John Davis and Brett DiBiase must have been awfully good friends. It’s good that they were.
Had Davis not gone overboard looking out for his wrestling buddy, the massive theft and misspending of welfare funds in Mississippi might not have come to light.
Remember it was a $40,000 payment to a ritzy drug rehab program in Malibu, California, for DiBiase that raised the initial flag three years ago — and led to the investigation that turned up $77 million to $94 million (depends on which auditor’s numbers you use) in fraudulent or questionable spending.
Not only was the $40,000 a drop in the bucket of the overall misuse, it was just a fraction of the generosity with the public’s money that Davis, the former welfare agency director, showered on DiBiase.
The pricey drug rehab, according to information released with Davis’ guilty pleas, ran to $160,000 in all. Then there was the $250,000 state salary for a job DiBiase was not qualified to perform, and another $48,000 to provide workshops to employees in the agency Davis ran. Throw in $8,000 for DiBiase to stay in a swanky New Orleans hotel, and $1,000 for Davis to fly to Malibu — on first-class accommodations, of course — to check on his pal, and the total cost to taxpayers of this friendship was nearly a half-million dollars.
Yes, they must have been very good friends.
Until a few days ago, it seemed as if Davis was going to fight the charges. While a handful of others copped a plea deal with authorities, Davis had been holding out. One thought was that he would use the loosey-goosey federal rules on how welfare block grants can be spent as his defense. True, those block grants — a 1990s-era shift away from direct cash assistance to the poor — provided the states with a lot of leeway in how they used the money. But no judge or jury was going to buy that detoxing on a California beach fell within the spending parameters.
Like those who had plea-bargained before him, Davis has agreed to testify against others. Who is there left to rat on?
The normal path of prosecutors is to work themselves up the feeding chain. They started with DiBiase, followed by a bookkeeper for Nancy New’s Mississippi Community Education Center. Then came New and her son, Zach New. Now Davis, who in the early stages of the scandal was portrayed as the main ringleader.
On whom does Davis have valuable information for which prosecutors were willing to bargain? Did they need him in order to build a stronger criminal case against some of the recipients of the improper welfare spending? Or is he the gateway that prosecutors believe will lead to Phil Bryant, Davis’ former boss? Bryant has been tangled up in the scandal by a bevy of text messages, including several of his own, but he has neither been charged with a crime nor has he been sued for any of the money.
It’s hard to square Bryant’s conduct in the matter. It doesn’t make sense, as Bryant himself has pointed out, that he would have sicced the state auditor on Davis if Bryant knew that the investigation might eventually lead back to him.
But still there are those compromising text messages of Bryant being receptive to a gift of stock from a pharmaceutical venture that got a $2 million helping of welfare funds; of Bryant coaching on how to write a proposal that would produce welfare money to build a new volleyball arena at his alma matter; of Bryant allegedly signing off on sending $1 million of welfare funds to one of his own buddies, former NFL quarterback Brett Favre.
We will have to wait for the next shoe to fall.
Johnny Gary Jr.’s a nice guy. No disputing that.
Whether the Leflore County chancery clerk is over his head, though, trying to do that job and several others paid for by the taxpayers is the issue, not his affability.
Certainly, as Gary’s defenders claim, he had a hard row to hoe after being elected in 2019. He didn’t have a lot of relevant experience, and those employees in the chancery clerk’s office who did and could have helped bring him up to speed largely left.
Gary knew, however, what he was facing when he asked to keep all the jobs — and the money that came with them — that his predecessors had. That was a mistake on his part, and he’s paying for it with some bad publicity a year before he seeks reelection.
An auditing firm was so frustrated with his lack of cooperation that it took the unusual step of calling him out in a letter to the Board of Supervisors. And as I reported this past week, he violated a state law twice by not paying on time tens of thousands of dollars he owed the county’s general fund for income he took in above his salary cap.
Gary is one of the highest-paid elected officials in Mississippi, earning more than a quarter million dollars a year. It should not have been a struggle for him to come up with that money. Why it was, he hasn’t explained.
Maybe he should.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
