3D printed homes, an abandoned $590,000 deposit, the FBI: What really happened in this small town?

CAIRO — Outside a repair shop in rural southeastern Illinois, the parts of a massive 3D construction printer sat disassembled on a flatbed trailer, weeds climbing the wheels.

The $1.1 million investment wasn’t meant to end up there, abandoned.

Two local men had taken out a loan from a tiny bank to buy the printer, promising it would spark an affordable-housing revival across hard-pressed southern Illinois. Their first stop was Cairo, at the state’s southern tip — a historic river town beset by the 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 a deal with their company, Prestige Project Management Inc., to build 30 duplexes. Days later, the printer arrived and crews assembled it on a vacant corner lot at 17th Street and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue.

More than 100 people showed up for the groundbreaking. Children clutched cotton candy and popcorn. Pallets of Amazon giveaways spilled from a truck. Behind a chain-link fence, the towering printer hummed to life, two American flags clipped to its steel legs, laying down the base of what was billed as the first new home built in Cairo in at least 30 years. The crowd cheered.

Kaneesha Mallory pressed against the fence. She had grown up in Cairo, moved away, then returned after her daughter was born. Living in a cramped one-bedroom public housing unit across town, she imagined a bedroom her 6-year-old could finally call her own.

Mayor Thomas Simpson called the project “just the beginning.” State Sen. Dale Fowler, whose district incorporates some of Illinois’ most destitute counties, described it as an “extraordinary project” — the start of more development to come. His nonprofit organization, which serves low-income children and families, had secured a $40,000 donation to help pay for the event.

Mallory couldn’t bring herself to leave while her future seemed to be taking shape. She stayed in the August heat so long that she fainted and was taken to the emergency room by ambulance.

Crews worked overnight to avoid the heat. Within about a month, the walls went up. Interior work followed.

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

A year later, no one had moved into the duplex. It stood alone in a wide lot along a sun-bleached road.

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

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

I also learned that not long after the groundbreaking, several employees left Prestige around the same time a spray of anonymous emails hit inboxes across the region. The emails called the Cairo duplex project little more than a publicity stunt and alleged fraud tied to Prestige’s other construction projects.

I also wasn’t the only one asking questions. I discovered that the FBI has launched an investigation into Prestige led by an agent in southern Illinois who specializes in white-collar and public corruption investigations. To date, there have been no charges filed or arrests made, and Prestige’s owners 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 plan — the one that had fueled speeches and celebration — started to look increasingly uncertain.

I was determined to know: Was this simply another failed pitch to 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 had long supplied labor to coal mines, founded Prestige in 2021 in Harrisburg, Illinois, a town of fewer than 8,000 people about 80 miles northeast of Cairo.

It is one of seven companies Hayes has started since 2020, three of them co-owned with Burtis, according to Illinois business records. The two, who were business partners since 2012, have taken on an eclectic mix of projects: school construction management, solar farm fencing and the 3D printing venture. Hayes provides the capital; Burtis runs the day-to-day operations.

Burtis said he landed on 3D printing in early 2023 after asking his son Josh, who works for the company, to find out what was hot in construction. He reported back that it was 3D construction — based on trends in Europe. “Usually we’re five, maybe six, seven years behind what happens there,” Burtis said.

Burtis said God then laid it on his heart to start building in Cairo by donating the first home 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 drove to Cairo to meet with town officials a few years ago. Fowler said he suggested building a duplex instead of a single home so two families could benefit. Burtis was moved by that idea.

“He literally started tearing up,” Fowler said. He told me the story in August as we talked in the back booth of a local barbecue restaurant.

“Did you cry, too?” I asked.

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

Cairo’s housing crisis is rooted in a long and complicated history. In 1972, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights visited the town and documented how racism had harmed Black families, including through neglect of their segregated public housing. Those problems only worsened over time.

I grew up nearby and have reported on Cairo’s housing problems for more than a decade. In 2015, I documented how conditions in those once-segregated developments had withered into mice-infested slums, overrun with mold and contaminated with lead, while federal overseers looked the other way.

In 2016, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development took over the local housing authority and then demolished those apartment homes, displacing nearly 400 residents. In 2022, HUD evacuated another high-rise for seniors, then home to about 60 people. In less than five years, more than 300 apartment units were razed, accelerating the county’s decline into one of the fastest-shrinking places in America.

Cairo had seen ambitious promises before the 3D printer arrived. At the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, it draws entrepreneurs who see unrealized potential in its vacant storefronts and magnolia-lined streets of dilapidated mansions built by river barons in another era. Some come to help, others to take advantage — it can be hard to tell. Residents have grown wary of outsiders with big ideas.

City Council member Connie Williams, a retired school principal, said city leaders had warned the Prestige owners not to make promises they couldn’t keep.

“We kept saying to them, ‘Look, we’ve had enough people come through Cairo talking all this crazy stuff and then back out,’” she said. “And they were just like, ‘No, no, oh no, that’s not us. We are here. God sent us.’”

The project attracted attention from Illinois’ top powerbrokers: Gov. 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 effort 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 craft development plans and an agreement with city officials. Miller regularly drove 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 reading about the decades of failed promises made to 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 the inexperience but said he planned to partner with developers who would secure financing and hire his company to handle construction.

Before the party, an unraveling

The block party in August 2024 — kids clutching cotton candy, everyone in a jubilant mood — made it look like everything was on track. But I have now learned that significant parts of the project already were shaky even before the printer squeezed out the first cement.

One big problem was acquiring the printer to begin with. In October 2023, Grand Rivers Community Bank approved the $1.1 million loan to purchase the printer — a big bet for the rural lender in Karnak, Illinois, population 450, about 25 miles north of Cairo. The loan was nearly double the bank’s single-customer limit, requiring another regional bank to join in.

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

By January 2024, Hayes and Burtis said, they had become impatient. It had been only three months, but they said they’d given Cairo their word they’d start building that spring and felt the printer wasn’t progressing fast enough. Hayes said, “‘Here we go again’ is what Cairo is thinking.”

Fowler emailed the governor’s office a few days ahead of a visit Pritzker had scheduled that month in southern Illinois, calling the new 3D printer business “a major humanitarian mission” and asking for an 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 contacts in Germany, where Peri is headquartered, who could help speed production, according to Burtis. A Pritzker spokesperson said the governor’s office took no action after the meeting.

Days later, a Peri 3D sales rep emailed Burtis’ son that the printer was on track for delivery that April.

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

Burtis said a COBOD engineer at the expo told them that their printer was only 10% complete, though a COBOD executive said it did not have any engineers present at the expo that year. While there, Burtis also met with one of the few other potential printer suppliers, Black Buffalo 3D. That New Jersey-based company said it had printers available that it could deliver right away, according to Burtis.

Shortly after the conference, Prestige tried to cancel the order for the original printer. Peri 3D did not appear to respond to Prestige’s requests, according to an email exchange that Hayes shared with me.

Two months later, Prestige’s lawyer sent a letter to Peri 3D saying the company’s request had been “blown off” and proposed Peri 3D keep about $60,000 — 10% — and return the rest. When Peri 3D responded in April, just as the printer was due, it said none of the $590,000 deposit would be returned. Prestige did not write back, according to email records the company provided.

Burtis and Hayes hadn’t yet spent about $500,000 of their loan. Hayes told me they were ultimately “no worse for the wear” since Black Buffalo 3D agreed to sell a printer for what they had left.

“If I get 10 grand for a car,” Hayes said. “Say I pay 5 grand for a car and I don’t get my money back, but I can buy another car that does the same exact thing, and I only pay another 5 thousand. What do I give a shit if I can get back and forth to work?”

He called the bank.

“We don’t need any more money,” Hayes said he told them. “Can we get this taken care of?”

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

A flimsy plan

Getting the printer to Cairo was one problem — it wouldn’t arrive until August 2024. Getting it to make sense financially was entirely different.

For months before the printer arrived, Miller, the Prestige employee managing the project in Cairo, had been telling city leaders that Prestige would secure financing to build the remaining 29 homes after donating the first duplex.

But city attorney Rick Abell said he couldn’t get straight answers about how the development would be paid for or what it might look like.

Typically, housing tax credits are used to build affordable housing in the U.S. But acquiring those is a highly competitive process that can take years to complete, a process that would be made even more challenging using an unproven construction technology and in a rural community. There’s no record that Prestige applied for any housing program funding.

Phillip Matthews, who chaired the town’s housing task force, said he repeatedly asked for a project rendering but “never got it.” That was strange, Matthews said, “because normally, when a company determines they’re going to develop a piece of property, they have designs.”

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

Weeks before the kickoff party, city officials visited Prestige’s office in Harrisburg. According to Abell and Matthews, Burtis told them Cairo would need to come up with the financing to build the other homes.

The city did not have that kind of money.

Simpson, the mayor, was perplexed. He said Burtis offered to help the city apply for grants for a fee but offered no specifics. “I’ve been getting grants for all kinds of stuff, but there’s nothing for building housing,” Simpson said.

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

Despite the uncertain financing, the city wrote up a contract: Cairo would sell a vacant lot to Prestige for $1. Prestige would build one duplex, manage it for 18 months and then transfer ownership back 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, hopeful the project would build momentum in a place that hadn’t experienced much.

Cairo’s last hope: Not “some big serious whatever”

I first met Hayes, the Harrisburg car dealer who co-founded Prestige, in early September 2025, more than a year after Cairo’s 3D printer party. At the time, I didn’t know about the abandoned $590,000 deposit or that there had never been a real plan for additional housing. I didn’t know Prestige and its suite of sister companies had drawn the attention of the FBI.

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

So I was taken aback when Hayes told me the printer, the size of a small garage when assembled, was stored on his lot.

I asked if he’d show it to me, a request that seemed to take him by surprise. Outside, we walked past rows of vehicles to the back lot. There was no printer — just heat shimmering off blacktop and a long chain-link fence.

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

He’d later tell me it had been there at one point, and he didn’t realize it was gone. That strange episode would set the stage for the interviews that followed.

Over many weeks, we’d spend hours talking in the corner office of his car dealership in Muddy, Illinois — population 40, a fading patch of coal country just outside Harrisburg near the Indiana border.

With an easy, elastic charm, Hayes slid between humor and confession, candor 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 like some big serious whatever.”

Eventually, he’d blame everyone else — including both printer suppliers — for what happened: the stalled project, the cracks and the fact that Cairo still has no new housing.

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

He flew into a rage when I told him the Peri 3D salesperson they’d worked closely with had called his company “shady.” At that point, he promised to find out where it was filed, but over multiple visits, he’d tell me he still hadn’t located it.

I found the lawsuit during a records search at the Saline County Courthouse, steps from Prestige’s office. It turned out that Prestige had filed the suit in early 2025, just as Peri 3D was laying off its U.S. staff. Prestige claimed in the lawsuit that it signed a “mock 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 Prestige’s favor after Peri 3D failed to respond to the lawsuit. In Saline County, where the poverty rate hovers around 20%, nearly double the statewide rate, the lost money stood out. “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 collect it.”

Before I could tell Hayes that I had located the lawsuit, he texted me that afternoon: “Looks like we did sue and won!!!” he wrote. “Who’s the shady one now?” (He later said he couldn’t tell me where the lawsuit had been filed because he’d largely left the business to Burtis to manage.)

Still, he said he was resigned to the fact that they’d likely never collect their money — and to date they haven’t.

Burtis said they can’t locate anyone from Peri 3D. When I followed up with Hayes this month, he acknowledged that the contract made the deposit nonrefundable and said he regrets not reading the fine print. “Every time I’ve done that, I’m like, you know what, gahhh, why do I get screwed? Next time I’m going to read through everything,” he said.

Burtis said Prestige owes the bank roughly $13,000 a month under the terms of its 10-year lending agreement to pay for the original $1.1 million printer; over the full term, the company would pay more than $400,000 in interest. Prestige can’t afford the note; Hayes said he’s paying it out of one of his other business accounts.

In an emailed statement from its German headquarters, Peri 3D said in October that it had conducted 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 had not been delayed in constructing the printer and that it had no knowledge 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 any-f**king-thing going wrong,” he said.

A modern-day Daniel

When I reached out to Fowler in October, he wasn’t vouching for much. He described Burtis and Hayes as acquaintances and himself as “just a guy that wants to help people.” He scoffed at Hayes’ claim that he could speak to any of their business dealings. And he said his role with the Cairo duplex project was minimal, limited to that of a cheerleader.

His attempts to distance himself from the housing plan and 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 touted the project before the state poverty commission he sat on, public records show.

He brought other top state officials into the orbit as well. Three months after Cairo’s duplex block party, 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 Mendoza spokesperson said Fowler asked if she wanted to tour the duplex, but she was not otherwise involved with the company or its owners, and they’ve received no state funding. The posts were removed after I asked the spokesperson if Mendoza had been aware that FBI agents had delivered a subpoena to Prestige’s office just days before her tour.

Fowler didn’t tell me, but I’d later also find out he’d convened Duckworth’s staff to a meeting with Prestige’s owners and the president of Grand Rivers Community Bank in early 2023 — 18 months before the 3D groundbreaking party in Cairo. A Duckworth spokesperson said the senator’s office had just revived discussions about how to address Cairo’s housing crisis when Fowler reached out and that the office did not have additional involvement with the company.

People in Cairo also saw Fowler as key to the deal and reached out to him after it became clear the duplex had been left unfinished.

“When it fell through, we were all calling Sen. Fowler personally, because he brought them here,” said Williams, the council member. According to Williams, Fowler told Cairo officials he was oblivious to Prestige’s business dealings.

Since its founding in September 2021, Prestige has been Fowler’s largest source of campaign donations, not including those from political action and other committees. The company, and others owned by Burtis and Hayes, gave him $22,000 between May 2022 and August 2024. Its final donation of $6,500 was made to Fowler five days after the groundbreaking party for the 3D-printed duplex. Fowler said he doesn’t track who donates to his campaign; he and Burtis said the donation was for Prestige co-sponsoring a golf fundraiser two months earlier.

Fowler, a decadelong state senator who plays a key role shaping his caucus’ legislative priorities as a Republican assistant leader, announced last summer that he wouldn’t seek reelection, citing a 10-year term limit pledge; his term expires in January.

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

Fowler said he’d known Hayes and Burtis for decades and doesn’t believe they’ve done anything wrong.

Still, he said he’d taken some unfair heat over the ordeal — “guilty by affiliation, I guess.”

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 is the modern-day Daniel. In the Old Testament, Daniel was a virtuous believer thrown into the lion’s den by his enemies. But angels closed the lion’s mouth, saving Daniel, while his enemies ended up being “chomped, mutilated, by the lions.” Fowler said the story put him “at peace.”

“I’ve never told this to anyone,” he added. “I’ve never told this to my wife.”

The FBI comes knocking

Not long after I began digging into what happened to the duplex in Cairo, I learned the FBI was also looking into Prestige’s broader business dealings.

Within weeks of the block party, six employees — more than half Prestige’s staff — quit. Then Prestige received a federal grand jury subpoena asking for its financial records, Hayes and Burtis said.

The FBI has also subpoenaed two school districts and the city of Harrisburg for their contracts with and 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 did two projects with Prestige, though he said Fowler had encouraged the city to use the company more. A school district in Eldorado, one of those subpoenaed, ousted the former superintendent in September, in part for failing to get school board approval for about $2 million in payments to Prestige and 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 hyped the 3D printing project to Cairo residents, was one of the employees who quit. When we first met up late last summer, he told me he had become an FBI whistleblower.

Miller told me he’d been taken advantage of, sent to Cairo to sell a false promise the company had no intentions of standing behind. He also told me about a flurry of anonymous emails sent via Proton, an encrypted email service, that accused Prestige of fraud not long after Cairo’s block party. The emails went out to various businesses and schools that had contracted with Prestige.

I, too, had received a Proton email about Prestige. It wasn’t anonymous like the others, but was instead from someone claiming to be a COBOD executive. It directed me to open a DropBox file, but the link didn’t work. That executive told me she’d been impersonated; the company said it takes the matter “very seriously.”

At one point, Miller claimed to me that he was the one who sent the Proton emails — under instructions from the FBI, in an attempt to drum up investigatory leads. The FBI declined to comment, though three law enforcement experts told me this would be highly unlikely. Miller later changed his story, saying he hadn’t sent the emails.

Burtis initially refused to answer my calls, texts and knocks 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, it was like, ‘You need to go ahead and talk to her,’” he said. Tears streaked his face. His aunt sat beside him, taking notes on a legal pad. He blamed Miller for trying to ruin his company and for spreading unfounded rumors about him and Hayes. Miller did not respond when I asked him about Burtis’ claims.

Burtis also said he and Hayes have fully cooperated with the FBI, handing over all the financial records requested in the subpoena, though he said they’d never been interviewed by agents. “If I was really in trouble, don’t you think I’d have been handed an indictment by now?” Burtis said.

His son Josh, who had been put in charge of the 3D printing venture, said the construction issues had been disappointing, but they had been keeping the city updated. Hayes said he’d been fully transparent with me and investigators.

As I asked questions last fall, the printer sat outside on the flatbed, though some parts of it recently moved to Hayes’ car lot.

The cracked house remained abandoned.

Hayes said the concrete “ink” that came with the Black Buffalo 3D printer was faulty and that’s why the printer has been idle since. Black Buffalo 3D said it has offered Prestige a new concrete solution and to find a buyer for the printer if Prestige no longer wants 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 fix the cracks, which they said were nonstructural. But Black Buffalo never showed up, saying its engineer couldn’t sign off on a repair plan without city permits, which don’t exist because they aren’t required. The company, which has sold only two printers in the U.S. since its founding in 2020, filed for bankruptcy in December.

Burtis later said he engaged his own engineering firm to sign off on a remediation plan to fill the cracks with a hydraulic cement, though he declined to share that plan or the company name. Crews were recently working on the duplex; Burtis said the cabinets they ordered did not fit.

Once the duplex is finished, Burtis said, he plans to turn the keys over to the city. Simpson said he will be ready. Still optimistic, the mayor said he hopes someone else will eventually follow through and build homes in Cairo.

Abell, Cairo’s city attorney, said the failed venture has never sat right with him. “I’ve seen a lot of deals fall through,” Abell said. “But we always knew why. Here, we got nothing.”

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

While 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 build back. Today, the only thing that has been built is one duplex, still unfinished.

Mallory, the mother who’d hoped to have a two-bedroom home one day, said she is tired of waiting, as much as Cairo has always felt like home. In mid-March, she applied for a housing assistance program in Chicago. She worries Cairo can’t give her daughter all 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 sighed, with the kind of resignation that comes from being disappointed too many times, it was just “a bunch of broken promises.”

Julia Rendleman contributed reporting to this story. Mollie Simon of ProPublica contributed to research.

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