Avery Ted "Buck" Cashion

This man did me wrong years ago but this is a far better story which I want to share right now. Avery Ted “Buck” Cashion is a retired US Army finance officer now sitting in McCreary Federal Penitentiary (Prisoner #27373-058) in Kentucky. He also has a $14(+) million judgment against him from a North Carolina federal court for running a scam as a property developer.

I got to know him from the 1980’s while in the US Army and having to serve under him as my unit commander. He should have been sent to the Fort Leavenworth military prison already back then. While running a US Army finance office in Wiesbaden, Germany during the late 1980’s, Cashion had this money-making scheme which he executed flawlessly. He used US Army vehicles and military-provided fuel, Army mess hall equipment, and a few select military soldiers as his free labor – coupled with food bought tax-free and at discounted prices from the US Army commissary – to run his “business” as a food vendor at Galaxy (American football) games in Frankfurt, Germany. He paid no taxes to the German or American governments on any of the profits. He and the few military soldiers which he used, then personally pocketed all of the money (over $300,000 and of course, never paid any personal federal income taxes on this money either as this was an all-cash business with no record keeping).

Buck is married to Joan (Lusk) Cashion, the daughter of a Navy Admiral, and also involved in real estate with Buck. We all knew about her all-about-Joan attitude back then also. She was initially indicted but somehow plea-bargained her way out of everything while letting Buck take the full rap for his property developer scam - and she is probably laughing as I write this. Buck’s comments at his sentencing were: “I am living in the basement of my 90-year-old mother’s house and am no longer the millionaire I was five years ago.”

Let me tell you something, Buck: You are lucky that you only went to prison for the first time at age 62 and then only got a few years - because you should have been locked up back when you were 35 and then rotted away in Leavenworth for a long time. In fact, you should not even have any kind of military pension after what you did in Wiesbaden. How about condoning and covering up adultery which was happening right under your nose? Or your female lieutenant who gang-banged the enlisted troops on a unit trip to Heidelberg? I could easily write a few more paragraphs here but I won’t. So none of us soldiers who served under you are remotely surprised at any of this. Except that maybe it didn’t happen a lot sooner in your life.