Halfway through his jury trial, a Green River man gave up and pleaded “no contest” to conspiring to steal from the oil and gas company that belonged to his uncle, who died trying to help the man recover from COVID-19.
Allen Meredith, 60, was sentenced Thursday to three years’ supervised probation, with the threat of between two and five years in prison if he violates probation, and ordered to pay $9,620 in restitution.
The sentencing came after Meredith’s cousins and aunt gave detailed accounts of his gutting their family company, which they called a painful betrayal.
Meredith worked for Cannon Oil and Gas for 38 years. He was the manager, and the nephew of company patriarch Robert Cannon.
Cannon died Oct. 11, 2021, when his plane suffered double engine failure. Cannon was on his way pick up Meredith and take him to get COVID-19 treatment, according to court testimony.
After Cannon’s death, his wife and daughter turned to Meredith for help protecting their company from “vultures,” according to testimony given Thursday in Sweetwater County District Court.
Little did the family know, Meredith was carting away their oil field equipment and working to start his own company with it.
In counts to which Meredith has not pled, the court documents also allege Meredith stole forms and intellectual property from the company and lured away Cannon Oil and Gas’s staffers.
He struck a plea agreement last week during his two-week trial for felony theft. He pleaded no-contest Monday to the conspiracy theft charge, and in exchange the prosecutor, Sweetwater County Deputy Attorney Hillary McKinney, agreed to drop a second charge of felony theft and a third of accessing a computer system to which he had no right.
The plea agreement offered Meredith the probation term with several conditions, such as avoiding the victims, paying the restitution, living a law-abiding life and avoiding alcohol.
Hesitating
Sweetwater District Court Judge Suzannah Robinson hesitated Thursday before accepting Meredith’s plea agreement.
She had the power to reject it, and said she may have if it weren’t for the Cannons saying they agreed with it.
It may traumatize the Cannon family further to make them begin another trial. The court would have to call another 125 jurors, which the attorneys would winnow down to the 12 plus one alternate required for trial.
And she would do all that, said Robinson, but it seemed the best thing to do Thursday was to accept Meredith’s plea agreement and move forward.
“I have confidence that Mr. Meredith will likely be successful on probation,” said Robinson. “If you’re not, I will not hesitate to send you to prison.”
From her experience, Robinson said a death in someone’s family very quickly reveals their character.
“That person’s character will be tested as to what they do after someone dies, and this is a very good example of that,” said Robinson. “You failed that test. … You did not choose what Mr. Cannon would have wanted you to do, and that has resulted in this betrayal of Mr. Cannon and his legacy.”
First, A Plane Crash
At Cannon’s funeral in late 2021, Meredith was on oxygen and appeared weak from his bout with COVID-19, one source told investigators, according to a 178-paragraph evidentiary affidavit by Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Detective Matthew Wharton, which contains months of investigation.
After that, strange things started happening.
On Nov. 10, 2021, Rob Cannon’s daughter Andrea Wilkinson and his wife Elaine Cannon met with Meredith in Craig, Colorado. Elaine said she couldn’t make day-to-day decisions and was unsure how to manage the company. Meredith said he “fully understood” and said he’d support them, the document says.
One week later, Cannon’s accountant called the women and said Meredith reached out to him about buying the company, and he asked for its financial history.
Before that, Meredith had never had contact with Cannon Oil’s accountant, the document says.
Elaine Cannon reached out to Meredith and asked why he’d called the accountant and not her. He said he didn’t know the answer to that, but he did want to buy the company, the detective wrote.
Elaine thought it was a good idea, if he could come up with the money.
The company was worth at least $6 million, says the court document.
About a week after that conversation, Meredith emailed Wilkinson, saying his bank would need three years of financials for Cannon Oil. She said they must wait until 2021 ended to complete that request.
Meredith kept contacting the accountant asking for the company financials. He even went into the accountant’s office, and the accountant wouldn’t hand over the financials, detective Wharton wrote in the affidavit.
Also around that time, Meredith had a repair shop perform $6,636 worth of work on his personal motorhome that, but the shop initially billed Cannon Oil and Gas for the work, says the affidavit.
Just Get Pre-Approved
In January 2022, Wilkinson and Meredith worked together on equipment lists to include in the financial packet for his bank, and on the company assets list.
Meredith signed a nondisclosure agreement with Cannon Oil and Gas, saying he wouldn’t target the company’s employees or its customers.
Wilkinson sent Meredith an email Feb. 3, 2022, telling him they would not give the financials directly to him, but would provide them to his bank if his bank handed over a pre-approval letter, the document says.
The affidavit says Wilkinson and her mother never heard back from Meredith about buying the company after that.
Wilkinson also noticed that the oil field industry was picking up, but her family company’s rigs weren’t working. She asked Meredith why the rigs weren’t in operation, and he said he was working on permitting and other things.
Wilkson and her mother wanted to sell the company, but Meredith discouraged Wilkinson from coming to Rock Springs to discuss the company’s fate with employees. He said the workers were just doing “business as usual,” the document says.
What the women did not know until later was that Meredith had already set up his own company, Mountain West Energy Services, through the Wyoming Secretary of State’s Office on Feb. 1, 2022.
The Invisible Trucks
On Feb. 28, 2022, operations manager Dave Mansfield contacted GeoForce and cancelled Cannon Oil’s GPS tracking system subscription, ending the company’s tracking of its own trucks, says the affidavit.
Even though the semitrucks weren’t being put out to work during the beginning of March 2022, Cannon Oil went through more than 3,000 gallons of diesel fuel. Typically 500 gallons would be sufficient to get two semitrucks back and forth from Idaho.
Using 3,000 gallons of diesel in a couple weeks “is significant when the trucks are not working,” says the document.
The company was burning through large amounts of money, and for some reason not lining up to plug about 200 wells for Crowheart Energy as expected, Wilkinson told investigators during the investigation.
Meredith told Wilkinson that the company was running low on equipment and needed to restock, the document says.
Wilkinson said they needed to quit spending money until the rigs were back to work.
Being ‘Skittish’
On March 25, 2022, Cannon Oil’s shop supervisor saw operations manager Jim Johnson at a gas station in Maybell, Colorado, he later told investigators. Johnson was in his Cannon truck hauling a Cannon gooseneck trailer and two sets of pipe racks.
The supervisor hadn’t seen Johnson in a while so he asked what the operations manager was doing.
Johnson was “skittish,” the supervisor told detectives, adding that Johnson said he was driving back to Rock Springs from the Cannons’ farm near Maybell.
The supervisor and his family arrived back from Colorado around 4 p.m. two days later. The supervisor saw Meredith walk out of the Cannon offices that afternoon, but he didn’t think it was unusual because Meredith was sometimes at Cannon on the weekends, the document says.
When the supervisor returned to work March 28, he didn’t see the pipe racks Johnson was towing in Colorado. He soon also found a pair of rod tongs missing from the shop.
The supervisor soon learned that Meredith hosted an employee meeting at his new shop that weekend, told everyone he was leaving Cannon Oil and invited people to come work for his new company.
Some employees noticed equipment at that meeting that had been missing from Cannon’s properties. They walked away with a wrongful feeling and refused to switch jobs.
But about 15-20 employees, plus Johnson and Mansfield, jumped ship. One noted that Meredith was offering free insurance and matching pay. Meredith had also cautioned them that Cannon Oil was being sold and no one knew its fate, says the document.
One employee who switched to the new company later told detectives that he was asked to sand the sky blue, or “Cannon blue” paint off some of the pipe racks at Meredith’s new business. Cannon Oil’s signature blue equipment paint is unique: custom-mixed in Lander, Wyoming, says the affidavit.
Around that time, Cannon Oil was missing about $75,000 worth of equipment, the affidavit says.
Walking The Dog
Also in late March, a former Cannon Oil employee who walked his dog in the area of Meredith’s new business noticed “random” new equipment there.
Two days later, the man saw a Cannon Oil “bed truck” dropping off oil field equipment at the shop. He recalled an orange water tank in the load.
The man was in the area again April 4, 2022, and noticed pipe bins with pipe near the orange water tank.
The pipe bins were Cannon blue, says the document.
Bailing
Meredith resigned in a letter March 28, 2022, taking the family by surprise.
Wilkinson tried to look at all her employees’ hire dates on her computer, but that file was deleted. Only she and Meredith had access to those files, the document says.
On April 28, 2022, Detective Wharton tried building a forensic image of operations manager Jim Johnson’s laptop, as Johnson had been implicated in some of Meredith’s dealings. But it was Bitlocker encrypted, meaning he couldn’t crack into it.
The detective then built a forensic image of Dave Mansfield’s laptop, which wasn’t encrypted.
There he found proof that Mansfield had cut GPS service to Cannon Oil’s trucks. He also found evidence of Mansfield — as a top administrator for Cannon — authorizing Meredith’s new company Mountain West Energy Services to use a third-party service to clone Cannon Oil’s safety forms, policies and paperwork, on Feb. 22, 2022.
You Don’t Have Access
During his investigation, Detective Jeff Sheaman asked Wilkinson if Cannon Oil and Gas had any surveillance cameras on the property. The security camera account was in Meredith’s name, she said.
She contacted the company to make sure he no longer had access, but the company told her Meredith was the only one on the account so they couldn’t help her.
Meredith said he’d provide an invoice to investigators for all the goods at his new shop, from Hud’s Wholesale Inc.
And he provided two invoices on April 2, 2022. But the business co-owner said the second invoice looked like a rough draft of the first invoice, and he couldn’t recall selling Meredith all the things listed on that second invoice.
The Takeback
Investigators got a warrant and went to Meredith’s property in April 2022 to conduct a take-back of Cannon Oil’s stolen equipment.
Meredith was helpful with the warrant execution, court documents indicate.
He also mentioned that he’d taken his deceased uncle’s barbecue grill.
“Meredith told Det. Wharton he had a flatbed trailer with a cooking grill on it that belonged to Robert Cannon,” the document says. “Meredith told Det. Wharton he could seize that as well.”
A top Cannon Oil employee helped police identify the equipment that belonged to Cannon, the affidavit says. The list included thousands of dollars worth of equipment.
The Other Two
Mansfield’s criminal case is ongoing. He declined via his attorney to comment Thursday.
Johnson was sentenced to two years’ unsupervised probation in July, Sweetwater Now reported.
He did not respond to a voicemail by publication time; neither did Meredith.
Robinson referenced Johnson and Mansfield Thursday, telling Meredith that another disappointing component of his theft case was that he dragged his friends into it.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
