On April 2, 1991, a day after April fools day,  Charles Collings, Raley's spokesperson/president, sent me a letter and threatened to sue me if I continued to spread falsehoods about Raley's. A portion of that letter is below and you can read his legal threat to me. Soon afterwards, Charles Nordby wrote his book "Raley's Exposed, Who On Earth Saved Raley's?"  For some strange reason Collings hasn't opened his mouth since and his threats have all but disappeared like a bold fox will disappear if it can sniff out the barrel of a farmer's shotgun.

After Nordby's book became public, there was an incredible amount of additional information uncovered by me by going to the following places:

Reno, Nevada and visiting the Washoe County Assessor's Office to check out Raley's; 

Washoe County Recorders Office to check out filings by the Eagle Thrifty Gastanaga Brothers/Tom Raley;

Carson City, Nevada and visiting the Secretary of State's Office to ascertain records pertaining to the Eagle Thrifty Corporation;

CA Secretary of State's Office to review Raley's/Eagle Thrifty corporation filings.

I reviewed the newspaper archives at a number of different libraries (Placerville/Sacramento/Reno), to recover old articles that could shed some light on Collings', Jim Teel's and Tom Raley's activities around the time Raley's hired my dad.

I painstakingly poured through hundreds of reels of microfiche, looking for any information about a company that I knew defrauded my dad back in the early '70s because had I not believed this I would have never gone to the library---what would be the point?  Regardless to the amount of nausea I experienced peering in at the microfiche, much more information was discovered. 

While looking at old newspapers from the '30s, '40s and the '50s, I realized that Raley's Rascals couldn't even get the correct year for when Tom Raley's first store in Placerville burned down in its history book.  Especially knowing that in Raley's history book, Betty Hansen stated that "Chuck Collings, Jim and Joyce Teel, who commissioned the book, spent many hours reading and rereading copy for historical content."  Sorry Joyce, but your dad's Placerville store burnt down in May of 1943 and not 1942.

After reading the 1943 newspaper account of this fire it became my opinion "arson" was written all over it.  Especially after Raley had indicated in the newspaper article he planned to reopen in temporary quarters, in Placerville, but decided to completely leave Placerville to open his next store in Sacramento, approximately one year later.  Maybe Raley got a nice payoff from his losses from the fire to be able to afford a completely remodeled store, with modern fixures and equipment, in his next store opening in Sacramento. 

For a guy who could make a decent profit in his 1st Placerville store (according to Raley's history book), he seemed to have hightailed it out of town after the fire destroyed his high profiting store.  If his store was making such a great profit, why didn't he stay in Placerville, rebuild there, and continue to rake in the profits? 

Raley did rebuild but the rebuilding for more "profits" didn't happen in Placerville for 22 years after the fire.  By then, everybody had forgotten about "the fire" that occurred in 1943-the one that drove him to Sacramento.  Suspicious-suspicious-suspicious....to say the least. 

So Joyce,  please update your information on your website concerning the year of the fire!  I know you would rather look stupid and unprofessional on your website by having the incorrect year than to change the year of the fire to the correct year and sadly admit to the fact that I was right.  I didn't realize stupidity had such an influence on people until I came into contact with all you bona fide bozos there at Raley's.

Folks, these guys were caught big time and the local news media knows Raley's got caught too and closed its eyes to it all because the lies that Raley's fed them about its success for so many years seemed so magical, truthful and believable. Just like children believing in Santa Claus for so many years because the lie seemed so magical, truthful and believable until they finally realized as they became older it was all just a sham.  Wow, what a rude awakening for any child knowing mom and dad pulled the wool over their eyes for a number of years.

It must have been too much for the news media to swallow after realizing that the top people of a successful privately owned company could be so dishonest. All that tasted so sweet about Raley's success became bitter and it needed to be spitted out.  However, this still didn't stop the local news media from doing its best to protect the status quo because it turned out the people, within the news media, were just as dishonest as those individuals at Raley's with the responsibility of over-pricing a can of peas.

Collings had con so many people in his life he thought he could con me too with his veiled threat of a lawsuit. Do any of you remember Mohammad Ali's fighting career when he fought his opponents? Well if you do, you will remember that most of his opponents took a beating.  

Collings has taken a public beating and all he could do was slander Charles Nordby while hiding behind his loyal business, church and news media friends who acted like they would go to their deaths to defend him against  a "just a security" man from Raley's past.  Collings could also trust his dishonest friends at The Sacramento Bee because they were there to assist him too whenever he needed a positive article published about him and The Bee was certainly faithful to appease him with that! 

Had Collings come clean when all of this took place in 1991, Joyce Raley Teel would have been spared the public thrashing she was going to receive and continues to receive.  But Collings' pride ruleth because he is an authentic narcissist and when you are dealing with a narcissist, nobody is spared.   

To read the complete letter, click on partial letter above. In fact, I created this web site back
in 2003 because of Collings legal threat to me. Do you see "ebh" above the P.S. sentence?  
"ebh" stands for Edith Beverly Hardesty....did she type this letter for Collings?  Well duh.

Charles Collings went to church regularly so he could con people into believing he was a God-fearing religious man and this is exactly how Collings was able to con Charles Nordby. It turned out that what Collings feared more than God was somebody showing him how incompetent he was in the grocery business...and into the picture comes Nordby.  A man whom Collings knew he would have an easy time cheating, just like Nordby discovered suppliers and vendors knew they would have an easy time cheating Collings on Raley's invoices.  I wonder if the suppliers and vendors were attending the same Sunday church as Collings.

It didn't take long for Nordby to realize that any janitor mopping a dirty floor, who didn't have a days experience working inside of a grocery store, could have easily replaced Collings as president based on what he uncovered in Raley's operation. It must have made Nordby dizzy trying to understand why Tom Raley had such an inexperienced guy running his company.  A guy running his company into the ground.

In 1969, it's possible a lot of Raley's people were jumping ship thus allowing IBC (incompetent bookkeeper Collings) to just take over the position because his Christian conning ability was needed to persuade creditors and suppliers into believing everything was fine at Raley's.

My big question is why didn't Jim Teel become president in 1969?  Tom Raley had been publicly promoting Teel, in The Sacramento Bee newspaper in previous years, to where he appeared to be right below Raley in upper management and there is no evidence during this time period to suggest that Collings was anything more than a bookkeeper & signing his incompentent name on Raley's legal papers.  Where was Tom Raley's public promotion of Collings during this time period?  I couldn't find one public promotion in The Sacramento Bee newspaper for Collings...and he and his lack of experience in the grocery business quietly takes command of Raley's in 1969.

I guess Raley determined it was also better to have Collings at the top spot of his chain of grocery stores when it went bankrupt than to have his son-in-law Teel at the helm because this chain of stores was going bankrupt....and soon!  Was this Tom Raley's plan? To use Collings, an inexperienced man in the grocery business, to be the scapegoat for when Raley's did go bankrupt?  It is hard to determine but it may have been part of the equation.  It just seemed like during this time period nobody was exempt from these kinds of shenanigans and how unfortunate for Nordby to have walked into a company that basically was a den of thieves and a house of dishonest scheming people.

Religious man Collings also knows the story about David and Goliath.  The Sacramento business community, the Sacramento religious community and the Sacramento news media had taken a cockroach dressed in a business suit and made him into a Goliath.

Unfortunately though, Cockroach Collings couldn't survive the single stone of truth smacking him square in the head that was thrown at him by two unknown nobody's who decided that enough-is-enough and stood-up for their dad and made it clear to everybody in Sacramento that Collings was just a fraud, "nothing more and nothing less." 

Jack and I came out of nowhere and destroyed the big lie that had been going on in Sacramento for so many years. Collings and his well polished reputation, along with Tom Raley's, came crashing down like a giant redwood tree would have come crashing down after the teeth of a power saw completed its journey through its base.

If Collings thinks he has survived the public thrashing that has gone on for the last twenty years, he better hope he can survive the eternal beating that is in store for him when he faces God.

God isn't a respecter of persons and God will devour all the phony preachers of this world who came to Collings' defense while at the same time devour all the crooked newspapers on the take. What a glorious day it will be when God makes the fraudulent ink from The Bee vaporize into thin air and its newspaper deception will have vanished into obscurity and won't be anywhere around to assist Collings when that lone moment comes and turns his ego and his arrogance into total humility! When all of this is said and done, the only thing Collings will see of himself is total slime. The same slime he left a trail of wherever he traveled in his life.

Below represents flyers that were mostly created by me and passed out around the Sacramento area. Some were passed out in the neighborhoods where Chuck Collings, Joyce Raley Teel, her husband Jim and her son Michael Teel lived. Some were distributed in the areas where a number of The Sacramento Bee journalists lived. Some were even distributed in neighborhoods in close proximity to a number of Sacramento's biggest churches.

The point being is that all of these flyers were passed out publicly after Chuck Collings threatened to sue me if I continued to spread falsehoods.  I guess all the flyers below weren't considered falsehoods by Collings because I never needed to get an attorney.  It turned out that Collings was now too busy directing his own dishonest attorney in fighting my dad's lawsuit against him to where he just didn't seem to have any legal quality time left for me.  And I was looking forward to my day in court with Collings too because I was prepared to legally drag his dishonest ass all the way around the perimeter of Sacramento County and show the entire community what a fraud he is.

For some time now I have offered $100,000 to the first person who could disprove Charles Nordby's claims about Raley's (how he alone saved this company from going broke) and I thought Collings would have been the first person to contact me to collect the money. 

My offer of money was probably the first thing in Collings' life that brought his runaway-speeding arrogance to a screeching halt and eliminated any thought of this man having an ounce of credibility.  Because if Collings could have disproved my dad, his overweight-ego and his overweight-pride would have done that many years ago to the satisfaction of his phony egotistical religious friends-in which many of whom are just like him.  Actually, I believe that "Charles Nordby" was the first person who brought Collings' runaway-speeding arrogance to a screeching halt back in 1973.

The only thing that Collings could do was educate his phony, egotistical religious friends, with the fact that the biggest problem any prolific liar will encounter is the inability to manufacture a speck of truth.   

Sad to say that it was easier for Sacramento's religious elite to ski down Christian-Collings' hill of lies than it was for any of them to look at reality with common sense and climb up Nordby's mountain of truth.  A mountain of truth with nearly 9000 thieves scattered around it in which all of whom were caught stealing by the same man.  A man without one false arrest in his life. 

I guess Sacramento's religious elite didn't want to believe Nordby because he didn't wear an expensive business suit or maybe because he didn't attend one of their church services on Sunday to get that real close-up personal taste of their phoniness. 

As long as the Church had smiling Collings sitting in the front pew, while he weekly added to its offering bucket, they could accept anything that was dishonest about him and it didn't matter to them, not-one-iota, that he defrauded an honest man with nine children.

Note:  Charles Nordby never saw one of these flyers while he lived and never knew that they were being passed out publicly.  Although he did know about the first flyer I passed out during Tom Raley's memorial service because Raley's called Nordby when he lived in Lake Tahoe to tell him what his crazy son was doing.  But he never saw that flyer.

Well, for being his crazy son, that was one of the best flyers I created and passed out publicly! The movie that wasn't identified in the flyer was "JFK" and it was  playing in the theaters during this time period.

Also understand that this flyer was created only a few hours before Tom Raley's memorial service so there were many grammar/punctuation errors, etc., within the flyer. I just wasn't the talented writer that you will find at The Sacramento Bee newspaper.  But what do you expect from a "crazy" man?  I guess the big contrast between me and The Sacramento Bee is that I felt it was more important to print the truth than it was to print the correct usage of a word or the correct placement of a comma.

One additional note:  At no time, with any of these flyers below, was I ever looking for media attention or media publicly for myself but at all times I was looking for justice for my dad. In fact, the "Welcome To The Neighborhood" flyer is practically the only flyer that has my name on it because Raley's put my name on it when they sent it to me.  A Sacramento Bee "letter to the editor" from the past has my name on it too in one of the flyers below.

This website didn't even have my name on it for some time until I added a page about my life after it was brought to my attention is appeared I was trying to hide my identity.