I may be able to add a bit of knowledge to the mix, but I had to step back from the Lawing swamp a few years back for my own mental health.
About 5 years ago, Lawing had two pieces of real proptery in Tennessee: the Mill Branch Road shop where he was "building" replicas, and a house and land on Beeson Ridge Road, where he lived. The Mill Branch Road property went into foreclosure a few years back when Lawing quit making payments. An online item actually stated that he made a payment with a check that didn't clear "for insufficient funds". Go figure. During that time, he moved the shop to his Beeson Ridge Road property where he lived. He must have done a workout with his lender, because he moved back to the shop a few months later.
He currently has at least one active court case with an unknown judgement/settlement in place, but I don't know details. It may be that the court judgement included a standard warning to "obey all laws, don't re-offend, etc., and Lawing is doing his usual song-and-dance to show the court that he is trying to run a legitimate business, as sad and laughable as that is. I don't know the above is fact, but reasonable speculation on why he responded to GP in the way he did, and why he would care about the actions of his many victims.
Much of what Lawing does is designed to hide the fact that he intends to defraud his victims all along. The most severe punishments and fines for both criminal and civil fraud are reserved for those fact patterns that show intent and repetition. That's why he comes up with these immature scenarios of the "dog ate my homework" excuses. None of us really know how long he has been scamming his victims, but it's been ongoing for at least 20 years.
I couldn't continue to let him rule my thoughts. I had to cut him loose. Sooner or later, we all sit down to a banquet of consequences. I have wished all the bad things possible for him that you can imagine. I have now stuffed him into a tiny box in my memory, which will bloom like a spring garden if/when I hear that the "bad things" happened. Sad, I know, that I can't forgive, but that's the best I can do.