To the Editor:
I was very interested to find out that Jerry Rich's business practices are drawing some attention. I attended grad school from 1993 to 2000 as part of the physics & astronomy department and have an anecdote about Jerry Rich that might be of interest.
During my second year in graduate school, I helped out a friend of mine (also a physics & astronomy graduate student) who had a legal problem with Jerry Rich. Back then, Rich was selling used cars in West Lebanon. It seems that he and a mechanic friend of his cooked up a scheme to steal thousands of dollars from my admittedly very naive and gullible friend. My friend must have seemed like an easy mark; he had only recently moved to the United States from Russia in order to attend grad school and wasn't fully fluent in English yet.
Jerry Rich sold my friend a Honda CRX with an engine from another car transplanted into it. It turned out that the car could never have run with this type of engine. Jerry Rich wouldn't allow him to test-drive the car before purchasing it, and my friend foolishly went ahead with the purchase anyway.
Well, some short distance from the dealership, the car died.
My friend took Jerry Rich to court, and the judge ruled that although Rich had sold the car "as is," my friend was still entitled to all of his money back, because it was obvious that they had deliberately tried to sell him a car "that could not be made to run, no matter how much work was done on it." In a nutshell, Jerry Rich had purposefully tried to con my friend, but a judge had foiled his plot. I met Rich once in person and asked him about what he had tried to pull with my friend, and he just laughed my questions off.
For years after that incident, I heard stories from undergraduate friends at Dartmouth about their experiences with Jerry Rich and J&R Properties. One tale comes to mind: Rich would throw their shoes in the trash if they were left in the hallway! He cited a fire code violation, but apparently there were big garbage pails in the hallway that posed much more of a fire-egress hazard then shoes. I also remember stories similar to what is being printed in The Dartmouth.
In my opinion, from what I've heard, he's a dishonest, unscrupulous businessman, and not a very nice person at all. He can't be just a "misunderstood victim of a few students' vendettas" if so many stories have circulated about him.
