Man pleads guilty to helping Eric C. Conn escape U.S.

A man who helped the orchestrator of the largest Social Security fraud in U.S. history cut off his ankle bracelet and fled the country pleaded guilty Friday to his role in the escape, admitting he’d spent months working to set it up.

Curtis Lee Wyatt had been the muscle for Eric C. Conn, a Kentucky lawyer who authorities say ran a fraud ring that totaled well more than $1 billion in bogus Social Security disability claims.

Conn was caught and was set to go to jail but was out on bond, when he cut off his ankle bracelet on the side of an interstate in Kentucky last June and made a run for the U.S.-Mexico border, managing to flee the country.

Wyatt, 48, assisted along the way, helping arrange the getaway car and making test-runs to see which border checkpoint would be the easiest for his boss to escape through on his journey out of the U.S.

Wyatt also arranged for Conn to have a Faraday bag — the device that allowed him to shield his ankle bracelet when he cut it off, this avoiding detection by the monitoring service.

While Wyatt was charged with — and is pleading guilty to — his role in the Conn escape, Sarah Carver and Jennifer Griffith, the whistleblowers who exposed the massive disability fraud, say it’s just the tip of his criminal activity.

One of the Social Security judges who Conn says was aware of the fraud had Wyatt follow the two women, looking to dig up dirt on them in order to discredit them after they blew the whistle.

Wyatt was assigned to follow both Ms. Carver and Ms. Griffith, looking to find information to discredit them, at the orders of the top Social Security judge in the Huntington, West Virginia, office where the women worked. That man, then-Chief Administrative Law Judge Charlie Paul Andrus, ordered Wyatt to follow the women to try to catch them breaking work rules.

When Wyatt was unable to find any evidence, the fraudsters doctored a video instead to try to get Ms. Carver in trouble, the women say.

They said Wyatt, Andrus and the others involved in the fraud should be facing much more serious charges.

“There is so much more to this case than has been made public with Mr. Wyatt and many others,” said Ms. Griffith.

“There are many additional people and additional charges that should be filed, too many former SSA employees were either promoted or allowed to retire with their federal government pension while Sarah and myself were forced out,” she said. “I will never understand why reporting fraud of this magnitude is something SSA would want to hide or look down on.”

Ms. Carver, the subject of the doctored video, said Wyatt should at least face additional charges for stalking her.

“However, the DOJ failed to ever charge Wyatt,” Ms. Carver said. “This is very disturbing that a federal employee who is a whistleblower can be stalked by an armed individual with the knowledge of the DOJ and was never charged.”

“It upsets me that this was allowed to happen and no one was there to protect me,” she said.

With the help of Wyatt, Conn was able to escape across the border last year, ending up in Honduras. Authorities finally caught up to him in December at a Pizza Hut in Honduras, and he was returned to the U.S. to face his 12-year sentence for the Social Security fraud.

He also faces a case against him for the escape.