Recycling kingpin sentenced for fraud
U.S. attorney: Deception in case ‘extraordinary’
For 11 years, Brian Brundage promoted Intercon Solutions, his booming suburban Chicago electronics recycling company, as a scrupulous industry leader in environmentally responsible waste disposal, led by a colorful, highflying entrepreneur.
On Thursday, a decidedly humbled Brundage was sentenced to three years in federal prison for what prosecutors called an elaborate fraud that caused untold damage to the environment and millions of dollars in losses to victims.
“The scope of the deception in this case is extraordinary,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean J.B. Franzblau said at the sentencing hearing in Chicago federal court.
The now-defunct Chicago Heights business once boasted an impressive customer list that included major corporations and government agencies.
In a 2007 article in the Chicago Tribune, Brundage highlighted the stringent recycling process, saying “nothing that leaves here goes to a landfill.”
That was far from the truth, as even Brundage himself acknowledged Thursday.
Brundage, who grew up in Florida, moved to Illinois in 2000 to work at Intercon.
By 2005, Brundage had ascended to become CEO and a 50% owner, ushering in a period of rapid growth for the firm, which occupied a 250,000-square-foot facility and an increasingly prominent place in the e-waste recycling industry.
Where others saw garbage, Brundage saw opportunity. As the computer industry boomed and products became obsolete ever more rapidly, the need to dispose of — and properly recycle — the toxic waste mushroomed.
Enter Intercon. A 2011 promotional video of the sprawling plant shows a maze of conveyor belts and forklifts and workers carefully disassembling, sorting and stacking electronic equipment, while a succession of employees wearing Intercon shirts tout the company’s “green” recycling methods. The 8-minute video ends with Brundage staring sincerely into the camera and making a confident promise he wouldn’t keep.
“Our goal is to make recycling for the client easy, and our promise is to get it done right,” Brundage said.
But much of the e-waste was bound for a landfill, or to buyers in China, or to other environmentally unfriendly places — never to be properly recycled.
At the sentencing, federal prosecutors showed sales and shipping records for weekly shipments of CRT monitors and other hazardous e-waste that came in the front door from clients for recycling, and went out the back door to a firm in China for processing.
Brundage also stockpiled “tens of thousands” of CRT monitors and other materials that Intercon was paid to recycle but never did, prosecutors said.
In 2011, just as an environmental watchdog group blew the whistle on Intercon’s recycling methods, Brundage directed his employees to use heavy machinery to smash CRT monitors, and also sent thousands of tons of potentially hazardous e-waste to landfills not licensed for such materials.
Brundage even had data from office computers wiped clean to cover his tracks, Franzblau said Thursday.
Reached by phone Friday, Brundage declined to comment.
For a while, Brundage enjoyed the fruits of success. Intercon took in more than $60 million in revenue during the course of the scheme, fraudulently disposing of more than threefourths of the materials intended for recycling, prosecutors said.
Business was so good that in 2011 a smiling Brundage was featured on a WGN-Ch.9 news segment as the buyer of a limited edition Lexus LFA supercar.
The scheme, though, would not last as a significant portion of Intercon’s business began to disappear amid accusations of sham recycling methods.
Brundage was arrested in December 2016 and charged with misrepresenting that the electronics the company collected would be disassembled and recycled “in an environmentally sound manner.” The 11count indictment alleged Brundage caused “thousands of tons” of electronics parts and potentially hazardous materials to be placed into landfills, resold to customers who shipped the materials overseas or stockpiled in his warehouses.
In September, Brundage agreed to plead guilty to one count each of wire fraud and tax evasion, admitting he evaded paying nearly $744,000 in federal taxes by concealing the income he earned from reselling ewaste.
As part of the tax scheme, Brundage concealed millions of dollars of fraudulently obtained income from the Internal Revenue Service, and falsely claimed personal expenses such as jewelry, gambling losses and wages to his nanny and housekeeper as business expenses, prosecutors said.
“I understand and accept all responsibility for my actions,” Brundage said Thursday before being sentenced by U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow.
Brundage, 47, was sentenced to a 36-month term in federal prison and ordered to pay $1.28 million in restitution, including his tax liability. He has 90 days to report to prison. His attorneys requested he be sent to Oxford federal prison in Wisconsin. The requested restitution amount was reduced Thursday when Lefkow discounted the value of one of his more audacious schemes — reselling $3 million in new but outdated graphing calculators that Texas Instruments paid Brundage to recycle.
“His operation was a complete fraud,” said Jim Puckett, co-founder and executive director of Basel Action Network, a Seattlebased environmental watchdog group, in an interview. “This man did so much damage.”
Puckett, whose organization published a report in 2011 that accused Brundage of exporting hazardous ewaste to China, was in Chicago Wednesday to testify for the prosecution at the former recycler’s sentencing.
Brundage however was not, phoning in his appearance Wednesday from his Northwest Indiana home, where he said he was tending to his sick children.
Divorced and remarried, Brundage was portrayed as a hands-on caregiver for his five children and “the bond that holds (the) family together” by Emily Brundage, his wife of three years.
On Thursday, Brundage’s wife and oldest son tearfully testified at his sentencing, asking the judge for leniency. Brundage’s attorneys requested probation. But in handing down her sentence, Lefkow expressed doubt that Brundage would be able to pay the full restitution, and said incarceration was a necessary deterrent to others who would commit similar fraud.
Recycling, though, was not his only venture. In 2012, with Intercon foundering, Brundage launched a sports agency, Worldwide Career Management, in an attempt to diversify. The client roster has thinned in the wake of his federal fraud indictment and guilty plea, but Brundage is still listed as the founder and a certified sports agent on the firm’s website.
Brundage’s agency certification was suspended in 2017 by both the Major League Baseball Players Association and the National Football League Players Association.
“He remains suspended,” Mark Levin, director of salary cap and agent administration for the NFLPA, said Friday.
Prosecutors said there was little mystery to Brundage’s seeming success.
“He is not a skilled businessman,” Franzblau said. “He is a skilled liar. For 11 years, he pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes.”