I am. And is the dump truck currently broken through Mr. Harbor's Bridge owned by Hulcom Paving and Excavation. Yes, but and was that truck carrying demolition debris from an Atlanta job site to a hollow inside your HOA's boundary? Tessa went silent for a long moment. The camera kept rolling.
I'd like a lawyer. You don't get a lawyer for an interview, Mrs. Hulk. You get a lawyer when you're arrested. Special Agent Larkin Boswell stepped into the frame at exactly that moment. Mrs. Hulk, you are under arrest for federal conspiracy to violate the Clean Water Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Act, and Title 26 of the Internal Revenue Code.
You have the right to remain silent. Tessa did not remain silent. She tried on camera in front of all of Western North Carolina to explain her side. The words came out crooked. The pink visor came off.
The tennis white stayed white. Her hair, blonde and perfect at 7:14 a.m. was now loose and falling across her face for the first time in any photograph I had ever seen of her. She cried, not theatrically, not for the cameras, quietly. The kind of crying that comes when a person finally understands that 22 months of running an empire across a 101-year-old bridge has caught up with her in 22 minutes. Two federal agents cuffed her gently.
They led her to the back of an unmarked sedan. Roland Hulkcom was being arrested at exactly the same moment on the back hollow by a second EPA team beside two paving trucks with their beds still tipped. Jasper's drone caught the entire back hollow arrest from 180 ft above the dump site. The footage would later become the lead segment of the NPR investigations piece that ran nationally in March. The footage would also be entered as exhibit 41 at the federal trial in Asheville 8 months later.
The same exhibit a juror named Hattie Fro would later tell a reporter had made her say out loud in the deliberation room, "That is the most arrogant thing I have ever seen in my life." I stood on the upstream bank with my hands in my pockets and watched the sun come up over Sourwood Creek. Out on the bridge, my great-grandfather's cedar siding was still standing. The south truss was bowed but holding. The dump truck was stuck.
The Empire of Tessa and Roland Hulkcom was by 9:14 a.m. on a Tuesday morning in January officially over. The bridge took 6 months to repair. Granger Pelum and a team of three timber span specialists out of Asheville rebuilt the south cord, replaced 11 decking planks, drove 47 new tree nails, and restained the cedar siding the same dark red Augustus Carver had mixed by hand a century earlier. The work was funded every penny out of a federal forfeite order against the Hulkcom assets, which the EPA had seized within 72 hours of the arrests. Tessa Hulkcom took 14 years in the Federal Bureau of Prisons on convictions for conspiracy to violate the Clean Water Act, conspiracy to violate the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, federal motor carrier safety violations, and tax evasion.
Roland Hulkcom took 18 years. The Hulkcom paving and excavation business was dissolved. The illegal landfill in the back hollow was capped and remediated under EPA supervision at a cost of $9.2 $2 million paid out of the seized Hulkcom assets. Six contractors who had been paying Roland for unpermitted dumping were indicted in a parallel case. Whitman Cross, the Atlanta attorney, quietly withdrew from the case 3 days after the arrests and was reportedly turned away by every regional law firm he reached out to for the next 6 months.