Longtime Nashville businessman Doctor Robert Crants lost his Belle Meade estate last week amid ongoing bankruptcy proceedings initiated by his wife, Shirley Crants. Court filings reveal a family in financial ruin decades after Crants helped build Corrections Corporation of America, the billion-dollar, Nashville-based private prison operator known since 2016 as CoreCivic.
Crants’ 11,000-square-foot mansion at 1310 Chickering Road sold for $7 million last week to Issam Faza, an Ohio businessman. The sale freed up much-needed cash for the Crants family, which has been fighting banks and creditors for several years. According to closing documents, the couple paid nearly $500,000 to Davidson County and the City of Belle Meade for unpaid property taxes going back to 2016.
Closing documents also show debts owed by the Crants family of $3.1 million for an initial mortgage on the house, which they bought in 1998 for $3.7 million. Regions Bank, which filed against Crants in 2021 for $279,030 on an unpaid 2014 promissory note, took $350,426 from closing. Attorneys fees topped $200,000. The balance — $2.3 million — went to KPL Industries LLC, a private equity firm with a Knoxville business address.
Along with his West Point roommate Thomas Beasley, Crants successfully pitched private prisons to then-Gov. Lamar Alexander in 1985. Described by former Scene editor-in-chief Bruce Dobie as a “financial whiz” in 1997, Crants led the business through its heyday in the 1990s, structuring it such that a prison real estate trust owned detention facilities while CCA, a subsidiary, operated them on contracts from state corrections departments. Crants stepped away from CCA and its affiliated businesses in 1999 after driving the once-lucrative venture close to bankruptcy.
The prison company still operates today. CoreCivic still oversees four of Tennessee’s prisons and faces a nearly constant barrage of lawsuits and complaints related to insufficient health care, sexual abuse, harassment, understaffing, negligence and inmate deaths. Despite a scathing audit of CoreCivic prisons in 2020, the state continues to hold contracts with the corporation at Hardeman County Correctional Facility, Trousdale Turner Correctional Facility and South Central Correctional Facility.
