FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Andrea and Colin Chisholm III, the pair accused of collecting welfare from two states while living like royals, have traded their luxurious lakefront homes for jail cells.

After seven years of allegedly feigning poverty to benefits workers in Minnesota and Florida, the couple is now actually broke. The Chisholms say they can’t afford to post bail, which a Minnesota judge this week raised to $300,000 apiece, so they will remain behind bars while their welfare fraud case is pending in Hennepin County, Minn.

“They haven’t had money to speak of for years,” said Colin Chisholm’s attorney, Thomas Kelly. “He was eligible for welfare benefits in the state of Minnesota and in the state of Florida. They’ve been living off of loans and gifts and odd jobs for years. So he’s impoverished now and he’s been impoverished for a long time.”

They didn’t live like it. Investigators say Andrea Lynne Chisholm, 54, and Colin A.J. Chisholm III, 62, who took in over $165,000 in public assistance from Minnesota, owned a $1.2 million, 83-foot yacht docked at Turnberry Isle in Aventura, Fla., and rented waterfront homes in Lighthouse Point and, after leaving the Sunshine State, Minnesota.

The couple had $3 million tucked away in various bank accounts, some of it from her Cavalier King Charles breeding business, which turned out a Westminster dog show award-winning pup, and some from his Caribbean television company, TCN Networks Inc.

And they presented themselves as Scottish aristocrats, using the titles “Lord” and “Lady.”

The Chisholms were extradited to Minnesota to face charges after being deported from the Bahamas and arrested at Port Everglades, Fla., on April 1. In court documents requesting bail be raised from $150,000, prosecutors wrote that the couple fled the country to escape prosecution – a claim Kelly refuted.

In the Bahamas, neither of the two worked, but Colin Chisholm tried to solicit money to bring Grand Prix racing there and reopen a casino badly damaged in a hurricane. He attempted to arrange for his family to be smuggled to Turks and Caicos or Florida, witnesses told prosecutors.

All those schemes fell apart when Bahamian officials revoked the Chisholms’ visas and sent them back to the U.S.


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