“Everything is a mess,” said Mr. MacKinnon, 55. “I got two dividend payments and then everything stopped. It was supposed to be a pretty safe deal.”Like many others, Mr. MacKinnon invested in the Nelson Partners deals through what are called private placements, a kind of unregulated offering that is often pitched to well-off individual investors by securities brokers. The arrangements — which generated millions of dollars in fees for Mr. Nelson’s firm and the brokers that set up the deals — were popular with investors because they could take advantage of a provision in the federal tax code called a 1031 exchange. That allowed them to defer paying …
