If you can't trust your financial advisor, then who can you trust?
Stay tuned to find out the truth about Peggy Fulford's multi-million dollar scam with the
biggest sports stars in the world.
According to Sports Illustrated, Peggy Fulford's client list was a who's who of professional
athletes, including Dennis Rodman, Travis Best, and Ricky Williams.
Fulford promised her clients they could sit back and relax as she took care of their finances.
"I do control a very large part of their life, and when you control someone's finances, that
is their life."
Fulford's scheme began when she made herself an intrinsic part of Best's world.
According to Sports Illustrated, they met in the early '90s, and by 2000, she was running
many aspects of his life, including his money.
Her next big client was Williams.
According to the CNBC series "American Greed", she met him by fluke when she showed up at
his house with a decorator he had hired to spruce his space up for the MTV reality series
"Cribs."
She pitched him her financial services, and he accepted.
As Sports Illustrated learned, Fulford's signature move was offering to work without pay and
promising to help build, quote, "generational wealth."
It was too good for Williams to pass up.
He was initially so pleased that he introduced Fulford to Lex Hilliard, who had recently
lost much of the money he had invested in a pawn shop.
Fulford offered him $10,000 without interest, and locked in her next victim.
Without a doubt, Peggy Fulford's most famed client was Dennis Rodman, and their relationship
extended beyond the professional.
The pair met through a mutual friend when Rodman was struggling with alcoholism, and
Fulford built a connection with the NBA player.
Rodman's attorney, Bradford Cohen, suggested on "American Greed" that Rodman was seeking
"emotional support" from Fulford, while she was after his wallet.
A unique bond soon formed.
As Sports Illustrated learned, Rodman would go in and out of Fulford's house freely, and
he even took her oldest child, a son named Elkin King, with him to North Korea in 2013.
Unfortunately, his appreciation for Fulford didn't spare him from her schemes.
While stealing from her supposed friend, Fulford allowed the electricity to be cut off at his
Florida condo, stopped making payments on his life insurance policy, and even took away
his debit card, claiming he, quote, "couldn't be trusted" to spend his money responsibly.
Their bond was so strong, though, that even as red flags began to mount, Rodman put his
trust in Fulford.
According to Oxygen, he was finally forced to accept the truth when the FBI became involved
and spoke with him directly.
Back in 2011, Peggy Fulford was at the top of her game, stealing money from her clients
and living in the lap of luxury.
As Sports Illustrated reported, she had multiple homes, including a mansion in Fort Lauderdale,
Florida and a fleet of luxury vehicles, including a Rolls-Royce.
It was at that time that network executives were shown a proposal for a reality TV show
called "The Peggy Show," which would feature Fulford, her family, and her various high-profile
clients.
Both Oxygen and VH1 appeared to be interested, but in the end, it was BET that ordered a
pilot.
By obtaining a document detailing the reality series' pitch, Sports Illustrated learned
that Fulford was billing herself as the, quote, "owner and CEO of King Management Group" and
boasting about being a business manager to 31 clients who trusted her with their finances.
However, the pitch also proclaimed -
"Money is usually the least of the partnership."
The pitch underscored that her job was a varied one: For her clients, she was willing to,
quote, "furnish homes, buy engagement rings, and deal with endless baby mama drama."
In a sizzle reel for Peggy Fulford's potential reality series, a camera followed her around
her home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, while she showed off many impressive sights, including
an office packed with autographed sports memorabilia and a framed Harvard diploma, according to
Sports Illustrated.
According to the Broward Palm Beach New Times, Fulford claimed she had earned degrees in
law and business from Harvard, passed her General Securities Representative Qualification
Examination, and went on to work on Wall Street.
The only problem was that her diploma wasn't real, and her fictitious résumé would eventually
become the first thread that would completely unravel her web of lies.
As Sports Illustrated reported, Ricky Williams and his former partner Kristin Barnes built
a particularly strong bond with Fulford after she burrowed into their lives.
Barnes considered her a friend, but an investigation into Fulford's academic career would change
that.
As financial red flags began popping up Barnes decided to do some digging and asked a friend
who actually went to Harvard to look for Fulford in the school's alumni database.
She wasn't there.
The discovery triggered Fulford's demise.
The FBI became involved and learned that she had actually attended Atlanta's Spelman College
but quit after becoming pregnant.
And the boast she made in her second wedding announcement in 1981 about having an engineering
degree from Georgia Tech was as phony as her Harvard diploma.
Once Ricky Williams and Kristin Barnes discovered that Peggy Fulford was a fraud, they filed
a civil suit.
They revealed to Sports Illustrated that most of the money Williams earned in the NFL between
2008 and 2012 had practically gone missing.
That's when law enforcement got involved and discovered the full extent of Fulford's scheme.
According to the United States Department of Justice, Fulford's M.O.
was that she would claim that she was a millionaire and wasn't interested in financial gains.
Once she earned her targets' trust, she failed to pay taxes and bills and make investments
as promised.
What she did do was launder their hard-earned cash, quote, "through dozens of bank accounts
to pay for her own personal expenses."
According to Sports Illustrated, Fulford would create two bank accounts for each client:
one with money for day-to-day expenses and one with money for investments.
In order to avoid getting caught, she constantly wired money between accounts while also using
it to pay for her lavish lifestyle.
The outlet uncovered other schemes, including how Fulford used a credit card machine to
steal from Williams' South Beach restaurant.
She also charged him double the actual cost of organizing his wedding.
In the end, her victims' provable losses tallied in the millions: $3.01 million from Williams,
$1.4 million from Travis Best, $1.24 million from Dennis Rodman, $200,000 from Rashad McCants,
and $132,000 from Lex Hilliard.
During the FBI's investigation, it was uncovered that Fulford had eight aliases, ran over 85
bank accounts, and had created more than a dozen shell corporations, a few of which bore
Dennis Rodman's name.
As FBI agent James Hawkins explained to Sports Illustrated, the money launderer would constantly
move assets around in the, quote, "most blatant attempt I've ever seen of someone trying to
hide where the money was coming from."
According to the Broward Palm Beach New Times, Ricky Williams also accused Fulford of impersonating
his then-wife in an attempt to dupe the IRS.
Fulford created such a tangled web that the FBI actually stopped trying to unravel it.
In the end, authorities discovered that the real Peggy Fulford was born Peggy Ann Barard
in New Orleans in 1958.
She had a tough go at life early on: She lost her baby sister to leukemia, her brother was
killed in a shooting at his corner store, and her mother died in a house fire caused
by lit candles.
Peggy Fulford's scheme wasn't just reliant on her being able to gain her victims' trust,
but also on her ability to secure a power of attorney from each sports star.
As the American Bar Association explains -
"A power of attorney gives one or more persons the power to act on your behalf as your agent,"
Unfortunately for Fulford's A-list clients, Fulford didn't use it honestly, and giving
her the power to manage all of their assets was a grave mistake.
As attorney Kimberly Schechter told CNBC, the document is important because it gives
someone, quote, "unfettered access to financial information, to making business decisions,
opening bank accounts, closing bank accounts."
It was that very power that allowed Fulford to embezzle millions by gaining access to
other people's cash, thus allowing her to freely move it around.
It's clear that she knew how important gaining that right was.
On "American Greed," Dennis Rodman admitted that giving power of attorney to Fulford was
a mistake, and shared a message through a representative.
"It makes me sad I trusted someone I considered family to manage my money, and they did terribly
wrong by me."
While Dennis Rodman was upset to learn that he'd been duped by Peggy Fulford, Ricky Williams
saw the situation in a different light.
Speaking with VladTV in 2021, he shared why he's not upset about losing so much of his
money.
After explaining that he's, quote, "really good at bouncing back from adversity," Williams
said that he would have missed out on a lot if he'd had all that money in the bank when
he retired from the NFL in 2012.
Williams revealed that being scammed forced him to, quote, "wake up and realize there's
more things that I could do than just live off of the money that I made playing football,
and it got me to be more proactive."
His pursuits included returning to school and focusing on his broadcasting career.
Considering himself a spiritual person, Williams underscored how, quote, "everything that shows
up in my life is happening for me, not to me."
He admitted that there were warning signs he failed to acknowledge, saying -
"I don't blame [Fulford], it's on me."
He also suggested that karma may have been at play, confessing to bad things he did as
a kid and even theorizing that he stole in his former lives.
Peggy Fulford's run as a top con artist came to an end in December 2016 when she was charged
with "wire fraud, mail fraud, interstate transportation of stolen property and money laundering,"
according to the Department of Justice.
She was arrested in New Orleans before being transported to Houston, Texas.
In February 2018, The New Orleans Advocate reported that she took a plea deal, and pleaded
guilty to the count of interstate transportation of stolen property, while the others were
dropped.
As the Department of Justice explained, the wire and mail fraud charges came with a maximum
sentence of 20 years in prison.
In November 2018, The Associated Press reported that Peggy Fulford received the maximum allowed
sentence of 10 years for her single charge, and was ordered by a federal judge in Houston
to pay nearly $5.8 million to those she wronged.
Being put on trial didn't stop Peggy Fulford from doing what she did best.
In January 2018, two days before she accepted her plea deal, The New Orleans Advocate reported
that she was arrested by New Orleans police while out on bail.
The allegation was that she convinced a doctor in Louisiana to give her $174,000 so they
could purchase an old high school and turn it into an assisted living facility for seniors.
The only problem was that the campus wasn't actually for sale, and Fulford simply pocketed
the cash.
According to a later report in The New Orleans Advocate, Fulford had actually convinced the
victim to put up a total of $371,000, but once he learned about her 2016 arrest, he
quickly canceled a check for $197,000.
Unfortunately, she had already cashed the other check for $174,000, and he wasn't able
to get that amount back.
Jump to June 2019 and Fulford was once again pleading guilty, this time to a, quote, "theft
and a worthless check charge."
She was sentenced to three years behind bars, which would run in concurrence with her 10-year
prison sentence for defrauding numerous athletes.
The end of her prison term falls in July 2027.
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