3D printed houses, abandoned $590,000 deposit, FBI: what really happened in this small town?

Outside a repair shop in rural southeastern Illinois, parts of a massive construction 3D printer lay dismantled on a flatbed trailer, weeds climbing over the wheels.

The $1.1 million investment was not supposed to end up there, abandoned.

Two local men had taken out a loan from a small bank to buy the printer, promising it would spark an affordable housing renaissance in struggling southern Illinois. Their first stop was Cairo, at the southern tip of the state — a historic river city plagued by loss of jobs and safe housing, now home to fewer than 2,000 mostly black residents.

In August 2024, after months of negotiations, the city finalized an agreement with its company, Prestige Project Management Inc., for the construction of 30 duplexes. A few days later, the printer arrived and crews assembled it on a vacant lot at the corner of 17th Street and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue.

More than 100 people were present for the inauguration. The kids were holding cotton candy and popcorn. Pallets of Amazon gifts spilled from a truck. Behind a chain-link fence, the imposing printer hummed, two American flags hanging from its steel legs, laying the foundation for what was billed as the first new house built in Cairo in at least 30 years. The crowd applauded.

Kaneesha Mallory pressed herself against the fence. She grew up in Cairo, moved away, then returned after the birth of her daughter. Living in cramped one-bedroom public housing on the other side of town, she imagined a room that her 6-year-old could finally call his own.

Mayor Thomas Simpson called the project “just a start.” Sen. Dale Fowler, whose district includes some of Illinois’ most impoverished counties, described it as an “extraordinary project” — the start of more developments to come. His non-profit organization, which helps low-income children and families, received a $40,000 donation to help finance the event.

Mallory couldn’t bring herself to leave when her future seemed to be taking shape. She stood in the August heat for so long that she passed out and was taken to the emergency room by ambulance.

Crews worked through the night to avoid the heat. In about a month the walls were erected. Interior work followed.

But work stopped before the duplex was completed. The homeowners would later say that cracks — dozens of them — had begun to run through the walls and they needed to make sure the structure was sound. The printer has disappeared.

A year later, no one had moved into the duplex. He was alone in a vast field along a sun-bleached road.

As I began to examine what had happened, the story became more complicated.

I learned that before the 3D printer arrived in Cairo, the Prestige owners had lost about $590,000 as a deposit for another printer when they ended up canceling the order, a fact that would quickly turn the atmosphere tense as I pressed the company owners, the bank, Fowler and others for answers.

I also learned that shortly after the groundbreaking, several employees left Prestige around the same time a wave of anonymous emails hit inboxes across the region. The emails characterized the Cairo duplex project as a mere publicity stunt and an alleged fraud linked to Prestige’s other construction projects.

I wasn’t the only one asking questions either. I discovered that the FBI had launched an investigation into Prestige led by a southern Illinois agent who specialized in investigating white-collar and public sector corruption. To date, no charges have been filed or arrests made, and the owners of the Prestige deny any wrongdoing.

Over the past eight months, the more questions I asked, the more public officials distanced themselves from the project and the company. The broader housing project – the one that had fueled the speeches and celebrations – was beginning to look increasingly uncertain.

I was determined to find out: Was this just another failure in this dirt-poor delta town – or something more?

“God sent us”

Jamie Hayes, who inherited a Ford dealership from his father, and Erik Burtis, who long provided labor to coal mines, founded Prestige in 2021 in Harrisburg, Illinois, a town of fewer than 8,000 located about 80 miles northeast of Cairo.

It is one of seven businesses Hayes has started since 2020, including three co-owned with Burtis, according to Illinois business records. The two business partners since 2012 have undertaken an eclectic mix of projects: school construction management, solar farm fencing and a 3D printing project. Hayes provides the capital; Burtis manages day-to-day operations.

Burtis said he turned to 3D printing in early 2023 after asking his son Josh, who works for the company, to find out what was hot in construction. He replied that it was a 3D construction, based on European trends. “Usually we’re five, maybe six, seven years behind what’s happening there,” Burtis said.

Burtis said God then put it on his heart to start building in Cairo by donating the first house his company would print. Fowler, the state senator whose district office is in the same building as Prestige, said he listened to Burtis’ plan as they traveled to Cairo to meet with city officials a few years ago. Fowler said he suggested building a duplex instead of a single house so two families could benefit. Burtis was moved by this idea.

“He literally started crying,” Fowler said. He told me the story in August while we were talking in the back booth of a local barbecue restaurant.

“Did you cry too?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Fowler said. “I’m about to think about it right now.”

The housing crisis in Cairo is rooted in a long and complicated history. In 1972, the United States Commission on Civil Rights visited the city and documented how racism had harmed black families, notably by neglecting their segregated public housing. These problems have only gotten worse over time.

I grew up nearby and have covered housing issues in Cairo for more than a decade. In 2015, I documented how living conditions in these once-segregated neighborhoods had devolved into mouse-infested, mold-ridden, lead-contaminated slums, while federal overseers looked the other way.

In 2016, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development took over the local housing authority then demolished these apartment buildings, displacing nearly 400 residents. In 2022, HUD evacuated another senior high-risethen housing around 60 people. In less than five years, more than 300 apartments were razed, accelerating the county’s decline to become one of the the fastest shrinking places in America.

Cairo had seen ambitious promises before the arrival of the 3D printer. At the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, it attracts entrepreneurs who see untapped potential in its vacant storefronts and streets lined with magnolias and ramshackle mansions built by river barons in another era. Some come to help, others to benefit – it can be hard to tell. Residents are now wary of outsiders with big ideas.

Connie Williams, a city council member and retired school principal, said city leaders have warned the Prestige’s owners not to make promises they can’t afford. couldn’t hold on.

“We kept telling them, ‘Look, we’ve had enough people come to Cairo to talk about all this crap and then leave,'” she said. “And they were just like, ‘No, no, oh no, it’s not us. We’re here. God sent us.'”

The project attracted the attention of Illinois’ key power players: Governor JB Pritzker met privately with Burtis and Fowler in Harrisburg. Fowler also invited staff from U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s office to learn about the project. Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza toured the unfinished duplex and praised the efforts on social media.

To help manage the project in Cairo, the company hired Bucky Miller, a broad-shouldered lineman with a baritone voice. He said part of his job was to draw up development plans and reach an agreement with city officials. Miller regularly traveled 300 miles round trip from his home near St. Louis to meet with city officials. He told residents at a housing task force meeting that he took the job after learning of the decades of broken promises made in Cairo, and “because of what I’m good at: keeping my word.”

But he had no experience developing affordable housing, and neither did anyone else at Prestige. Burtis acknowledged his inexperience, but said he planned to partner with developers who would secure financing and hire his company to manage construction.

Before the party, a denouement

The August 2024 block party – kids holding cotton candy, everyone in a jubilant mood – gave the impression that everything was on track. But I have now learned that significant parts of the project were already fragile even before the printer released the first cement.

One of the big problems initially was acquiring the printer. In October 2023, Grand Rivers Community Bank approved a $1.1 million loan to purchase the printer — a big bet for the rural lender in Karnak, Illinois, which has a population of 450 and is about 25 miles north of Cairo. The loan was almost double the bank’s single customer limit, requiring another regional bank to participate.

That month, Grand Rivers sent half the cost of the printer, about $590,000, to Peri 3D Construction, which operated in Texas, to purchase one of its most expensive models. Their agreement provided that delivery of the printer would take place six months “at the earliest” from receipt of the deposit. The exchange of funds prompted Peri 3D to order a large-scale commercial printer from COBOD International, a Danish company that bills itself as the global leader in construction 3D printing technology.

By January 2024, Hayes and Burtis said, they had become impatient. It had only been three months, but they said they had promised Cairo that they would begin construction in the spring and felt the printer was not moving fast enough. Hayes said: “Here we go again, that’s what Cairo thinks. »

Fowler sent an email to the governor’s office days before a visit Pritzker had scheduled that month to southern Illinois, calling the new 3D printer business a “major humanitarian mission” and asking for the opportunity to introduce the governor to Burtis, records show. Fowler and Burtis met with Pritzker at Harrisburg City Hall and discussed with Pritzker whether he had any contacts in Germany, where Peri is headquartered, that could help speed up production, according to Burtis. A Pritzker spokesperson said the governor’s office took no action after the meeting.

A few days later, a Peri 3D sales representative sent an email to Burtis’s son saying the printer was on track for delivery in April.

Then, shortly thereafter, Burtis and other Prestige employees traveled to Las Vegas to attend an expo on the concrete industry. Fowler said Prestige paid for him to come and he agreed because he wanted to see demonstrations of the 3D printer technology. He did not report the trip on its annual economic declaration form; he changed the form after I asked him about it last year.

Burtis said a COBOD engineer at the expo told them their printer was only 10 percent complete, although a COBOD executive said no engineers were at the expo that year. While there, Burtis also met with one of the few other potential printer suppliers, Black Buffalo 3D. This New Jersey-based company said it had printers it could deliver immediately, according to Burtis.

Shortly after the conference, Prestige attempted to cancel the order for the original printer. Peri 3D does not appear to have responded to Prestige’s requests, according to an email exchange Hayes shared with me.

Two months later, Prestige’s lawyer sent a letter to Peri 3D saying the company’s request had been “rejected” and offered Peri 3D to keep about $60,000 — 10 percent — and return the rest. When Peri 3D responded in April, just as the printer was due to arrive, it said no $590,000 deposit would be returned. Prestige did not respond, according to email records provided by the company.

Burtis and Hayes had yet to spend about $500,000 of their loan. Hayes told me they’re ultimately “no worse for wear” since Black Buffalo 3D agreed to sell a printer for what they had left.

“If I get $10,000 for a car,” Hayes said. “Let’s say I pay $5,000 for a car and I don’t get my money back, but I can buy another car that does the exact same thing, and I only pay $5,000 more. What do I care if I can go to and from work?”

He called the bank.

“We don’t need any more money,” Hayes told them. “Can we fix this?” »

The bank agreed and transferred the remaining funds to Black Buffalo 3D in April 2024.

A fragile plan

Getting the printer to Cairo was one problem: it wouldn’t arrive until August 2024. Making financial sense of it was another problem entirely.

Months before the printer arrived, Miller, the Prestige employee who is managing the project in Cairo, told city leaders that Prestige would secure financing to build the remaining 29 houses after donating the first duplex.

But City Attorney Rick Abell said he couldn’t get clear answers about how the development would be financed or what it might look like.

Typically, housing tax credits are used to build affordable housing in the United States. But acquiring them is a highly competitive process that can take years, a process that would be made even more difficult using unproven construction technology and in a rural community. There is no record of Prestige applying for funding for a housing program.

Phillip Matthews, who chaired the city’s housing task force, said he repeatedly requested a project rendering but “never got it.” It was strange, Matthews said, “because normally when a company decides to develop a property, they have plans.”

Abell and city officials became frustrated with the lack of clarity around the deal.

A few weeks before the launch party, city officials visited Prestige’s Harrisburg office. According to Abell and Matthews, Burtis told them that Cairo would need the financing to build the other houses.

The city did not have this money.

Simpson, the mayor, was perplexed. He said Burtis offered to help the city apply for grants for a fee, but gave no details. “I’ve gotten grants for all kinds of things, but there’s nothing to build housing,” Simpson said.

Burtis would later say that Miller had made unauthorized promises that Prestige would provide financing for the project; Miller disputes this.

Despite uncertain funding, the city wrote conclude a contract: Cairo would sell vacant land to Prestige for $1. Prestige would build a duplex, manage it for 18 months, then transfer ownership to the city. The contract called for 29 more over the next three years, with no details on how they would be funded.

The mayor signed the contract, hoping the project would bring momentum to a place that hadn’t seen much.

Cairo’s last hope: not ‘something very serious’

I first met Hayes, the Harrisburg car dealer who co-founded Prestige, in early September 2025, more than a year after the Cairo 3D Printer Festival. At the time, I was unaware of the abandoned $590,000 deposit or the fact that there had never been any real plans for additional housing. I didn’t know that Prestige and its sister companies had attracted the attention of the FBI.

But I had already visited the missing printer in the middle of nowhere at the end of last summer. A former employee of the Prestige had sent me a Google pin to show me where it had been parked for almost a year.

So I was surprised when Hayes told me that the printer, the size of a small garage once assembled, was stored on its land.

I asked him if he would show it to me, a request that seemed to surprise him. Outside, we walked through rows of vehicles all the way to the back. There was no printer – just heat shining off the black roof and a long chain-link fence.

He squinted into the sun, looked at me and shrugged. “I don’t see it, do I?”

He told me later that he was there at one point, and he didn’t realize he was missing. This strange episode would set the stage for the interviews that followed.

For several weeks, we would spend hours chatting in the corner office of his car dealership in Muddy, Illinois — population 40, a disappearing coal mining area just outside Harrisburg, near the Indiana border.

With an easy, elastic charm, Hayes slipped between humor and confession, frankness and confusion. He told me Prestige was named after the fictional, do-nothing company in the Will Ferrell comedy “Step Brothers.” “It’s just stupid,” he said. “I’m not a very serious person at all.”

Ultimately, he would blame everyone – including the two printer suppliers – for what happened: the stalled project, the cracks, and the fact that Cairo still has no new housing.

Hayes told me that Prestige sued Peri 3D to recover the deposit on its printer. But for weeks he remained vague about it. He said he hadn’t seen the lawsuit and didn’t know where it was filed — “nowhere here,” he told me.

He became angry when I told him that the Peri 3D salesman they had worked closely with had called his company “shady.” At that point he promised to find out where it was dropped off, but after several visits he told me he still hadn’t located it.

I found the trial during a records search at the Saline County Courthouse, just steps from Prestige’s office. It turned out that Prestige had filed suit in early 2025, just as Peri 3D was laying off its U.S. staff. Prestige claimed in the lawsuit that it signed a “fictitious document,” not a real contract, and that it never received the language Peri 3D later claimed made clear the deposit was nonrefundable.

Five months later, in August, a judge ruled in favor of Prestige after Peri 3D failed to respond to the lawsuit. In Saline County, where the poverty rate hovers around 20 percent, nearly double the state rate, the money lost is particularly significant. “That’s a lot of money,” the judge remarked, according to a court transcript.

“It’s a bad situation,” Prestige’s lawyer said. The judge replied, “I guess good luck trying to get him back.” »

Before I could tell Hayes that I had located the lawsuit, he texted me that afternoon: “Looks like we sued and won!!! » he wrote. “Who’s the shadiest now?” (He later said he couldn’t tell me where the lawsuit was filed because he had largely left management of the company to Burtis.)

He nevertheless resigned himself to the fact that they would probably never get their money back – and so far, they haven’t.

Burtis said they couldn’t locate anyone from Peri 3D. When I contacted Hayes this month, he acknowledged that the contract made the deposit nonrefundable and said he regretted not reading the fine print. “Every time I do this, I’m like, you know what, gahhh, why am I getting fucked? Next time I’m going to read the whole thing,” he said.

Burtis said Prestige owes the bank about $13,000 a month under the terms of its 10-year loan agreement to pay for the initial $1.1 million printer; over the life of the contract, the company would pay more than $400,000 in interest. Prestige cannot afford this note; Haye He said he paid it from one of his other business accounts.

In an emailed statement from its German headquarters, Peri 3D said in October that it had conducted its business “in accordance with the terms and conditions” of its contract with Prestige but would “investigate the matter diligently in the coming weeks.” When I followed up recently, the company declined to comment further. COBOD said it was quick to build the printer and was not aware of a lawsuit since its contractual obligation was to Peri 3D and not Prestige.

As I continued to ask Hayes questions, he told me the state senator could vouch for the deal.

“Ask Dale Fowler if there’s anything wrong,” he says.

A modern-day Daniel

When I contacted Fowler in October, he didn’t vouch for much. He described Burtis and Hayes as acquaintances and himself as “just a guy who wants to help people.” He scoffed at Hayes’ assertion that he could talk about any of their business dealings. And he said his role in the Cairo duplex project was minimal, limited to that of a cheerleader.

His attempts to distance himself from the housing project and the company struck me as odd.

The month after Prestige secured a loan for the printer, Fowler’s office emailed promotional materials for Prestige’s 3D printing business to the Illinois Housing Development Agency and praised the project before the national commission on poverty he sat down, public records show.

He also brought other senior state officials into orbit. Three months after the duplex block party in Cairo, Fowler led Mendoza, the comptroller, on a tour of the property with Burtis and his son. In since-deleted social media posts, she called them “visionaries.” A spokesperson for Mendoza said Fowler asked her if she would like to tour the duplex, but that she was not otherwise involved with the business or its owners, and they had not received any state funding. The messages were deleted after I asked the spokesperson if Mendoza knew that FBI agents had served a subpoena on Prestige’s office just days before his tour.

Fowler didn’t tell me, but I also later discovered that he had called Duckworth staff to a meeting with Prestige’s owners and the president of Grand Rivers Community Bank in early 2023, 18 months before the 3D opening party in Cairo. A Duckworth spokesperson said the senator’s office had just restarted discussions about how to solve Cairo’s housing crisis when Fowler contacted it and that the office had no additional involvement with the company.

Cairo residents also saw Fowler as key to the deal and contacted him after it became clear that the duplex had remained unfinished.

“When that failed, we all called Senator Fowler personally, because he brought them here,” said council member Williams. According to Williams, Fowler told Cairo officials that he was unaware of Prestige’s business dealings.

Since its inception in September 2021, Prestige has been Fowler’s largest source of campaign donations, not including those from Political Action and other committees. The company, along with other companies owned by Burtis and Hayes, gave him $22,000 between May 2022 and August 2024. His final donation of $6,500 was made to Fowler five days after the groundbreaking ceremony for the 3D printed duplex. Fowler said he didn’t know who was donating to his campaign; he and Burtis said the donation was intended for Prestige co-sponsoring a golf fundraiser two months earlier.

Fowler, a decade-long state senator who plays a key role in shaping his caucus’ legislative priorities as Republican deputy leader, announced last summer that he would not seek re-election, citing a commitment to limit the term to 10 years; his term expires in January.

Fowler also told me in October that he had no knowledge of the federal investigation into the Prestige and had never been approached by investigators. “Are they looking for straws?” he said of the FBI.

Fowler said he had known Hayes and Burtis for decades and did not believe they did anything wrong.

Still, he said he took some unfair heat because of the ordeal – “guilty by affiliation, I suppose.”

But Fowler told me it wasn’t the first time he’d been criticized as an elected official, leading him to believe in his “spiritual soul” that he was the modern-day Daniel. In the Old Testament, Daniel was a righteous believer thrown into the lions’ den by his enemies. But the angels closed the lion’s mouth, saving Daniel, while his enemies ended up being “eaten, mutilated by the lions.” Fowler said the story put him “at peace.”

“I never told anyone that,” he added. “I never told my wife that.”

The FBI is coming to the door

Shortly after I began investigating what happened to the duplex in Cairo, I learned that the FBI was also investigating Prestige’s broader business dealings.

A few weeks after the block party, six employees, more than half of Prestige’s staff, resigned. Then Prestige received a federal grand jury subpoena seeking its financial records, Hayes and Burtis said.

The FBI also subpoenaed two school districts and the city ​​of Harrisburg for their contracts t payments to Prestige for work unrelated to the duplex project, according to records obtained under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. The FBI declined to comment on the status of its investigation.

Harrisburg Mayor John McPeek said the city has completed two projects with Prestige, although he said Fowler has encouraged the city to use the company more. A school district in Eldorado, one of the people summoned to appearousted the former superintendent in September, in part for failing to get school board approval for about $2 million in payments to Prestige and its related companies, public records show. The district declined to comment and the former superintendent did not respond to requests for comment.

Miller, the Prestige employee who touted the 3D printing project to Cairo residents, was one of the employees who resigned. When we first met late last summer, he told me he had become an FBI whistleblower.

Miller told me he was taken advantage of and sent to Cairo to sell a false promise the company had no intention of keeping. He also told me about a wave of anonymous emails sent through Proton, an encrypted email service, accusing Prestige of fraud shortly after the Cairo block party. The emails were sent to various companies and schools that contracted with Prestige.

I too had received a Proton email about Prestige. It wasn’t anonymous like the others, but rather came from someone claiming to be a COBOD executive. It asked me to open a DropBox file, but the link didn’t work. This executive told me that his identity had been stolen; the company said it was taking the matter “very seriously.”

At one point, Miller told me that he was the one who sent the Proton emails – under instructions from the FBI, in an effort to find investigative leads. The FBI declined to comment, although three law enforcement experts told me that would be highly unlikely. Miller later changed his story, saying he did not send the emails.

Burtis initially refused to answer my calls, texts or knock on his door, but he called me back in October and said he wanted to talk.

“For some reason, I woke up today and after praying, I was like, ‘You need to go and talk to him,’” he said. Tears were streaming down his face. His aunt sat next to him, taking notes on a notepad. He blamed Miller for trying to ruin his business and spreading unfounded rumors about him and Hayes. Miller did not respond when I asked him about Burtis’ claims.

Burtis also said he and Hayes cooperated fully with the FBI, turning over all financial documents requested in the subpoena, although he said they were never questioned by agents. “If I was really in trouble, don’t you think I would have been charged by now?” » said Burtis.

His son Josh, who had been put in charge of the 3D printing business, said the construction issues had been disappointing but had kept the town current. Hayes said he was completely transparent with me and the investigators.

When I asked last fall, the printer was outside on set, although parts of it were recently moved to the Hayes parking lot.

The cracked house remained abandoned.

Hayes said the concrete “ink” that came with the Black Buffalo 3D printer was defective and that’s why the printer has been sitting idle ever since. Black Buffalo 3D said it had offered Prestige a new concrete solution and found a buyer for the printer if Prestige no longer wanted it.

Prestige and Black Buffalo told me in a joint email in September that they would return to Cairo by the end of October to repair the cracks, which they said were not structural. But Black Buffalo never showed up, saying its engineer couldn’t approve a repair plan without city permits, which don’t exist because they aren’t required. The company, which has only sold two printers in the United States since its founding in 2020, filed for bankruptcy in December.

Burtis later said he hired his own engineering firm to approve a repair plan to fill the cracks with hydraulic cement, although he declined to share that plan or the name of the company. Crews were recently working on the duplex; Burtis said the cabinets ordered did not fit.

Once the duplex is completed, Burtis said, he plans to hand over the keys to the city. Simpson said he would be ready. Ever the optimist, the mayor said he hoped someone else would eventually follow through and build houses in Cairo.

Abell, the Cairo city prosecutor, said the failure of the venture never pleased him. “I’ve seen a lot of deals fail,” Abell said. “But we always knew why. Here we got nothing.”

“Even today,” he added, “I probably have a lot more questions than answers.”

Although some questions remain unanswered, one set of facts is undisputed: When HUD began dismantling housing here a decade ago, officials promised there would be an effort to rebuild. Today, the only thing that has been built is a duplex, which is still unfinished.

Mallory, the mother who hoped to one day have a two-bedroom house, said she was tired of waiting, even though Cairo always felt like home. In mid-March, she applied for a housing assistance program in Chicago. She fears that Cairo won’t be able to give her daughter everything she needs to thrive. “I want more for her,” she said. “I thought I was going to be able to get a two-bedroom apartment.”

But in the end, she sighs, with the sort of resignation that comes from being disappointed too often, it was just “a bunch of broken promises.”