Billionaire behind Loveland project

It’s not easy to keep a low profile once you’ve made your first billion, but Brad M. Kelley has been better at avoiding the limelight than most billionaires.

Kelley is the moneyman behind Cumberland & Western Resources, the Kentucky company that won (and paid $5 million for) the rights to redevelop Loveland’s former Agilent Technologies plant, which is now being called the Rocky Mountain Center for Innovation and Technology.

Unlike most of his billionaire brethren, Kelley has taken anonymity to a near art form. Cumberland & Western has no website touting its successes. Not only did company vice president Bill Murphree turn down the Business Report’s request for an interview with Kelley, but he strongly suggested that writing about Kelley might have negative consequences for Cumberland & Western’s interest in doing business in Northern Colorado.

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“Brad likes to be very private,” Murphree said in a phone interview. “He’s just the source of capital for the project, he’s not really involved in it. … The less you write about Brad, the more supportive we are going to be of the Northern Colorado area.”
Despite declining an interview, Kelley has left a public trail that helps fill in some of the gaps.

For starters, the website Tennessee Trivia lists Kelley as Tennessee’s fifth wealthiest individual, estimated net worth $1.3 billion, and says he lives in Nashville. He is married with children.

The theme that runs through most of Kelley’s business ventures is his predilection for taking on a turnaround project. In this way, he has gone from cranking out cheap cigarettes in a once-shuttered tobacco factory to revitalizing world-famous horse racetracks and converting more than 1 million acres of land in the South and West into safe habitats for endangered species. So although Murphee insists that Kelley is “really not involved” in the Loveland project, in fact it fits neatly within the context of his career as a re-inventor of properties.

Kelley, believed to be in his mid-50s, was born and raised on a farm in Franklin, Ky., according to sources as varied as the New York Times and the blogger Critic From the South. Getting details nailed down can be difficult in Kelley’s case, because he never agrees to help reporters with fact-checking. “Most of what’s been written about him is wrong anyway,” Murphree said. With that in mind, the Business Report has, where possible, tried to use multiple sources to confirm all facts in this story.

Several sources say Kelley was heavily involved with the Future Farmers of America in high school and that he did not go to college. In a brief telephone interview in 2005 with the New York Times, he dismissed the importance of a college degree.

“I guess I just don’t find that as unusual or remarkable as apparently a lot of other people do,” he said. “I mean, I’ve had a lot of MBAs that’ve worked for me over time, off and on, that, excuse my French, were useless as teats on a boar hog.”

Kelley did not wait long to roll the dice in search of his fortune. According to a Tennessee Business article about him in 2006, “in 1990, at the age of 33, Kelley parlayed his financial successes in Kentucky’s commercial real estate market to start discount tobacco company Commonwealth Brands.” (Several other sources placed the date of the tobacco company’s founding at 1991.)

Kelley’s strategy was to revive a shuttered factory in Bowling Green, Ky., as the production site for a suite of discount, generic cigarettes. It worked.

Here’s what the New York Times article, written by Nina Munk in 2005, said about his business:

“In 2001, just 10 years after starting the company, Mr. Kelley sold Commonwealth to Houchens Industries for $1 billion in cash. By then, Commonwealth Brands was the fifth-largest cigarette maker in the country, with sales approaching $800 million. Its top brand, USA Gold, was, and still is, the nation’s eighth-best-selling cigarette.”

The sale vaulted Kelley into the public eye. Forbes magazine, ranking him the 258th wealthiest American in 2006, was among the first to note Kelley’s new status including his ownership stake in some famous race tracks.

“(Kelley) owns 71 percent of Kentucky Downs racetrack; (he) also holds minor stake in Churchill Downs, venue of Kentucky Derby,” Forbes wrote. “Also (holds) real estate: 1.2 million acres in Texas, Florida, New Mexico. Wildlife conservationist runs program to help zoos breed ‘hoofstock.'”

These details about his holdings and interests emerged when Kelley found himself on several lists of the largest landowners in the U.S., ranked No. 4 in the nation in 2011 by The Land Report – just below the likes of Denver’s John Malone and the legendary Ted Turner.

The Land Report estimated his holdings at 1.7 million acres in Florida, Texas and New Mexico. Other reports indicate he also owns land in Kentucky and Tennessee.
“Kelley (has) poured the profits (from the sale of Commonwealth) into land in New Mexico, Florida and lately Texas, where his emissaries reportedly have been acquiring hundreds of thousands of acres in the southwestern corner of the state. He stocks his land with rare species such as (black) rhinos, wildebeests and miniature water buffalo,” the Land Report noted in 2010.

Kelley also has demonstrated a keen interest in another beast: the racehorse. It appears that, following his sale of Commonwealth, he began investing in racetracks and racehorse accommodations.

He has held major stakes in the European-style track Kentucky Downs (which he helped renovate), and the legendary Churchill Downs. He once sat on the board of the firm that owns the Kentucky Derby track and, at one point, had a reported 11 percent stake.

The record also indicates that horse racing is one of Kelley’s biggest passions today. He is at least part (if not full) owner of Kelley Farms Racing and Bluegrass Farm LLC in Kentucky, has stables of thoroughbreds that race regularly, and held an interest in an historic home called Hurricane Hall in Lexington, Ky., that he and several partners converted into a lavish stable complex.

Given his many interests and penchant for privacy, it seems unlikely Loveland will see much of Kelley, though, if all goes as planned, many here will doubtlessly want to thank him.

The roots of the Agilent project reside in a partnership between NASA and the Colorado Association for Manufacturing and Technology.

By even the most ambitious accounts, it will take the better part of a decade to create the thousands of jobs envisioned there.

Still, no one should expect Kelley to show up at any celebratory parades.

“Brad is a dedicated family guy who just really likes to be private,” Bill Murphree said.