By Dan McCue

SUMMERVILLE -- Everywhere attorney J. David Dantzler Jr. looked in economist Al Parish’s Summerville home he found works of art, jewels and potentially priceless furniture.

“There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of items that we’re looking at—literally something everywhere we’ve looked—and we haven’t even been to Parish's other properties, in Edisto and the Highlands,” he said. “The task is just enormous, more than we’ve seen in any of our previous cases, and more by a long shot.

“Based on our experience and expertise in forensic accounting and funds-tracing, in the scheme of complicated cases, this is a very complicated case. What we’ve got is a much bigger task before us than we typically run into.”

Parish, who built his Lowcountry reputation as a university professor and regional economic forecaster, stands accused of bilking investors through a series of funds he ran and could be responsible for the disappearance of as much as $134 million.

The U.S. Security and Exchange Commission brought a five-count federal civil case against him April 5, the same day Parish’s then-employer, Charleston Southern University, sued him in Charleston County Common Pleas Court over his handling of more than $10 million in university funds.

On Tuesday, CSU announced that it had terminated its relationship with Parish both as a faculty member and as director of its Economic Forecasting Center due to misconduct.

The magnitude of the objects Parish collected in his home is so extraordinary that Dantzler, who is working with court-appointed receiver Hays Financial Consulting LLC of Atlanta, will have to bring in local appraisers and receivers to help come to terms with it all.

“By definition our job is to handle complicated cases, but this is a whole different order of magnitude,” said Dantzler, who is trying to determine exactly how much money Parish received from investors through Parish Economics LLC, and where it went.

“There’s just so much art, and objects d’art, and so many pieces of furniture, that we need some help figuring out what should be treated as museum pieces and what are just regular furniture,” Dantzler said.

“The same holds true for gem stones; we need a little help determining which are the precious stones and which are only semi-precious.”

A number of other clients have now also filed suit against Parish, who has been hospitalized since early April with what’s been described as a case of profound amnesia.

A hearing on the SEC charges is scheduled before U.S. District Judge David C. Norton for Friday morning.

Hays Financial Consulting plans to file a report with Norton prior to that hearing, Dantzler said, but admitted Wednesday morning the team is scrambling to get a preliminary assessment done.

The local appraisers and receivers, which Dantzler did not identify, are expected to begin trying to sort through Parish’s collection on Saturday.

Dantzler predicted that for the next 30 to 45 days, the receiver’s large team of investigators will be “consumed” with locating, securing and cataloging all of the hard assets Parish accumulated.

“Our expectation is that once we get the bank records, financial statements and get done examining the computers we’ve seized, figuring out how much money came in and how it was spent won’t be difficult, only time-consuming,” he said.

“It’s going to take a long time to figure out what we’ve got and how to dispose of it at a fair market value to benefit his creditors.”