DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. — It was a series of guilty pleas in DeKalb County court in an elaborate scheme designed to steal tax dollars intended to help low-income Georgians find housing.
Prosecutors say the former director of a statewide housing agency was the ringleader.
Shawn Williams ran the Georgia Housing Assistance Division, which provides Housing and Urban Development money to help low-income Georgians get a home.
In a plea deal, she will pay more than $104,000 in restitution, serve 15 years’ probation and be barred from government work or any work involving public dollars.
All four people charged in the RICO case have now pleaded guilty to their roles in the scheme.
“What happens when that money is not used for the appropriate purposes is that people suffer immediately. But secondarily, it means that people aren’t going to trust those agencies to give that money for its legitimate purposes,” DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston told Channel 2 consumer investigator Justin Gray.
In a 42-page criminal indictment, a grand jury in 2023 brought a 19-count RICO case against four people: Shawn Williams, Toyao Andrews, Corey Alston and Quinton Tate.
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The indictment alleged that Williams funneled contracts to fake companies created by accomplices to pay $64,000 to clean a Norcross office that already had cleaning services and $120,000 to build a new software system for the division, which was never made.
“To use that type of project as a cover to steal money from taxpayers, from citizens, is the worst kind of fraud and abuse,” Boston said.
Alston was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay $30,000 in restitution.
He appeared in court virtually because he must turn himself in to federal authorities in Florida this week to serve a 41-month federal prison sentence on separate pandemic Medicare fraud charges.
Andrews was ordered to pay $10,000 in restitution and sentenced to 20 years’ probation.
Tate was sentenced to five years’ probation and ordered to pay a $5,000 fine.
The indictment alleges that it was all part of a well-orchestrated plan.
One of the 14 unindicted co-conspirators even allegedly said in a phone conversation that they should plan to “replicate [the fraud] many times” to “other people and other departments” across the Georgia state government.
Boston said the convictions show her office’s commitment to fighting fraud.
“What I want to make clear is that this is the same message and theme that we have been hitting for anyone, under any federal administration, and that we in DeKalb take this very seriously,” Boston said.
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