From the “Great Southwestern Land Co.” to “Golden River LLC”, Tres Orejas has had a long list of “corporations” in its history since the 1960s. There aren’t any big corporations on the list. There are no natural resources here to exploit nor markets to market to. All of the corporations in the history of Tres Orejas have dealt in the one thing that is here: Real estate, conveniently divided into 1/4 acre lots. None of these corporations had anything like a board of directors and most were run by one person. They were what is referred to as a corporate alter ego. It’s a common practice used to avoid personal liability when doing business. It’s especially common in real estate. Here is a brief rundown of the two most notable ones.
The Great Southwestern Land Company, our founding father.
The Great Southwestern Land Company was incorporated in 1961 and is the original subdivider of what is now Tres Orejas along with our neighboring communities in sprawling subdivisions of 1/4 lots scattered accross western Taos County. They purchased land from local ranchers and subdivided it into Carson Estates, Ranchos de Taos Estates, and Tres Piedras Estates. What was once was one big parcel of land was cut up into thousands of small lots and sold in a manner that was anything but scrupulous. Deceptive marketing was used and lies told about the availability of water and the proximity of lakes and golf courses. Free lots were given away that had a $50 registration fee which was a lot of money in 1962, a month’s rent in a nice house easily. These marketing methods got them in trouble with the law. As early as 1962, they were forbidden to do business in the State of California and by 1964, they were being prosecuted by the Postmaster General for mail fraud. The “they” I refer to was really just one principal stakeholder, Robert N. Golubin and a few associates. Golubin was convicted and lost again on appeal and ended up doing time for his business practices. By the mid 1970s, the Great Southwestern Land Co. was broke and a most of its remaining lots were sold at a huge tax auction in January of 1975. The main buyer at this auction is the next major player in this corporate history, the Cayman International Corporation.
Not a whole lot is known about the Cayman International Corporation. They purchased a huge number of Great Southwestern lots in 1975 and sold most of them in 1977 and then pretty much vanished from the face of the earth. Unlike Great Southwestern, they never had legal troubles and the court case against Great Southwestern is an excellent historical record as are the numerous newspaper articles about it and the testimonies of deceived buyers that can be found online. The man that bought out most of the vast Cayman holdings was Ralph Inglestatt who owned a casino in Las Vegas. The end of the Cayman International Corporation was the end of an era. From that point on, no single corporate entity would hold a huge number of the available Great Southwestern lots with no interest in them other than their speculative value. Starting in the late 1970s, people actually started to live in the Great Southwestern subdivisions and make their homes in them. There have been multiple corporations that have dealt in real estate in the subdivisions since then but none of them have held more than a small portion of the available lots. Ralph Inglestatt was for a time the biggest land owner in Tres Orejas and the other Great Southwestern subdivisions but he never formed a single corporate alias, he had several like “Anyplace Ltd, a Nevada Corporation” and sold his holdings gradually starting in the mid 1980s and always either used a local agent or sold lots in groups to someone who sold them locally. They buyers of these properties form a large portion of the current home owners in Tres Orejas and the other Great Southwestern Subdivision communities.