Part 3 — Cousin Vernon Confesses
The name on the red tab was Vernon Pitts. My wife cousin. The man who played the piano at every family gathering and called me Big Floyd.
The agent, Special Agent Hayes of the Health and Human Services inspector general office, did not say a word at first. He let me stand on the shoulder for a long time. Then he said, “Mr. Barnett, we have been waiting eleven years for this trailer, and we are grateful to you for pulling it.”
The boxes were medical billing files. Eleven years of claims for patients who had never existed, sent to health programs in three states by a clinic Vernon ran out of Atlanta. My trailer carried the originals so the claims could never be matched against real records.
The photographs were Vernon quiet leash. He had never said a cruel word to me in his life, and that was what made it so cold.
Vernon was not hiding in a mansion. He was at his clinic when agents knocked, sitting at his piano, playing a hymn. He closed the lid, stood, and held out his wrists.
The gentlest hands can also sign the cruelest checks.
Vernon pleaded guilty to health care fraud and conspiracy. He cooperated, and the court ordered him to repay more than $4 million to the programs he had cheated. He received a prison sentence and a long period of supervised release.
I was never charged. The prosecutor wrote a letter on my behalf to the licensing board, so that my commercial license would stay in good standing even though I would never use it again.
My wife Annette sat on the edge of the bed that night and said nothing for an hour. In the morning she made grits, and she told me, “Floyd, family is who stays honest, not who stays close.” I have never heard a truer sentence.
The seized assets covered every driver back wages. My envelope arrived in January, and the amount was exactly what I had been promised eleven years earlier.
On Sunday, we went to church as always. The choir sang, the piano sat quiet, and I put a hundred dollars in the plate for the clinic that really serves our parish.