A minister at a secretive church in North Carolina has been sentenced to 34 months in prison and ordered to pay $466,960 in restitution for his role in an unemployment fraud scheme involving businesses owned by members of the congregation.
Kent Covington, a minister at the Word of Faith Fellowship in Spindale, North Carolina, was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud in U.S. District Court in Asheville in June 2018. He pleaded guilty to the charge in September. The conspiracy charge carried a possible maximum penalty of 30 years in prison and a $1 million fine.
In court filings, prosecutors had recommended a sentence between 57 and 71 months for Covington.
“The unemployment insurance system was his piggy bank, there for his convenience, and he raided it when he felt the need,” prosecutors wrote.
The development follows an investigation by The Associated Press that, beginning in 2017, documented claims of physical and emotional abuse at the church. AP also reported that authorities were looking into the unemployment claims of congregants and their businesses.
Prosecutors say Covington and his employee, Dianne McKinny, decided to lay off employees at one of Covington’s businesses so they could collect unemployment benefits in 2008 when the company was struggling financially. But the employees continued to work at the company, Diverse Corporate Technologies, with the unemployment checks replacing their salaries. They later put the scheme into place at Covington’s other business, Integrity Marble & Granite. Covington then implemented a variation of the scheme at Sky Catcher Communications Inc., a company he managed, prosecutors say.
U.S. District Judge Martin Reidinger said that Covington had shown a “cynical disregard to the law” and he wanted to send a message to the community. The judge noted that the unemployment scheme happened at a time when the state had to borrow money during the recession.
The judge said Covington’s actions “undermine the entire unemployment security structure of the state. … It’s sort of like picking the pocket of a dying man.”
McKinny has pleaded not guilty. She is scheduled for trial May 6. In addition to conspiracy, McKinny is charged in a subsequent indictment with lying to federal agents.
Besides Covington and McKinny, two others were charged in the federal investigation. Dr. Jerry Gross, a podiatrist, and his son, Jason Gross, were sentenced last week to three years on probation and jointly ordered to pay restitution of $162,276 after admitting to fraud at a podiatry clinic in Forest City, North Carolina. Both are listed as ministers on the church website.
Jane Whaley, the church’s leader, has not been charged, but she was named in a court document as someone who “promoted” the scheme.
Former members said Whaley called it “God’s plan” to help the businesses survive the economic downturn and keep money coming into the church.
Covington’s lawyer, Stephen Cash, has said that while Covington pleaded guilty, it was not an “admission that Jane Whaley instructed him to act.”
Whaley’s attorney, Noell Tin, has said Whaley “strongly denies any insinuation that she was somehow involved in Mr. Covington’s offense, as does Mr. Covington.”
The scheme resulted in more than $250,000 in fraudulent claims between November 2008 and March 2013, according to the original indictment in the case.
The unemployment allegations were uncovered as part of the AP’s investigation into Word of Faith, which had about 750 congregants in rural North Carolina and a total of nearly 2,000 members in its branches in Brazil and Ghana and its affiliations in other countries.
In February 2017, the AP cited 43 former members who said congregants were regularly punched and choked in an effort to beat out devils. The AP also revealed how, over the course of two decades, followers were ordered by church leaders to lie to authorities investigating reports of abuse.
AP later outlined how the church created a pipeline of young laborers from its two Brazilian congregations who say they were brought to the U.S. and forced to work for little or no pay at businesses owned by church leaders.
Covington is described by former congregants as the highest-ranking member of the church to be charged in the unemployment case.
Most employees were members of the Word of Faith Fellowship. Prosecutors said Covington used his leadership position in the church to force them to comply.
Covington spent eight months in a North Carolina prison in 1974 for breaking and entering, as well as larceny, and later joined the church.
His wife, Brooke Covington, is one of Whaley’s most trusted confidants.
Brooke Covington is facing unrelated state charges that she and other members of the church assaulted a congregant in an effort to expel his “homosexual demons.”
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Read more of AP’s Broken Faith series here .
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Mohr contributed from Jackson, Mississippi.
