Accounts Deceivable Podcast Series: Season 3, Episode 2 - The Conn No One Saw Coming

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Speaker 1

What was happening was not ethical. And then as we dug deeper and as we went further into the case, it just became more and more evident that not only were we right and it was unethical practices, it was unlawful practices. And we couldn't trust anybody else but each other because people were, we didn't know it at the time, but people were going behind our backs to our supervisors and trying to get us fired. And it became that the only person that you could discuss this with was each other.

Speaker 2

Welcome to season three of Accounts Deceivable, a podcast about white collar crime and the devastating impact it has on people, companies, and communities. This season is about the moment of discovery. What happens to the people who uncover criminal activity in their own companies? We'll help you see fraud through the eyes of three infamous whistleblowers, from the biggest corporate invoice fraud in history to small town criminal masterminds, Accounts Deceivable will explore how fraudsters game the system and hear the stories of the incredibly strong employees who expose them.

In this episode, we meet Sarah Carver and Jennifer Griffith, two former Social Security Administration professionals who leaned on each other through friendship and a shared moral compass to battle misogyny, gaslighting, and even stalking while uncovering government fraud worth more than half a billion dollars, one of the largest in US history. Their story includes corrupt judges and a lawyer dubbed Mr. Social Security, whose marketing tactics were as dubious as his legal ones. It was a seemingly small town con so crazy that it was made into an Apple TV series. But I must warn you, their story does not have a tidy ending, rather one that cautions the ripple effects of fraud beyond just a legal conviction.

Sarah was the first to join the Huntington, West Virginia-based Social Security Administration field office, soon convincing her friend and fellow former paralegal, Jennifer, to join her. For both, the job started like many new jobs do, filled with excitement and promise for a fulfilling and well-paying career in an area that wasn't known for either.

Speaker 1

She was interested in getting involved in this government position because in our area, those government positions are highly sought after, well-paid, you know, well-benefited jobs, and that just wasn't the norm for paralegals in our area to have good income.

Speaker 2

But sadly, the shine of their new government jobs began to tarnish with their dreams of helping those who desperately needed help with social security claims giving way to a much harsher reality.

Speaker 1

It was a different world for us in government service. I always felt like everything was based on numbers and not so much about the people that we were there to serve, and having had a background as paralegals, we are focused on the client, the person that we're trying to help, the person we're trying to win the case for. And at Social Security, it always felt like that even though they hired us based on our past experience and our education as paralegals, it always felt like it was more about how quickly we could process things and get things out the door. And it was always a, you know, quantity over quality situation.

Speaker 2

The situation only worsened when their hearing office director retired, opening the door for Jennifer's manager to step into the role, where he made it clear that the office's number one priority should be the quantity of cases cleared, ensuring that he had the opportunity for the prestigious and monetary benefits afforded to the top nationally-ranked field offices.

Speaker 3

Everything was a number. So every meeting was, okay, here's our goal. Here's where we're at today.

Here's how many cases are in this status. And here is where we need to be tomorrow. We were always reminded where we were ranked nationally. There was, I think, maybe 140 offices throughout The United States of hearing offices, and he wanted to be in that top three.

And generally, we were in that top three out of all offices.

When he took over, those numbers mattered so much to him that he didn't care how we got to those numbers. And if it meant bypassing the normal procedures and policies, he seemed to be perfectly fine with that as long as he got his numbers.

Speaker 2

This pressure to clear cases paved the dangerous path that allowed one infamous local lawyer to cash in, all but guaranteeing his clients that he could push their cases through the system faster than anyone else. No one could have suspected the lengths he would go to keep that promise. The lawyer? A man ever so ironically named Eric Conn.

Speaker 3

And a month in, you got a sense of there were a lot of Eric Conn cases.

And these cases were treated differently and prioritized over all other cases. We had a large amount of cases. So I would say, you know, we had a good 50 or 60% of cases in our office were Eric Conn cases. It was clear that he was treated different.

Speaker 2

So who is Eric Conn? Well, it depends on who you ask. To many in the Eastern Kentucky area, he was a local celebrity known for everything from his billboards dotting the highways to his Conn hotties, wearing his t-shirts and handing out beads at local festivals to live monkeys featured in many of his commercials. But most importantly to our story, he was considered to have written the book on gaming the social security system.

Speaker 3

He called himself Mr. SSI and had that on his license plate.

Speaker 1

He was over the top in his advertisement of himself. He says in some interviews that some may call him a marketing genius. Well, in our area, nobody did things like that and he did get the quantity of clients in.

But there comes a time in the process of his representing people that he starts to circumvent the normal disability process.

While recording bluegrass commercials and throwing Mardi Gras beads.

Speaker 2

To understand how Mr. Conn was able to game the protocols the Social Security office had in place, we first need to understand how a case makes its way through the official process. Once a case is submitted, it gets filed away awaiting a hearing date. A waiting period that can be anywhere from twelve to twenty four months.

Once a hearing date is established, the cases are distributed at random to a rotation of judges. This step in the process is the most crucial to our story, as it was meant to put a stop to judge shopping, where lawyers try to stack their cases with favorable judges. Yet, Mr. Conn's office did their best to circumnavigate the protections that Sarah and Jennifer's office put in place, even to the detriment of his own clients.

Speaker 3

A lot of times you would call an attorney's office, specifically like Eric Conn, and their secretary or paralegal would say, well, who's the judge gonna be on this case? And if you told them it was, you know, judge John, and they'd be, well, Eric's busy that day. So our office developed a policy specifically to prevent that by saying, these cases are signed out on a rotation.

Speaker 1

Yeah, because they had learned to circumvent the tally count by just saying, oh, we're not available. And then you'd call again, oh, we're not available, and it would go on and on and on. His clients would be missing hearings because he was trying to wait out the judge and it got so bad that when some of his clients would actually get a hearing finally, but it was with a judge he wouldn't want, he would tell them to withdraw that application and basically start over fresh, meaning that they were waiting even longer just so he could get the judge he wanted.

Speaker 2

And who were the judges he wanted? Ones who would be wowed by an extravagant yet questionable lifestyle.

Speaker 3

Eric also started having parties at his house, and he would entertain certain judges at our office at his home where he had a stripper pole in the basement of his home. And he would this was actually done. He would roll out the red carpet literally when certain judges from our office came to his house. Well, then he would have young girls over and some of them didn't speak English.

Speaker 2

Eventually, Mr. Conn found his partners in judges David B. Daugherty and Charlie Paul Andrus, two men with wildly different personalities and office reputations. But I think it's fair to refer to them as two sides of the same corrupt coin. Judge David B. Daugherty was an administrative law judge at our office. He was a previous county judge that heard cases, a magistrate, and he was retired from that.

Speaker 3

We really enjoyed judge Daugherty. Judge Daugherty was always a person who contributed to office parties or a present or a birthday cake. He would take employees out on his boat. He would take them to the country club that were his favorite employees. If he really liked you, he liked you, and if he didn't like you, you knew about it.

Speaker 1

Judge Charlie Paul Andrus was the chief administrative law judge for our office, and then later on down the road after I leave, he becomes the regional chief administrative law judge. So he was essentially over Judge Dougherty. And Charlie Paul Andrus was one of the most arrogant, misogynistic men you'll ever meet. He was difficult to deal with and he was not exactly well-liked and didn't have a high opinion of women.

Speaker 2

Soon, a recognizable pattern started to form. Cases were getting favorably decided far faster than the twelve to twenty four month average. Sometimes only a few days or a few months was all it took for Mr. Conn to have his cases favorably decided and squared away. This was the turning point for Jennifer and Sarah when they realized that maybe judge Daugherty had taken a big step beyond his usual favoritism into fraud.

Speaker 3

We started pulling some of his schedules to see that the average ALJ heard anywhere from four to six cases a day, anywhere from four to five days a week. Judge Daugherty on the other hand would have sometimes 20 cases. And instead of being an hour and a half apart, like most judges would have them an hour, hour and fifteen minutes, his were literally set every ten or fifteen minutes apart. It was a cattle call.

Speaker 2

The timing of hearings is key to this case because each of the hearings involve a vocational expert, a court reporter, an attorney, a claimant, a judge, and oftentimes a witness. So to decide a case in fifteen minutes meant the judge was leaving just enough time to swear in, go on the record saying it's a favorable decision, and excuse all parties involved. This resulted in not only payouts for a large percentage of Mr. Conn's clients, but court reporters and vocational experts fighting to be on judge Dougherty's docket as they made a $175 per claimant. So the more the merrier in their opinion, but the opportunity of payout for Mr. Conn was far greater. Let's put those numbers in perspective.

Speaker 1

If, for example, Eric Conn had 1,500 client decisions a month or whatever, you know what I mean? When they get upset with us because we're bringing these issues to light and they stop all these hearings, that means that every single one of Eric Conn's clients from 2007 until 2011 with this one judge was decided favorably on the record without a hearing, which means they bypassed every protocol, every policy and went straight to "here's a check."

Speaker 2

So it's no surprise that when Sarah and Jennifer started making some noise, trouble found its way to their door. But before we find out just what kind of trouble, a brief word from our sponsor, Medius.

Speaker 4

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Speaker 2

We're back just in time to get the real meat of our story. How Jennifer and Sarah went about gathering evidence to prove their increasingly strong suspicions of untoward behavior in the social security office and their first break came because of some unlikely advice from Jennifer's father.

Speaker 1

So I have a nasty habit of putting read receipts and delivery receipts on all of my email. When I took that job, my dad said, cover your ass.

Always. You can't trust anybody.

And I put that read receipt and delivery receipt on my email. Well, what I would find was they would have their messages up on preview so they could see it without actually clicking it open so it wouldn't mark read. So we started spacing down like a full page length in our emails so that they couldn't see it on preview and they had to open it. So everything went out, read receipt, delivery receipt, had the tracking information.

Speaker 2

But the office quickly caught on and enacted several policies they hoped would kneecap the women's efforts, including a policy banning read receipts and eventually a policy that banned retaining emails and inboxes altogether. Soon, vicious rumors and theories began to spread about Sarah and Jennifer around how they got their information. The phrase planting a bug was tossed around more than once to the point that Sarah was barred from stepping foot into their supervisor's office unless they had a pre-agreed appointment, a notetaker was present, and the door was never allowed to be closed. In reality, good old-fashioned stupidity was what was helping them lay the groundwork for their case.

Speaker 1

But in reality, all that we were doing was running the reports that were available to us in the system. We didn't do anything that they couldn't do. Okay, then they would have a nasty habit of printing to the wrong printer. So sometimes they print their print jobs into one of our printers and we just grab them up and walk off with them. And the funniest thing was they had shred bins that they would just put the stuff in the shred bin.

So we could just go by and just grab it. But then when they figured out we were doing that, then they bought locked shred bins.

Speaker 2

Oh, if you're wondering, yes, they did use those shredders to dispose of documents when they were raided by the Department of Justice. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Now, it's 2011, Jennifer has since left the office, but Sarah is still fighting the good fight from within, despite being near constantly investigated for made-up charges. Her work product constantly being called into question. She was even disciplined for rushing to her daughter's aid after a severe car accident event. Even after letting her supervisor know that she would be absent. Yet she continued to gather evidence until one day, a Wall Street Journal reporter began to catch wind of a possible story.

Speaker 1

I was contacted in April 2011 about a Wall Street Journal reporter who had done a story on another Social Security office, a different type of fraud, and he had reviewed some online statistics and thought that their numbers were really funny in our office, and he contacted a former judge, and that former judge put him in contact with with me. He came in and sat down and talked to us and that began kind of like a relationship with him as far as a lot of communication, a lot of visits to Huntington.

And he interviewed some other people, other judges in our office too. And he started working on a big investigative story.

Speaker 2

Interestingly, the same day The Wall Street Journal reporter contacted Jennifer, an officer from the office of the inspector general also reached out looking to discuss an anonymous complaint she had filed months earlier. He waited for her outside her place of work and when she agreed to talk, she recorded the conversation knowing he was only there and ready to investigate because they knew The Wall Street Journal was going to break something. And that something was big enough to make significant waves. But the social security office was woefully unprepared to deal with internal fraud. They only watched for those who tried to defraud them on claims from the outside, never thinking to look at the judges on the inside.

Suddenly, it became Sarah and Jennifer's jobs to both educate a massive government body in order to prove their case.

Speaker 3

We came prepared, we had because social security can be a very complex, difficult system to explain. Yeah, and there's procedures and we just brought, we made a notebook and we tabbed it like a binder and we gave each one of them and we explained to them, okay, your first tab, this is the social security appeal process.

This is you know, this is how the case is done. Okay, now, if you look at this exhibit, you're going to see a normal hearing log, like a normal schedule for a normal judge, then you're going to look and you're going to see this is a schedule for judge Daugherty. And you know what? They understood it. They grasped it enough to where they knew what reports and what to ask for, you know, from the Social Security to do their investigation.

We did the same thing for the office of inspector general, and they still said there was no smoking gun. They didn't understand the significance of what we were telling them.

Speaker 1

The same evidence that we gave to the congressional committee is the same evidence we gave to the office of the inspector general. One could figure it out, one couldn't.

And that's a problem because that's literally their job. And I remember we were in that meeting and they kept calling more people to come into this meeting like, you're not going to believe this.

Speaker 3

What was supposed to be a thirty minute meeting with the oversight committee ended up being an eight hour. I mean, it was the first day, eight hour.

Speaker 2

From there, Sarah and Jennifer were scheduled for meetings with other senators not a part of that committee, each of those lasting for hours as well. The lead investigators filled up notebook after notebook with the information the women shared, all new facts to them, despite it being their job to investigate the very loopholes that were being brought to light in a conference room in Washington DC. So with the investigation well underway, and seemingly no light at the end of the tunnel, would the men of the Social Security office give up their campaign of abuse against Sarah? The answer is sadly no.

Speaker 3

Their investigations were targeted in such a way that it was harassment.

They came after us rather hard. That was a privilege at that time that we got to work from home one day a week. And so what they set out and tried to do, judge Andrus, which was the chief ALJ, had contacted Eric Conn and said, hey, I think I know a way we can get her. If I can show that she's leaving her house at any point during the day and not requesting leave, then we can fire her.

So Eric's like, okay. You know, I have a guy that can do the job.

And it ended up being Curtis Wyatt.

And Curtis Wyatt was known he was a local guy. He was really kind of one of these guys that kind of just did a little bit of everything for Eric. It was whether it be mowing grass or errands or delivering something, he was just his go-to, you know, guy, maintenance worker, you name it. But they referred to him as a private investigator, but I don't think he was ever professionally trained.

And but he did have a bag of very large guns, assault rifles, very many of them. And that was his Facebook profile.

And apparently that's the guy who which I didn't know at the time, was hired to follow me and try to discredit me and ultimately get me fired.

Speaker 2

But considering Sarah was an upstanding employee and single mother just trying to keep a hold on her job, it's unsurprising Mr. Wyatt could not catch her in the act. There was simply no act to catch. So he started getting more aggressive with his tactics.

Speaker 3

Little did I know that this man was sitting on a hillside overlooking my home, videotaping me and my children on days that I wasn't working at home because he couldn't get footage.

He couldn't get me leaving my home. So he had to falsify the footage.

Speaker 2

So what did all this anguish get Sarah and Jennifer? Certainly not the vindication they had hoped for.

While Eric Conn and judge Dougherty did end up going to jail for their crimes, and judge Andrus was convicted for his part in harassing Sarah in an attempt to get her fired, many feel their punishment should have been worse. Mainly in that, while both judges were convicted, they got to retain their valuable government pensions, despite the harm they did to the government itself. Meanwhile, Jennifer and Sarah, despite working to help the government, had to quit over the course of the investigation, forgoing their pensions. But perhaps the worst injustice of it all? Instead of the government cracking down on opportunities for fraud within the social security system, they punished claimants, making the task of applying for benefits even more arduous.

Speaker 1

And so now the burden of proof is much more stringent on disability applicants and the hurdles that they have to jump through are so much more significant.

And a lot of that, I'd say better than 90% of that is our fault.

And instead of dealing with the problem and dealing with the people that created this situation, they have then in turn blocked everybody from seeing what they're doing and taken it out on the claimants.

Speaker 2

Additionally, Jennifer and Sarah were denied the funds owed to them for being government whistleblowers. Funds that would have helped make up for lost job opportunities, forfeited pensions, and the overall mental anguish that comes with being a whistleblower. Why? Well, they believe it's because of the second time they chose to make a report for the greater good.

Speaker 1

We made another disclosure.

Speaker 3

Which made the Department of Justice look bad.

Speaker 1

And that was that when Eric Conn left his office, he left all his claimant files in there. And he left it, I mean, he just walked away.

And there are people that killed themselves because they could not get their files. They are being redetermined because of this case, having their benefits taken away, being told they owe millions, thousands of dollars back and they need their file that Eric Conn had and they were told it was destroyed. But it wasn't destroyed, it was sitting in his office. And we went would let into that office, we found it, we disclosed it again, and the Department of Justice told us to keep our mouth shut.

Speaker 2

Now, years later, neither holds out a lot of hope they'll ever see that money nor feel real closure from a case that dominated so many years of their lives. The one small glimmer of hope at the end of this long and complicated tale is the work Jennifer and Sarah have dedicated themselves to helping social security claimants navigate the process and the unexpected remorse they've received from Mr. Conn behind bars. But given they were at the heart of uncovering one of the largest fraud cases in US history, don't you think they deserved more?

For more chilling stories from victims and fraudsters alike, check out the Accounts Deceivable podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever else you get your audio fix.