A three-man, nine-woman jury in U.S. District Court at Knoxville has convicted Blount County businesswoman Joyce Allen of 10 financial crimes, including conspiracy to commit mail fraud, wire fraud and money laundering. They stem from a multi-million-dollar Ponzi scheme.
From the News Sentinel report:
Assistant U.S. Attorney Frank Dale said Allen is looking down the barrel of a life sentence because of the enormity of the losses suffered by victims of a Ponzi scheme that spanned 10 years and totaled $46 million in ill-gotten gains for Allen, mastermind Charles “C.D.” Candler, co-conspirator Brian K. Murphy and four others.
Candler, who concocted the scheme to sell fake annuities through his Benchmark Capital investment firm, shot himself to death in March 2012 in a Knoxville cemetery just as investigators with the IRS Criminal Investigation Division, U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the FBI were closing in.
Murphy, a former preacher and gospel singer, has admitted he helped Candler create all the trappings of a legitimate business, including fake annuities, bogus checks and a phone line purporting to lead callers to a home office in Chicago that did not exist.
Allen, testimony showed, was recruited to join the scam because she already had a loyal customer base in her other business ventures, which included tax preparation and financial advising. She convinced dozens of people to invest their life savings, retirement accounts or home equities into the faux annuities, testimony showed.
Allen, the only one of the six co-conspirators indicted after Candler’s death to take her case to trial, argued she was a victim, too, duped by Candler, a notorious swindler.
Jurors rejected that argument after deliberating roughly 11 hours over two days.