Terrence Williams, Tony Allen, Glen “Big Baby” Davis, and Darius Miles are among the 18 former NBA players charged with defrauding the league’s health and welfare benefit plan out of nearly $4 million, the Associated Press. Allen's wife, Desiree, has also been charged for her involvement with the scheme.
The case was brought to the Manhattan federal court and 16 of the defendants were in police custody by Thursday morning, authorities said.
"The defendants' playbook involved fraud and deception," Audrey Strauss, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a news conference. "Thanks to the hard work of our law enforcement partners, their alleged scheme has been disrupted and they will have to answer for their flagrant violations of law.
According to court documents, the elaborate scheme was carried out from at least 2017 to 2020, when the plan received fabricated claims that amounted to $3.9 million. Of that amount, the defendants received about $2.5 million in fraudulent proceeds.
Other players named in the indictment include Milt Palacio, Antoine Wright, Ruben Patterson, Eddie Robinson, Gregory Smith, Ronald Glen Davis, Shannon Brown, Melvin Ely, Alan Anderson, Troy Wroten, Christopher Douglas-Roberts, William Bynum, Sebastian Telfair, and Jamario Moon.
Williams, who allegedly was the mastermind behind the scheme, began by submitting fraudulent claims totaling $19,000 back in November of 2017 for chiropractic care. He eventually received a payout of $7,672.
Reportedly, Williams has also been accused of recruiting other NBA players into the scheme and is said to have received upwards of $230,000 in payments from other players as he gave them allegedly falsified invoices.
Court documents revealed that the defendants claimed to have received medical treatment on a specified date and sometimes they were not even in the same state or country, according to the indictment.
Several ex-players requested reimbursement for the same treatment on the same date, USA Today reports. Allen, Davis, and Tony Wroten all claimed they had root canals on the same six teeth on the same date in 2016. Allen and Wroten also claimed to have the same procedure on the same 13 teeth on the same date just two years later.
According to the indictment, prosecutors are seeking “any and all property, real or personal, that constitutes or is derived, directly or indirectly” from the fraudulent scheme.
