff. When Hagler confronted him about what happened during a telephone call, all he would say is, “I’m sorry.”

Hagler says that he is currently working with a United States postal inspector on the case.

Quick to grab the check

Renee Hartley, the well-liked vice president of the Dallas Young Democrats, always had a good time with Adrain Noe. She met him at one of the group’s meetings, and they quickly started to hang out together, usually with a crowd of like-minded friends. When they would all go out to dinner, he’d usually pick up the check.

Noe also had a rather upscale wardrobe featuring tailor-made suits and Ralph Lauren shirts. He didn’t overdo it, but at any event he was always among the better-dressed men around. Hartley heard that his parents gave him a trust fund.

Hartley’s acquaintances told her that her fun-loving friend was all talk, but that didn’t bother her. She had been around people in politics and knew that many of them enjoyed sharing a tall tale. Noe was no different.

“Everything he said you would always take with a grain of salt because I was never really sure what was the truth or not,” Hartley says. “He was the type of person who could exaggerate a situation.”

Hartley says that Noe never stole from her, but her friend David Hardt wasn’t as lucky. The first openly gay president of the Young Democrats of America, Hardt met Noe when he was working on Miller’s campaign for state House. Noe claimed to have his own fundraising business and said that he was on the verge of buying out the firm of Amy Boone, one of the most prolific Democratic fundraisers in Texas. (Boone has since gone on to work for the state party and says through a spokesperson that she never had any type of arrangement with Noe.)

After the Miller campaign, Noe occasionally staged meet-and-greet events for local Democrats. He’d hit on Hardt to help cover part of the cost and not only did he agree, he gave him his credit card information. A year or so later, around the time Noe’s friends shared their suspicions, Hardt went back and checked his credit card bills a little more carefully. That’s when he discovered thousands of dollars in extra charges he believes were racked up by Noe.

“So many people vouched for him that I felt comfortable giving him my information,” he says. “For the most part, people liked him. That’s why he was able to do what he did.”

Hardt seems less angry at Noe than he is confounded. Who was this guy, anyway? For one, Hardt just assumed his friend was gay, until he met Noe’s wife and young son. Noe also told him that he grew up Mormon, but no longer practiced his faith. And yet Noe couldn’t stop gushing about Republican presidential candidate and noted Mormon Mitt Romney — even when he was in the presence of young Democrats.

‘What an idiot’

Pete Schulte is a bright, young lawyer who mounted a dark-horse bid for Dallas sheriff in the Democratic primary earlier this year. Though he lost to incumbent Lupe Valdez, he made a good impression, even picking up the endorsement of the Dallas Morning News. If he showed one case of bad judgment, it was tapping Adrain Noe as his finance director.

Almost immediately, he had a bad feeling. One time, the two were at Macy’s, and Noe purchased an expensive suit. The clerk greeted him by a different name — after he ran his credit card.

One day, Schulte received an e-mail from his credit card issuer telling him he was maxed out. Oddly, Schulte never carried his card, but kept it in a bag in his closet. When he started to review the charges, he noticed a few purchases in Kerrville, Texas, where Noe has family. The candidate then remembered that he held a staff meeting at his Uptown condo with his finance director present. Noe must have rifled through his stuff when no one was looking, he figured.

Schulte also noticed a series of charges at the Crescent Court Spa, so he decided to have a little fun. He called Noe and suggested they get a massage at the upscale establishment. Noe agreed and while they were there, Schulte went back and asked the staff for his old credit card receipt. After all, he had been a paying client before. The staff retrieved it and sure enough, it was signed by Noe himself.

“What an idiot,” Schulte says. “‘If you’re going to commit credit card fraud, you’re not going to sign your own name.”

Schulte says that he took his case to the Dallas Police Department in late October. No one took the case seriously ,and the department merely issued Noe a misdemeanor ticket for stealing a credit card. (A Dallas police spokesperson says that a warrant was never issued.) Schulte suspects that when Noe received the ticket, he realized his time in Dallas was up and simply skipped town.

The former candidate adds that Noe never had access to any of his donors’ credit card or bank account information. And, of course, he fired Noe as his finance director.

“He never raised a dollar.”

Iowa Hawkeye

If Noe escaped the long arm of the law in Texas, he wasn’t as fortunate in Iowa. There, he resumed his political career and used his clients in Dallas as references. On July 12, police arrested Noe at a local Quality Inn and Suites in Des Moines. He was at a Republican meeting — by this time he had apparently switched parties — and was caught paying for his room with a credit card from a woman named Karen Zmoos who worked with him on a local campaign.

According to court files, when the Des Moines police caught up with Noe at the Quality Inn, he admitted taking Zmoos’ credit card and told them where he discarded it: in a garbage can on the third floor of the Wells Fargo Arena. There the police found two other stolen credit cards that belonged to Brent Schulte (no relation to Pete), the husband of Renee, who was running as a Republican for a state House seat in the Cedar Rapids area.

A few weeks earlier, Renee Schulte had met Noe at a political event where Noe introduced himself as a fundraiser. Although he did a good job of self-promotion, touting experience honed from working in the trenches of Dallas campaigns, he didn’t raise a lot of money for Renee Schulte. Still, the candidate seemed to like Noe. Her lawyer, Landon Dufoe, says that he stayed in her house when her family was away.

Then, Renee Schulte started receiving strange notices in the mail, including credit denials and unexpected balances. After Noe was arrested in Des Moines, Renee and Brent Schulte did a credit check and discovered that their fundraiser had used their credit information to purchase a Dell computer and some artwork, says their attorney. He also used Brent Schulte’s financial information to apply for a Hilton Honor Visa card, which he used to make over $6,000 in charges.

And once again, when the Schultes went back to review those receipts, Noe had been kind enough to leave his autograph.

According to his indictment, in a taped interview with Des Moines police, he admitted stealing the Schultes’ credit cards to rack up more than $10,000 in charges. After Noe turned himself in, the police had an interesting interview with the suspect’s wife, Tammy Lynn Stubbs-Noe. Court records say she pointed detectives to a lock box that turned out to have other people’s financial records. She also said that some of the items in their office were “probably bought using fraudulent credit cards.”

Finally, Tammy Lynn told police that she was moving back to Texas to “get away from the entire situation,” a detective wrote.

On Dec. 8, Noe is scheduled to go to trial in a Linn County courthouse on two felony charges of identity theft and false use of a credit card. His public defender, Neke Ida Tucker, didn’t return a call for comment –and Noe didn’t respond to two e-mails.

But he seems to be doing alright. Last week, Dufoe spotted him at a restaurant called the Flying Weenie, which claims to have the best Chicago hot dog in Cedar Rapids. Seen with a friend, the defendant seemed upbeat. “He didn’t seem down in the dumps at all,” Dufoe says.

(UPDATE: See the indictment and other court papers in the case against Adrain Noe at this link.)