The fraudster who attempted to auction Graceland has received a 57-month sentence. Photo Credit: Graceland Mansion by Joseph Novak / CC by 2.0
Scheming to sell Graceland out from under Elvis Presley’s family wasn’t a great idea after all: The individual who pleaded guilty to a related mail fraud charge has been sentenced to almost five years in federal prison.
One Lisa Jeanine Findley entered that guilty plea about seven months back, after unsuccessfully attempting to auction Graceland last year. As we broke down in detail, the brazen scheme saw the Missouri native maintain that Lisa Marie Presley had borrowed close to $4 million before her passing, putting up Elvis’s famed home as collateral and then defaulting.
As the sentence suggests, however, there was quite a bit more to the ill-advised plot than an unfounded claim. Findley reportedly said the loan had come from a fake lender, fabricated multiple documents, and even put forward a fraudulent foreclosure notice.
Meanwhile, it won’t come as a surprise that an auction involving one of the most famous pieces of real estate in the country (and perhaps the world) attracted serious attention.
Therefore, it didn’t take long at all for Elvis’ 36-year-old granddaughter, Riley Keough, to file a lawsuit. A judge promptly halted the would-be auction before the full scope of the harebrained scheme came to light.
Back to Findley’s sentence, Judge John T. Fowlkes, Jr. has ordered the 54-year-old to serve a total of 57 months behind bars – minus the 13 or so months she’s already been in prison, the appropriate document shows.
That leaves roughly 44 months on the sentence from here, and Findley will also be subject to three years of supervised release thereafter.
At the time of this writing, Keough didn’t appear to have addressed the development on Instagram. But in a statement about the sentence, Eric Shen, inspector in charge of the USPIS criminal investigations group, described fame and money as “magnets for criminals who look to capitalize on another person’s celebrity status.”
“In this case,” Shen proceeded in part, “Ms. Findley took advantage of the very public and tragic occurrences in the Presley family as an opportunity to prey on the name and financial status of the heirs to the Graceland estate; attempting to steal what rightfully belongs to the Presley family for her personal gain. Postal Inspectors and their law enforcement partners put an end to her scheme, protecting the Presley family from continued harm and stress.”
