A story last week from Mississippi Today in its ongoing coverage of the state’s massive welfare scandal was a bit of a sideshow, but a fascinating one.
It detailed how possibly $30,000 of the $70 million-plus of squandered or stolen block grant money during the Phil Bryant administration wound up in the hands of an African scam artist.
Reading the story, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anna Wolfe, you have to wonder what kind of fools would fall for something so patently bogus. And since the state was planning to do business with one of them, you also have to wonder what kind of due diligence is done on some of the economic development projects that taxpayers are asked to bankroll in Mississippi.
As Wolfe explains, the trail that led to the Ghanaian rip-off begins with Jake Vanlandingham, a neuroscientist from Florida who was counting on his connections to Brett Favre — and Favre’s connections to Bryant — to line up start-up funding for a pharmaceutical company that would produce a drug to treat concussions.
At the same time that Vanlandingham was securing a $2 million slice of the state’s allocation of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families funding, he was working on an overseas funding angle. He had been led to believe by an Ohio inventor, who claimed to have a direct line to God, that a wealthy heiress from Ghana was willing to invest $1 million into Vanlandingham’s Prevacus venture.
Only problem, the inventor-turned-middleman told Vanlandingham, is that it would take $25,000 to perform a geological analysis on the land the heiress wanted to sell, the proceeds of which would produce the stake for Prevacus.
Surprise, surprise, the $25,000 was not enough to close the land deal. The heiress or her associates needed another $500, then $4,000, then $1,000, then $5,000, then $8,000, then $18,000. Along the way, the plan for raising the capital switched. Since the supposed real estate deal had run into roadblocks, the heiress instead would sell gold bars her father gave her before he died.
Although Vanlandingham had long since gotten suspicious he was being played, it didn’t stop him from wiring one last $1,000.
Wolfe was not able to discern how much the scam netted. Vanlandingham’s lawyer says his client was out no more than $30,000. It’s fairly clear, though, that at least some of the swindled proceeds came from Mississippi, based on the proximity in time between the welfare money coming in to Prevacus and the payments going out to Ghana.
The welfare scandal has had its share of bizarre stories, starting with the $48,000 spent on ritzy drug rehab in Malibu, California, for a former pro wrestler. But the Ghanaian hoax goes to the top of the list.
