Convicted felon Eric C. Conn certainly lived up to his name.
The small-town Kentucky attorney, who described himself as a “wealthy and flamboyant lawyer,” defrauded the U.S. government of more than half a billion dollars in the biggest scam ever perpetrated against the Social Security Administration. His scheme funded a lifestyle that took him to ports of call around the globe, where—again, by his own description—his exploits rivaled James Bond as he “pursued the world’s most beautiful women.”
“You’re dealing with a guy that doesn’t have a moral compass,” noted a lawyer who once represented Conn. “You can’t get mad at a snake for being a snake. It is what it is.”
That observation is proffered in the new documentary series The Big Conn, which began streaming on Apple TV+ over the weekend. The four-part Emmy contender comes from James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte, the writer-directors behind the hit 2020 docuseries McMillions that told the story of an intricate fraud committed against McDonald’s Monopoly game.
Directors Brian Lazarte (L) and James Lee Hernandez at the premiere of The Big Conn in West Hollywood, Calif. Apple TV+ “We’re fascinated with unique stories that have these twists and turns, and have a layer of depth to it, but also a degree of humor and levity,” Lazarte tells Deadline. “The stakes in The Big Conn are just way bigger than they were for McMillions. But a big part of what really drew us to the story was being able to tell it and include Eric’s point of view.”
Conn viewed himself as a Robin Hood of rural Kentucky, outfitted not in green tights and feathered cap, but in a suit, with jacket slung over his shoulder instead of a quiver and arrows. He took from the rich—that is to say, the federal government—and gave to the poor: people scraping by who maintained they had become disabled and deserved Social Security disability payments.
“I was fanatically ethical for a long time,” Conn assured the filmmakers. Until he wasn’t.
Conn conspired with a shady medical provider and a crooked judge who oversaw disability claims cases. Together, they fast tracked benefits for thousands of people—some who merited them and others, perhaps, who didn’t.
Eric C. Conn outside a federal courthouse in Lexington, Ky., April 12, 2016 AP Photo/Bruce Schreiner “Conn created doctored, falsified templates that a doctor would just sign off on and say, ‘This person is disabled, they can’t work.’ The judge stamps and approves it. And they just pumped so many people through the system,” Lazarte explains. “The kickbacks and the money that Eric got in each case would be the equivalent of 25 percent of their back benefits or up to $6,000. So it was a volume game for him.”
Conn’s law practice thrived as he became known as the guy who could get disability benefits approved lickety split. His doughy face and gleaming white teeth grinned from billboards that proclaimed, “Need Your SSI or Social Security? ‘We’ve Got You Covered.’”
“We really find that idea fascinating of the rationalizations that people put on to do certain things… There is a person out there [Conn] that rationalized the idea of stealing $550 million from the U.S. government,” Hernandez comments. “But the reason that the person is doing it–you could rationalize they’re trying to help someone because normally it would take around 18 months for people who needed these benefits to get them. And this person found a way to do it in six months at maximum. So he’s getting people help who needed it right away, but doing it through really shady ways.”
The dodge might never have come to light without the efforts of two indefatigable whistleblowers working in the Office of Disability Adjudication and Review in West Virginia, and journalist Damian Paletta who thoroughly investigated the situation, and published an expose in the Wall Street Journal in May 2011.
Former Wall Street Journal reporter Damian Paletta Apple TV+ Paletta truly had been disabled as a child—there is poignant home video of him at age 8 in a baseball uniform, hobbling around the base paths with a painful and awkward brace to correct a congenital hip problem. He got death threats while working on the Conn story; someone in the lawyer’s office seemingly offered to dump Paletta’s body in a ditch.
“With Damian it was really fascinating because he’s a reporter, but he ends up being part of the story,” Hernandez points out. “He really signifies exactly why the news exists. An article he wrote forces changes to happen all the way up to a U.S. Senate level.”
Mason Tackett, one of the subjects of The Big Conn Apple TV+ The Big Conn abounds with colorful characters, including Mason Tackett, a musician and rapper who wrote jingles for Conn advertisements (without prompting, he abruptly showed the filmmakers his full set teeth to demonstrate that not all people in Eastern Kentucky are dentally challenged).
But the biggest character of all is Conn himself. He shelled out $400,000 for a statue of President Lincoln that he grandly displayed outside his offices, near an equally robust replica of the Statue of Liberty. He hired a porn star to appear in some of his TV ads. In Thailand, he allegedly opened a Halloween-themed brothel. And then there was his romantic and even chivalrous fondness for matrimony. How many times did he get hitched?
“At least six, maybe seven” times, he told Hernandez and Lazarte. Actually, the number was closer to 16 or 17. That sense of an id run wild may spring from a suffocated upbringing.
A billboard for Eric C. Conn Apple TV+ “Eric was forced to be very serious from an early age. He was raised by a very strict mother and he had to wear… a suit and tie to school every day starting in elementary school. He would go to school with a briefcase,” Hernandez notes, describing Conn’s mother as “overbearing all the way ‘til he was in his 50s. And she was working at his law firm… Even if he wanted money to go get a soda from a soda machine, he’d have to ask ‘Mommy,’ which is how he referred to her until the day she died. It was almost like as an adult as he started seeing a way to make money, seeing a way to make a name for himself… he really looked at it as his chance to finally let the inner child out and start doing all of these outlandish things.”
The law belatedly caught up to Conn and his associates, but not until years after the publication of Paletta’s story. Then, as The Big Conn recounts, before a court appearance the Kentucky attorney cut off a monitoring bracelet and bolted for the Mexican border. Like James Bond eluding SPECTRE.
As one person says in the series, “Eric C. Conn was Eric C. Gone.”
What happened next? No spoilers here. We’ll have to direct you to the series itself.
As Paletta puts it in The Big Conn, “Everything about this guy was too much to believe. But it all happened.”
