The man responsible for the 27,000-ton pile of carpet off Route 90 in Warren has been sentenced to federal prison for defrauding a Native American tribe in Michigan.
The U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids, Michigan, sentenced Chester Randall Dunican, 69, to 78 months in federal prison for defrauding the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians out of over $1 million, according to The Courier-Gazette.
When released from his more-than-six-year term, Dunican will be placed on supervised release for three years. He also must pay $1,124,293 in restitution, according to The Courier-Gazette.
Dunican is best known in Maine for putting the 27,000 tons of carpet-like material on the side of Route 90 in Warren. In the late 1990s, Chester and Kathleen Dunican obtained the carpet — and were paid around $1 million to accept the material — with the promise of using it for berms in his proposed 7,000-square-foot indoor rifle range. The shooting range, which Dunican claimed was going to be the largest on the East Coast, never came to be after Dunican disappeared.
Dunican’s federal prison sentence stemmed from his time as the chief executive officer for Grand Traverse Band, LLC, which is a company created by the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, in 2015-2016, according to The Courier-Gazette. He created shell companies that the company sent over $1 million to in exchange for water dispensers and filters, which he knew he could buy at a much lower price and make a personal profit. He was eventually caught after hiring a schoolteacher to pretend to be a representative of the shell company.
Dunican’s sentencing had been delayed after he allegedly shot himself in Virginia in February, claiming someone else shot him in a robbery. He was charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm, discharge of a firearm in public and making a false police report, according to The Courier-Gazette. That charge is still pending.
Residents in Warren had resisted foreclosing on Dunican’s former property — the one that houses the carpet mound — because they didn’t want the environmental cleanup responsibility. The Maine Department of Environmental Protection has been looking for ways to clean it up since 2001, but so far without success. In December 2022, Warren residents finally foreclosed on the land and reached an agreement with the Maine DEP that Warren would not be liable for the cleanup, according to The Courier-Gazette.
Jules Walkup is a Report for America corps member. Additional support for this reporting is provided by BDN readers.
