The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Mississippi Swindle: Brett Favre and the Welfare Scandal that Shocked America by Shad White

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

Mississippi Swindle: Brett Favre and the Welfare Scandal that Shocked America by Shad White https://amzn.to/3AiG7PF How America’s youngest state auditor uncovered the largest public corruption scandal in the history of the nation’s poorest state “A must read” with all the thrills of a John Grisham novel — for fans of shocking true crime exposés like Black Edge and Bad Blood (Peter Schweizer, author of Secret Empires) This riveting exposé details how a small team of auditors and investigators, led by the youngest State Auditor in the country, uncovered a brazen scheme where the powerful stole millions in welfare funds from the poor in a sprawling conspiracy that stretched from Mississippi to Malibu. Well-connected donors, highly placed officials, and popular public figures diverted tens of millions of dollars from the federal government's TANF — temporary assistance for needy families — program until a Republican auditor, his small team of dedicated investigators, and a Democratic prosecutor joined forces to hold them accountable in the face of intense obstruction and harassment. Peopled with unforgettable characters — from the perpetrators; to the impoverished citizens for whom the money was intended; to the investigators, prosecutors, and reporters who held them to account — Mississippi Swindle is a political and true crime drama that highlights larger crises while appealing to a broad nationwide audience.About the author Shad White is the State Auditor of Mississippi. During his tenure, the auditor’s office has uncovered more waste, fraud, and abuse than any other time in state history. Shad is also a prolific writer on fraud, and his work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Hill, and other publications. He is a certified fraud examiner and holds degrees from Harvard Law, the University of Oxford where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of Mississippi. He lives with his wife and three children in Flowood, Mississippi. He serves as a captain in the Mississippi National Guard.

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All those crazy places on the internet That you can find us We have an amazing young man on the show. We're going to be talking to him about his insightful journalistic book that he's just put out. It's called Mississippi Swindle, Brett Favre, and the Welfare Scandal That Shocked America. It's out August 6th, tomorrow, 2024. And I've been wondering about this story because it's been all over the place. And now we're finally going to get to lowdown right from the people who are in charge of overseeing it. 2024. And I've been wondering about this story because it's been all over the place and now

we're finally going to get to lowdown right from the people who are in charge of overseeing it. So we'll be talking to him about his amazing book. Shad White is the state auditor of Mississippi. During his tenure, the auditor's office has uncovered more waste, fraud, and abuse than any other time in state history. It's Mississippi. No, I'm just kidding. I'm teasing the old South. Chad is also a prolific writer on fraud, and his work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Hill, and other publications. He's a certified fraud examiner and holds degrees from Harvard Law, the University of

Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar in the University of Mississippi. Sounds like he should be a governor. Hold on, he might be too smart. He lives with his wife and three children in Flowood, Mississippi, and he serves as a captain of the Mississippi National Guard. Welcome to the show, Shad. Thanks for coming. Yeah, thank you for having me, brother.

It's an honor to be here. There you go. I think the Rhodes Scholar disqualifies you from being a high-level politician. You're too smart. Something like that. I don't know. Who knows? Who knows? I don't know. I've insulted half of the electorate in Mississippi, I guess, now at this point.

So I've lost all five people listening to the show there. Mississippi Swindle, give us a 30,000 overview. What's in your new book? Sure. Yeah. The book is about the largest welfare scandal, largest public fraud scandal in the history of the state of Mississippi. So my team here at the auditor's office and I, we uncovered this large fraud scam back several years ago. And the short version of the story is over $100 million of welfare funds were spent. So spent on things like donations to beauty pageants, advertisements at college bowl games, out of state, just stuff that you can't spend welfare money on. And then some portion of that was taken fraudulently. And so now fast forward several years, seven people have pleaded guilty to either state or federal charges.

And this book tells the story of how we found out about this, how we investigated it, and who did what down here in Mississippi. I think the real goal of the book is to tell taxpayers what happened, but also I hope that folks around the country will read it so that what happened here doesn't happen in their state as well. There you go. Hold your politicians accountable and I suppose your state authorities. Was there any certain people that were central? I mean, who was in charge of this money that was bad with it? Yeah, the central person here at the heart of this is John Davis, who is the head of the Department of Human Services. That's the agency down here in Mississippi, at least, that runs

TANF funds, so typically what's known as welfare funds. And because he's the head of the agency at the time, he's the one directing a lot of the spending. And he was the one who ultimately pleaded guilty to both federal and state charges related to a lot of these different transactions. And then the other people around him were folks who were friends of his, maybe who benefited from the welfare funds, or there were folks who were running a nonprofit who entered into a conspiracy with John to misspend the funds. But he's really one of the central figures at the middle of it. Wow. So how did Brett Favre get caught up in all this? Yeah. So as we were doing our audit and our criminal investigation, we found three different

buckets of money that related to Favre. The first was a chunk of $1.1 million that went to FARV Enterprises. And when we dug in, we found that there was what looked to be a contract that required him to give certain speeches and do certain things. And he had not done those things, but the money still flowed to FARV Enterprises. Now we have no idea if he knew he was supposed to give these speeches, but for us, it doesn't matter in terms of the law. What matters is, did you do the things that are required under the contract? No, then you can't be paid the $1 million. Second big bucket of funds was a bucket of funds that went to a company called Prevacus. So Prevacus was an experimental concussion treatment company. Brett Favre was a major investor in Prevacus. So Prevacus was an experimental concussion treatment company. Brett Favre was a

major investor in Prevacus. And now fast forward a few years, you may have seen this a couple of weeks ago, Chris, the head of Prevacus, a guy named Jacob Van Landingham has pleaded guilty to federal wire fraud for his role in all of this. And then finally, third bucket of money, it was a chunk of money that went to pay for a very high end volleyball court at the University of Southern Mississippi. Brett Favre is an alum of Southern Mississippi. His daughter was there at the time and playing volleyball. And so those were the three big tranches of money that we saw that related to Favre. And we released all this in an audit back in mid-2020. Shortly after that, we know from text messages that Mr. Favre texted one of his associates and said he wanted to stick it to them. And I take it them is me and my team.

Of course, shortly after that, Mr. Favre on social media, he said that we lied. And of course, that implies that we made all of this stuff up. This is all just the truth based on the documents that we gathered. He sued me for defamation for talking about what's happened here. So that's really the way Mr. Favre became involved in all of this stuff. Wow. He seemed like such a nice guy in the football era. I mean, he did take a few too many concussions, maybe. He's got kind of Aaron Rogers mode, maybe. I don't know. I'm probably going to sue him now But... I lost it right now. There you go. There you go. I'm getting a call now.

From the attorneys. CND is coming across my text message. You know, this... I mean, it was kind of interesting. It seemed like there was some... You know, you hear about rich people using donations to, you know, buy things for colleges to get their kids, you know, favorite spots in colleges and stuff. And when I...

That was the part that i heard about the the volleyball thing i think in the building building or court or something like that i was like i mean that's it i mean stealing money from the poor to give to the rich i mean when did that become bad in america i'd say this you know you said the word stealing he has not been charged with a crime yeah this so So the real issue here that we that we discovered in the audit is that this money flowed. It is not an allowable use of TANF funds. And so as a result, the state is suing him, but suing him in civil court to try to get this money back. So that's an important distinction to make there.

And look, I would say this, too. You talk about football fans out there. I grew up in rural Southern Mississippi. I grew up maybe 40 minutes or so from USM, University of Southern Mississippi, where he played football. My mom is a USM graduate. Every little boy growing up in rural South Mississippi knows about Brett Favre because he was one of us who came from South Mississippi. Half of them idolize him. So this is not news to me at all. And as you can imagine, there were days when it became very difficult to do my job because of the public criticism. But also at the same time, the job is pretty simple. You dig up the facts about how

taxpayer money was spent and you tell the public and you don't let anybody dissuade you from doing that. So that's what we kept our eye on here. There you go. I mean, is he hurting for money? I mean, he should have made a lot of money in the NFL. Does he really need some of this money? I would have just returned it and said, oops, my bad. I have no idea. When we first released the audit, he did write a check for $500,000 back to the state. And then through

his intermediaries at Favre Enterprises, he made a commitment, according to them, to repay the rest of it in installments. And so then nothing happened for quite a while. So at some point, more than a year later, my office said, we're just going to issue demands, which are just letters saying you need to repay the money. We're going to issue demands to Mr. Favre and all these other people who needed to repay the money. And so we did that. He repaid another $600,000. But of course, the state is still suing him for the additional funds. And we're suing him in the auditor's office for the interest on those funds. So if this was just a normal case where we had somebody down the street who owed $1,000 back to the state, we don't give them an interest-free loan. We make them pay it back

plus interest. And so this litigation is still going on right now. There you go. And is there any sort of criminal investigation still? Is there anything going on with him criminally-wise, or is this all civil? What I would say is seven other people have pleaded guilty to state or federal charges. And really, at this point, in terms of a criminal investigation, my office has finished what we're doing. The FBI, of course, has— I think we dropped down a little bit. There you are. So the FBI—it dropped down a little bit. There you are. So the FBI, it dropped down a little bit there.

So the FBI has got a still investigation going? Yeah, so the FBI has had its own independent investigation, but they, to be honest with you, they have not asked us a question about the case in a long time. So really where we are in the criminal investigation is the investigation piece is by and large done and the facts have been dug up. What's left is that prosecutors have to make their final decisions about whether or not they want to charge anyone else with a crime. And so we'll find out over the course of the next couple of months, probably whether or not they intend to do that.

Yeah. According to the Internet, Brett Farr's net worth May 29th, 2024 is a hundred million. Come on, Brett, let's get on this. Tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you grow up? Is this your first book and what prompted you want to write the book and tell the story? Yeah, this is my first book to answer your question. I'm by training, I'm an attorney and a certified fraud examiner. So that's how I got to be in this role as the state auditor of Mississippi. I grew up in rural Mississippi. I grew up in a town of about 700 people. My dad's an oil field pumper. My mom was a school teacher, is now retired. And so I always grew up knowing that I wanted to be back in

Mississippi. I love the state. I wanted to raise a family here. And so I went off to Ole Miss and then I left. I lived in England for a bit and then I came back home and studied law at Harvard and then moved back to Mississippi shortly after that, practiced law for a little bit and serving the National Guard down here as a captain of the National Guard and eventually got into this job. And I've been state auditor for the past six years. I really started writing this book as we were doing this case, mainly out of frustration, to be honest with you, because really early on, my office and the local district attorney down here, we seem to be the only two offices doing anything about this. And as you can imagine, it was frustrating. We had arrested

some high profile individuals at that point. I was sitting in church one Sunday after we made those arrests and a woman turned around to me in the pew in front of me after church was over and confronted me about it and told me that I was completely wrong about these people that we had arrested. So there's a ton of public pressure at that moment. And that was the moment when I started starting jotting down thoughts of, you know, what had happened here? Why did we make the decisions that we made in my office? And over time, I kept refining that and refining that. And it kind of started to turn into stories and then book and then the book. And and yeah, at that point, I thought, you know what, this is this is something that people need to read. This is a complicated case. We need to be able to,

folks need to be able to read about this all in one place in a story form so that it's easy to follow. And again, the big picture goal is make sure this doesn't happen anywhere else again. And hopefully the book helps achieve that. There you go. It's even billed as a must read with all the thrills of a John Grisham novel for fans of shocking true crime exposes. You know, it was so it's that old thing. The truth is stranger than fiction sometimes. And there's some stories that you hear about that you're just like, it can't be real. And you're like, wow, it is.

I mean, it felt that way. You just can't write it any better. Did you get death threats or any sort of threats from, you know, going after the blessed state son, Brett Favre? Yeah, I did get some threats. To be honest with you, most of those threats, they came by, you know, social media and that sort of thing. And it felt like a lot of them were coming from Wisconsin, not Mississippi necessarily. You know, I probably can't run for state auditor of Wisconsin. But what I would say, I was there last month and nothing.

Oh, there you go. Just buy some cheese. You'll make it. They'll make them happy. Yeah. I had some, I had some Wisconsin beer. They, they, they make great stuff up there, but I would say this, you know, I knew when I got into this job that that was always possible. And whether you're talking about a high profile case or a case against a local mayor, you can make people mad just by telling them the truth about what happened

with taxpayer money. And so I knew that going in and did the best I could to brush that off, not think about it and just keep going forward. Do you hope that, you know, we've seen examples where state officials, sometimes, you know, you kind of expect things from governors and stuff. But, you know, we've seen things from state officials and state people that go above and beyond and stand in the face of sometimes danger and sometimes threats. And they stand up to do what's's right and there's a right and wrong in in this country you know ben rathisberger is a name that comes to mind there's a few other names

in the recent voting thing voting workers people like yourself do you do you hope that that kind of inspires other people in in maybe who work in different divisions of government of government to say, hey, you know what? We need to stand up for what's right sometimes instead of just rolling over for what goes on. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I also hope that it inspires whistleblowers to come forward too if they know of wrongdoing,

even if they're not in a job like mine where your job is to investigate or a prosecutor's job where their job is to prosecute. I talked about this a little bit in the end of the book. You know, my folks who are my age have a very have a very intimate relationship with the notion of fraud because we lived through 2008. And when I say we lived through it, I mean, I graduated college in the year 2008 when the economy is crashing because of a fraudulent mortgage system that existed in this country. And a lot of people who are my age, they're still having trouble accruing wealth because we started our careers right at that really terrible moment. And I think a lot of people

are skeptical of power. They're skeptical of government bailouts for that reason. And really, I think for this generation, for folks my age, it's important for anybody who ends up in a position where they can report fraud or where they can investigate or prosecute fraud to do that and to do it well, because doing that over and over, over time is the, is really the only way you restore faith in the American Republic. And the idea that we, we are not living in a world that's being rigged by a big corporation or somebody in charge of a giant government agency who's running it to their own benefit. There you go. Unless you're on the SCOTUS, then you can just get free RVs. i don't know what that means but no you're right people need to stand up and go there is a difference between right and wrong

it is not it is not you know you know there's uh whatever you know it's a it's not black and white no it is there's there's a right and a wrong way to do things and when it comes to ethics morals and integrity we need more of that in this this country. I noticed here in the bio too, this was also, the word escapes me, but you had a Republican auditor and a team of investigators with a Democratic prosecutor. You guys basically, this didn't become a political thing between one party and the other. So working together was good. That's absolutely right. So the local DA down here in the county that I'm in right now is a Democrat. And so part of my thought process when we were wrapping up this investigation is I need to take this to a prosecutor initially who can, one, move on it quickly. Because dollars at that moment were still flowing out the door to one of these nonprofits who had misspent millions and

millions of taxpayer funds. So I wanted to do that. And then two, my thought was we need to give the public some assurance that this case is going to be fully investigated and prosecuted to the fullest. And so part of the way you do that is to give the case to a prosecutor who's across the aisle. And then, you know, you've got a Republican investigator, an elected Republican investigator, an elected Democrat who's a prosecutor handling the case. He did move very, very quickly, reviewed the case file, asked tough questions, decided to indict six individuals. And so those six individuals were arrested. We arrested them in February of 2020. And effectively, that cut off the flow of funds and stopped the bleeding. After that, we took our case findings,

took them over to the FBI. Of course, the FBI could do their own investigation. They take what they learn and they give it over to the U.S. Attorney's Office. At the end of this, four years later, we've had two investigative bodies, the Office of the State Auditor and the FBI, two different prosecutors, the local DA and the U.S. Attorney's Office, and an independent CPA firm based out of Baltimore, Maryland to dig into all this. So suffice it to say, all the facts get dug up when you have a process that's that robust. And really what was left at the end of all that is to tell the story of what we found. There you go. I think I watched Brett Favre's last game where he was, I think it was against the Vikings,

and he threw that interception and lost the run in the Super Bowl. So now I don't feel so bad for him anymore. I don't remember who it was. Was he playing the Vikings or the New Orleans Saints? I don't remember. Anyway, were there people harmed by this? I mean, you're talking $100 million that were rerouted from this program for temporary assistance for needy families. Were there families that were harmed or shortchanged that this has had an impact on the ground for them?

Absolutely. I mean, the purpose of temporary assistance for needy families is to assist needy folks. When you take $100 million and you spend it on other things, yeah, that's $100 million that are not going to those people. I'll give you an example. If we had converted that into a tax cut, so an earned income tax cut, a lot of states do that. They'll take their welfare funds and they'll say if anybody goes from being unemployed to being employed, they immediately get a tax cut paid for by welfare dollars. You're talking about thousands and thousands of dollars for individual families who could have benefited. There's also another knock-on effect after it's all over. It's that not only did we misspend over $100 million as a state, but the state has not yet really figured out how it wants

to spend TANF funds. So the state's been accruing this surplus of TANF funds since we made our arrest. The state, the last time I checked, has about $98 million in TANF funds in reserves. So all told, over the course of really, you'd say the last eight years, you're talking about nearly $200 million that could have gone to do something for poor people in Mississippi that just has not. Oh, wow. Wow. There you go. There you go. That's interesting. Mississippi swindle. Brett Favre in the welfare scandal that shocked America. A wonderful story that's going down there. Any final thoughts as we go out to tell people to pitch in on the book and pick it up wherever fine books are sold?

Look, I would say this. I hope that everyone reads the book because I think it's an important story for anybody who wants to understand how fraud happens, how fraud happens in government programs that are designed to benefit poor people, how power is abused. I mean, we had a group of people who were very influential. They had a lot of money that they had access to. They had all the right folks' cell phone numbers in their pockets that they needed to call to keep the dollars flowing. So anybody who's interested in that is going to be interested in this book. Amazon just named it a best nonfiction book of August 2024. And so my hope is that folks will read this and take the lessons from it. A couple of, I guess, last year, I testified before Congress and it was about this case. And at the end of that testimony, Congress wrote a letter to

a couple of different federal agencies saying, you know, our big concern is that this Mississippi case, what happened in Mississippi is emblematic of what could be happening all across the country. And so I hope that this case and the book serves as an alarm bell to wake everybody up that all these programs that are supposedly serving the poor are very vulnerable to fraud. And we need to take a hard look at them and make sure that our dollars are going to things that actually make a difference in real people's lives there you go there you go thank you very much for coming on the show we really appreciate it shad thanks chris appreciate you thank you and thanks for on it's for tuning in go to goodreads.com fortune's chris foss pick up the book wherever fine books are sold mississippi swindle it's out tomorrow august 6

2024 brett farb and the welfare scandal that shocked America. Be good to each other, folks. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.