`Big Conn' more than tale of fraud
Pair who bilked $500M from Social Security point to a larger dysfunction, filmmakers say
Eric Conn turned himself into a local hero, running colorful ads in the Kentucky and West Virginia area where he worked as a lawyer.
His marketing touted his wildly successful rate for scoring Social Security medical benefits for applicants but naturally left out what was later revealed: fraud that he and a judge were perpetrating. Their crimes eventually bilked the federal government out of $500 million and prompted the termination of benefits for all his former clients, many of whom had legitimate needs.
Conn is quite the character — he has been married 16 or 17 times (he loses count), may have once owned a brothel, and partied in his office, even while he was under the tight control of his domineering mother. Yet “The Big Conn,” a four-episode documentary series that will be released Friday on Apple TV+, aims to do much more than capture the sordid details of Conn's saga.
While Conn and Judge David Daugherty make for memorable villains, the real story is about the way the system allowed their misdeeds to continue unchecked year after year. “The takeaway theme is about the consequences of ignoring a problem,” says Brian Lazarte, who created the series with James Lee Hernandez.
“We lure you in with the shiny object of Eric Conn to look at the people of this coal country region who have gone through a lot of hardships and the impact his fraud had on them and on the area, by taking money out of an already poor community.”
The duo previously collaborated on another true crime story, “McMillions,” but quickly realized this story was far more complicated. “We knew there were great characters and defining moments but at the beginning, we didn't know the depths of where the story was going to take us.”
The key to the narrative was the heroics of two women, Sarah Carver and Jennifer Griffith. “The core of the series are Jennifer and Sarah and their absolute bravery in standing up to the U.S. government to try and right a wrong,” Hernandez says. (Another hero emerges near the end in local lawyer Ned Pillersdorf, who has fought valiantly, and without pay, to try to recover funding for those who lost it in the aftermath of Conn's exposure.)
The women worked at the Social Security Administration office that handled the paperwork for the Conn and Daugherty cases. They realized there was something wrong in 2005 and spent six years trying in vain to get higher-ups to pay attention. Instead of earning praise for their detective work, honesty and dogged determination, they were harassed, isolated, followed and menaced.
“They didn't only ignore us, they went to extremes to try and stop us,” Carver says, citing hundreds of interoffice emails they provided to the filmmakers.
“That reveals clearly that this was more than just fraud by some individuals; this was corruption at every level,” Griffith adds.
Carver says agency officials benefited from Daugherty's rapid-fire rubberstamping of all Conn's cases, boosting the tiny Huntington, West Virginia, office into the top three nationally for number of cases. “People were getting recognized through promotions, travel and monetary awards,” she says. “Taking this away meant taking those numbers and that prestige and recognition away.”
It was only after a Wall Street Journal writer finally broke the story with the help of the two women in 2011 that public pressure helped bring down Conn and Daugherty, with numerous congressional hearings highlighting the problems.
Even then, Carver and Griffith say, there were no repercussions for the higher-ups. “So what's to deter people from doing this again?” Carver asks.
The series features interviews with Conn, his former employees, journalists, congressional aides, senators and law enforcement agents. “We wanted to talk to every player who was part of this,“Lazarte says.
But the women are the stars. While they've testified before Congress and have been on “60 Minutes,” they were careful when approached for the documentary. “We're always skeptical at first,” Griffith says.
Carver says they researched Lazarte and Hernandez but, even after saying yes, did not quite appreciate how broad the scope of the series would be, Griffith says, though the filmmakers' ambitions made them more comfortable that the project would do the story justice. (Even today, the women have not received official whistleblower status, with the protections and benefits that conveys.)
The creators' desire to tell the full story led to several challenges, one of which is that the bureaucratic problems at the heart of the case are far less entertaining than Conn's antics. “Most people don't even know that Social Security has a medical benefits side, so we tried a version of the first episode where we did a long dive into that, but even we were falling asleep watching it,” Hernandez says.
Lazarte says the fraud was able to go on for so long because the system is so complicated. “So this is not the easiest thing to break down for viewers to understand,” he says.
Hernandez hopes the fact that the series features so many Washington power players helps “get a conversation kicked off” in the Capitol about how to make changes, adding that when the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations began examining Conn's case, it was the first time any outside government officials had focused on Social Security since the 1950s.
“It's unbelievable that the agency is one of the largest pieces of our budget and has been free to do whatever it wants,” he says. “People only care about Social Security when it is running out of money, but we hope to shine a light on this massive loophole that allowed people like Conn and Daugherty to do what they were doing.”
Lazarte says that as filmmakers, they came to the project without an agenda, although both now hope it helps pressure the government to restore the benefits for Conn's victims. Beyond that, however, solutions won't be simple.
“When you watch the series, you realize how deep the problem is and how complex the system is, so it can't be fixed with a snap of a finger,” he says, adding that they will be creating a “Big Conn” podcast to dive even deeper into the story and to keep the conversation alive. “But it requires transparency and accountability.”