Sooner or later, fate, the law, the government or even pizza will put an end to unethical behavior. Eric Conn, an attorney whose specialty was disability law, put together a massive scheme to commit social security fraud to the tune of $550 million.
The Eric Conn case went to trial in 2016, and as the saying goes he was guilty as sin. He was given a 12-year jail sentence and fined about $
83 million. Prior to starting to serve his sentence in June 2017, he removed his GPS device and fled to Honduras. He was caught by Honduran SWAT police outside of a Domino’s Pizza joint in La Ceiba, turned over to the FBI and he is making the return trip to the states as we speak.
Authorities had had been tracking Eric Conn for weeks, but his own attorney, a man faithful to the end said:
“It does appear from the reporting that Eric Conn was taken into custody by some uniformed group in Honduras, but given the security situation in Honduras and the dangerous gangs operating there as has been reported as recently as the last few weeks in relation to its election, then who knows who these masked folks are, for whom they work, or if Eric has even been lawfully seized. Those may or may not be issues for either our courts or the Honduran courts.”
Oh please. Let’s re-wind the calendar a bit and introduce two women who Eric Conn shoved into the center of the storm: Ms. Griffith and Ms. Carver. About 13 or 14 years ago, the women were working for the Huntington, W. Va., branch of the Social Security Administration’s Office of Disability Adjudication and Review. By all accounts they are highly ethical women who noted a peculiar pattern of a relationship between David Daugherty, an administrative law judge and Attorney Conn. It seemed as though every time Eric Conn filed a social security disability claim for one of his “clients,” David Daugherty “rubber-stamped” it. This practice went on for years.
They finally listened to Ms. Griffith and Ms. Carver in 201l, after a story about Daugherty’s unethical behavior appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Daugherty was apparently on the take.
By 2016, a massive case was built. Conn had billed the U.S. government of more than $550 million. He had created an entire bribery network where disability claims, both real and fictitious (mainly fictitious) were processed for thousands of claimants. Daugherty himself had accepted a whopping $600,000 in bribes from Conn.
Conn is the ultimate con man. Even after he was arrested he convinced one of his ex-employees to buy a pickup truck for him for cash to aid in his escape. The employee opened bank accounts for Conn, and scouted escape routes. Conn was able to convince just about anyone of anything. He got amazing results. Perhaps too amazing.
Eric Conn – Network of Bribery
Using his network of bribes and favors, Conn all but guaranteed to his poor disability clients he would give them the guaranteed results they sought, and he did. These claimants were legitimately poor, badly injured in coal mining accidents.
However, Conn was no Robin Hood. The legitimate claims were mixed in with unethical, non-existent claims. Now, as this massive case of fraud becomes undone, at least 800 legitimate clients may lose their benefits for months or even years until everything is straightened out.
For this case to have worked at all, required Conn – a lawyer – to extend his obvious lack of ethics to other lawyers and judges. These are individuals presumably dedicated to the law. What makes this particular case of fraud so troubling is that it “jumped the tracks,” going from the private sector to government. Neither side cared that the poor, the victims, got hurt. The very people who should have been helped and protected were treated with disdain.
I find the legal profession, as with many others, are becoming increasingly insular. The ethical training received is predictable, by rote, merely satisfying a set of requirements. This ethical scandal underscores the dangers of that approach, all the way to a pizza shop in Honduras.
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