Posted on 12/03/2019 2:09:00 PM PST by csvset
A former Chicago police commander once considered a rising star in the department was spared federal prison Tuesday for pocketing more than $360,000 in Social Security payments intended for his mother that he continued to collect for nearly 25 years after her death.
U.S. District Judge Manish Shah sentenced Kenneth Johnson to two years of probation and ordered him to serve the first six months in community confinement, likely at the Salvation Army.
. In handing down the sentence, U.S. District Judge Manish Shah said Johnson’s decision to betray the public’s trust was “infuriating.” “How many times (as a police commander) did you plead with people to come forward and accept responsibly for something?” Shah said. “Yet all that while, there was a crime being committed that you knew all about, and you did nothing to stop it.”
Johnson, 55, pleading guilty in May to theft of government funds, admitting he bilked the Social Security Administration out of a total of $363,064 from the time of his mother’s death in May 1994 to November 2017 when the scheme was uncovered. In seeking up to two years in prison, federal prosecutors revealed in a court filing that Johnson withdrew some of the stolen funds from an ATM at the Englewood District police station. In 2016, Johnson used stolen funds to pay for a hotel room in Phoenix, according to the filing. Two months later, he used other Social Security payments for round-trip airfare to Los Angeles to attend a “crime-fighters conference,” prosecutors said.
The scheme was eventually unraveled by a watchdog arm of the Social Security Administration that red-flagged Johnson’s mother’s account in 2017 because she had not used Medicare, even though at that point she would have been 96, according to the prosecution filing..
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
This leaves me wondering...
Does he have to pay back the stolen funds (posted part of the article did not mention or imply any restitution —I didn’t go to the Tribune).
Isn’t he also guilty of tax evasion (I’m assuming he didn’t report “Dead Mom’s SS Income” on his return).
Was he helping his dead mother vote in every election?
Speaking of betraying the public trust, judge, why’d you only whack his peepee?
Garnish the whole amount from his Chicago Retirement Pay.
“Doesn’t the coroner notify the appropriate government authorities including the elections department?”
In Chicago the coroner has a direct line to the Democrat party voter registration center.
Check your facts. Then give yourself an uppercut.
Not “Special Ed” Johnson, a different corrupt cop.
Good point — no mention of restitution. No mention of his lavish CPD pension either.
Click on it. Sheesh.
Also, was her death recorded??? SS yanked back mom’s last month of SS in a heartbeat the moment the funeral home registered her death.
And of that is a fairly new practice, how about bouncing the payment roll against the death index, socsec minions.
For whatever reason your link doesn’t connect to the story
“But NOOOOOO!!! Not you!!! You hadda get caught passed out in your cruiser, you stupid drunk!! Mayor had no choice but to bust your @zz but you still got off cheap!”
* * * * * * * * *
Different police officer Johnson.
Reading comprehension police are coming for you.
He might even be the president, like the Obungler.
“Retired POS Chicago Police Commander Kenneth Johnson”
You correctly identified him as a POS.
What the heck ? I suspect a cut and paste cut that cut something off. A thousand apologies, lol. .
“It seems odd that the Social security administration, apparently does not get notified of people’s deaths.”
A few days after my mom passed away, I called the Social Security office to notify the agency. The woman on the other end said, “Oh, we already know that.”
That was about eight years ago.
I don't want to say it was common but while I was the administrator of my company's UAW pension plan, we were regularly discovering that deaths of survivors were not being reported to us and thus someone in the family was receiving the survivor benefit checks and cashing them.
When discovered, we would contact them and demand repayment of all the funds they had received. Most would repay but in the case of long term fraud, the only thing we could do was demand they enter into a repayment plan which usually didn't last very long until they stopped paying. Considering most of them were out of state, it was not financially feasible to pursue them legally so their debt was just written off.........
Eventually the company hired a company called the Berwyn Group who had access to social security information and on a monthly basis we would send them a file containing all our pensioners, both active and survivors, and they would compare them to their social security records and inform us of any of our pension recipients were deceased.
That put an end to any fraudulent payments being paid beyond the death of the recipient........
The rumor at secondcity cop blog is that one of his relatives found out, wanted a cut of the money, didn’t get it, and dimed him to the feds. I’ll bet future family get togethers are fun!
http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/
I imagine if death notices were forwarded tot the SSA, it would save millions. Too easy ?
Its must have been really weird to have been mailing checks out to someone I can only assume might have been pretty old after 25 years.
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