Inside a Florida minister's virtual support group for white-collar criminals

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By Shira Moolten | smoolten@sunsentinel.com | South Florida Sun Sentinel

Every support group meeting for white-collar criminals begins with a prayer.

Jeff Grant, the founder, often picks someone to head it off. Then all the members -- convicted fraudsters, Ponzi schemers, insider traders, tax evaders, money launderers -- say the Serenity Prayer in unison: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

About 40-50 participants join the weekly Zoom every Monday night from across the country and Canada. Grant and several other members live in South Florida, considered by some experts to be the fraud capital of the U.S.

Grant refers to his fellow support group members as "justice-impacted people." He extends a compassion and understanding that few others afford to the wealthy and powerful when they commit crimes, but that's because he's been there himself. In the early 2000s, he was convicted of wire fraud and money laundering after lying on a Small Business Administration loan application in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

It was a pivotal moment in his life: He went to prison, lost his career, and his family fell apart, a similar experience to that of many other white-collar offenders, whose hardships Grant says are often overlooked.

"It's a very misunderstood community of people who are really suffering, and there's just so little empathy and so much stigma and shame and schadenfreude," he told the South Florida Sun Sentinel from his home in West Palm Beach, where he moved with his wife two years ago. "Probably, most of them were pretty well off. But by the time I met most of them, they weren't. And they were hiding and isolated and they didn't have a voice and they were being shunned by their communities. Their children were being kicked out of their schools, parents wouldn't let their children play with their children, as if they had a disease."

It's a unique time to be advocating for white-collar criminals. Americans are increasingly losing money to fraud and scams, and several prominent white-collar cases have made headlines in recent years, from Sam Bankman-Fried to Elizabeth Holmes. Yet prosecutions of these crimes are declining. Meanwhile, both former President Joe Biden and current President Donald Trump have embraced the presidential pardon -- Trump in particular for white-collar offenders.

Grant sees the government's shift towards leniency as an opportunity. In June, he and several group members launched an initiative that would make it easier for people to have their federal criminal records expunged. Last year, the group held its first national virtual White Collar Conference, the second iteration of which will take place on Oct. 11, featuring speakers like Jeffrey Toobin, a legal analyst for CNN who recently wrote a book on the presidential pardon -- and was fired from the New Yorker for exposing himself during a Zoom call -- and Joe Bankman, the father of Bankman-Fried. The conference will feature panels on pardons and expungements, and invites people to become sponsors and "be the voice of second chances."

"As a society, perhaps we can change the path to conviction, but we can also change the path after conviction," said Charles, a support-group member with a house in Delray Beach who was convicted of tax evasion and disbarred before getting reinstated as an attorney in 2022. He is also part of the expungement initiative and asked that his last name not be used.

"That's the one thing the federal system has lacked. The path afterwards," he said. "And that's really what I believe this group is charged with. Helping people through the system, not getting them out of their problem, but helping through it."

As a child, Grant always dreamed of becoming a lawyer. He grew up in the hamlet town of Merrick on Long Island in New York, and described his family as "dysfunctional." His mother took pills, drank and smoked three packs of cigarettes a day.

Grant took after her, beginning to drink at age 13 before picking up drug use through high school, college and law school. Nonetheless, he fulfilled his dream and began working as a corporate and real estate lawyer on Manhattan's Upper East Side, where he lived with his wife. The two later moved to Rye, a town just outside of the city, to raise their two daughters.

Yet as Grant achieved career success, his life began to crumble. Doctors prescribed him painkillers after a basketball injury, and he became addicted. Soon he was missing work, his business was collapsing, and he was mingling his clients' funds with his firm's to pay off expenses.

Then the 9/11 attacks happened. The Small Business Administration offered loans to New Yorkers whose offices were affected by the tragedy. Desperate for money and still in the haze of his addiction, Grant applied for a small business loan, claiming that his office was in Manhattan when, in fact, it was in the next town over. The loan was granted, and he defrauded the U.S. government out of close to $250,000.

Grant can't say exactly why he committed the crime, because he can barely remember doing it. He describes it as "an act of pure insanity." Nevertheless, he used the money to pay off debts, an act that led to his money-laundering charge.

Still, it did not save his business.

In 2002, Grant found out he would lose his law license because of his commingling of funds. With it, he would forfeit his career, his lifestyle, and his good reputation in the well-off community of Rye, where he owned a restaurant and served on the school board. That same night, he attempted suicide by overdosing on painkillers.

The close call with death changed Grant. Immediately following his attempt, he was hospitalized. He got sober, came clean to his family about his addiction, and began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Then, after 20 months of sobriety, he received a phone call from a special agent, telling him there was a warrant out for his arrest over the loan fraud.

In 2006, Grant pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering and was sentenced to 18 months in prison, of which he served close to 14.

In prison, he found an AA group and, after his release, he became ordained as a minister. He moved to Greenwich, Conn., where, for the next 10 years, he continued to attend AA meetings.

"A lot of people, even ministers, will tell you, if they're being honest, that often the most spiritual place in a church is in the basement where the AA meeting is," Grant said. "And I found that to be true."

He began to counsel people who had criminal justice issues, traveling between Greenwich and Bridgeport, two opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. Many of the people he ended up talking to were hedge funders, to the point that a reporter once asked him, "are you the minister to hedge funders?"

That was his "aha moment," and the white-collar support group was born, officially launching in 2015.

The group has since drawn over 1,500 participants, with a rotation of about 200 who attend regularly. It serves as both an emotional lifeline for those experiencing their worst moments and a place where offenders can share advice as mundane as what underwear to bring to prison.

Many members first discover the group after an arrest or conviction, anxious about serving time and wanting to know everything they can about what to expect.

Enrique Perez-Paris is one of them.

On Nov. 17, he will surrender himself and head to prison after pleading guilty to healthcare fraud. The lab he owned had submitted over $36 million in claims for medically unnecessary and non-reimbursable COVID tests, according to prosecutors. In August, a judge sentenced Perez-Paris to three years in prison; Grant and some other members of the group came to Miami federal court to support him.

Perez-Paris, who is now seeking a presidential pardon, maintains that he was not aware what he was doing was illegal until he was handed a piece of paper telling him to give the government access to his email and bank accounts. Then, on an April morning in 2024, police raided the Miami Beach home he shares with his wife, clad in helmets and carrying guns, taking him into custody.

It was not an easy transition. Anxious about his future, Perez-Paris hired a consultant, a popular practice among white-collar offenders, to help him navigate the next phase of his life. Many white-collar criminals hire sentencing or prison consultants to help them secure lighter sentences and prepare them for incarceration, some charging upwards of $600 an hour. The consultants are often ex-convicts themselves.

Perez-Paris' consultant informed him about the support group, and he reached out to Grant, then began attending the Monday meetings, which he found "not just emotional but also educational."

"I immediately felt moved by the group," Perez-Paris told the Sun Sentinel. "You talk to your family and friends, and you explain to them what's going on, they don't really get it ... they don't get the navigating piece of it. They just don't understand it because they haven't lived it."

The support group is more than a practical resource for the prison-anxious. Many white-collar offenders describe their first encounter with the justice system as traumatizing. Often, members of the group had wrapped their identities up in their careers and the lifestyle their jobs -- and crimes -- afforded them while growing distant from their families, Grant said, convincing themselves that their spouses valued them only because of the money that they brought home.

Then, one day, "they got tapped on the shoulder by the FBI."

Offenders often emerge from prison estranged from spouses, children, former friends, and colleagues. Some group members who spoke to the Sun Sentinel described becoming destitute, living on couches and in halfway houses, unable to find work.

"We basically have to live two separate lives," Grant said. "And the acceptance of that is very hard for people prosecuted for white-collar crimes because almost always they lived a very large life, say, the life of a hedge fund manager. And then their second life, maybe, is a drug and alcohol counselor."

Some members of the group know people who died by suicide; multiple have described contemplating suicide themselves after discovering they were under investigation. In the early days, Grant would answer calls from group members in the middle of the night. Many prospective members still reach out at odd hours.

Speaking about the group's purpose, Grant often draws parallels between white-collar crime and addiction. The group is founded on AA principles, following a mix between the 12 steps and the Buddhist eightfold path. The most important steps, Grant said, are "clean house, praise God, help others."

Group members offer different explanations for what drove them to commit crimes. Some see them as acts of desperation, ignorance or thoughtlessness; others as deliberate and calculated.

For Richard Bronson, the answer was simple: "Greed."

He had been working in investment banking on Wall Street when he ended up at the infamous Stratton Oakmont firm -- the boiler room depicted in the Wolf of Wall Street film -- eventually becoming a partner. About a year-and-a-half in, he decided to move to South Florida and start his own operation in Fort Lauderdale, preying on investors and breaking federal securities laws to amass his fortune.

Bronson said he knew "full well that what we were doing was wrong," but he "reaped the benefits" all the same: He owned a nightclub in Miami Beach, an art collection, private jets, a beachfront mansion, and served as chairman of the Miami City Ballet.

"There's an element, I suppose, in a lot of people to be greedy," Bronson told the Sun Sentinel. "And greed, it hides behind creature comforts and power and pretty women and fast cars and good tables and hard-to-get reservations and all kinds of rewards. But a lot of it, at least for me, as I was certainly enjoying it, it's sort of hollow. Anybody that gets money the wrong way, they don't seem to be too happy by it all."

A preoccupation with material things is a common thread for members of the group.

Charles, the attorney, was convicted in 2012 of failing to report over $300,000 in income on his tax returns and fabricating evidence to the IRS, according to the Department of Justice. He said he was dealing with financial pressures based on his lifestyle and "lost his way."

"My priorities have changed," he told the Sun Sentinel. "Things are less important. I don't want things to replace happiness. Happiness is independent of things."

Other group members described their actions as careless. Perez-Paris told the Sun Sentinel he didn't know at the time that his company was violating the legal requirements for Medicare reimbursement, such as by offering COVID tests to people without a doctor present.

Still, Perez-Paris said he "should have been more careful."

"I was the CEO," he said. "I owned up to my mistakes."

There is a tension between accountability and solidarity within the support group, particularly given its focus on reforming the justice system. Members of Grant's group have at times emphasized the nonviolent or victimless nature of their own crimes while pointing to confusing regulations, unfairly long sentences and excessive restitution agreements.

During a recent support group meeting, Ron Bauer, a venture capitalist who pleaded guilty to securities fraud after orchestrating "pump-and-dump" schemes around the world, gave a guest talk about his experience, at one point remarking on New York City, where his case was tried, as once "a city full of homeless people and crime."

"None of us have killed anyone," he said later. "It's white-collar crime, you know. You made mistakes. People make mistakes."

Charles, the lawyer convicted of tax evasion, said his criminal justice experience made him "more sensitive to the misapplication of laws on a selective basis." But he still finds it "offensive" when people commit everyday crimes like jumping the turnstiles at the subway or stealing shampoo from the drugstore.

"The vast majority of Americans can't tolerate somebody who doesn't pay their taxes but can certainly tolerate someone stealing a jar of peanut butter," he said. "I can't easily reconcile that."

White-collar offenders often seek to distinguish themselves from other criminals, experts say.

"Almost without exception ... the people who are convicted of white-collar offenses deny having criminal intent," criminologists wrote in a 2012 paper. "They view themselves as generally moral, and they typically do not see themselves as being like 'real criminals.' Instead, they tend to rationalize away their offenses as 'oversights,' 'mistakes,' or 'technical violations.'"

Rick Del Toro, a former prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami who previously helmed its money-laundering section, told the Sun Sentinel that he often encountered situations where defendants refused to agree to plea deals because of this, more so than with other types of offenders.

"White-collar criminals tended to have a harder time seeing themselves as criminals -- as someone who had committed a crime, who had defrauded victims," he said. "They usually tended to rationalize."

Del Toro was pleasantly surprised when he saw that Grant's group emphasizes accountability. Members' critiques of the justice system often accompany stories of shame and self-loathing.

"I'm sure there are people in our group that have this retained anger about 'look what the government did to me,'" said Charles. "I did it to myself. I blame nobody but me."

Making amends with victims is not one of the group's formal steps, Grant said, but is "part of each person's journey" and a frequent subject of conversation.

Conversations within the group are typically kept under wraps. Grant denied a Sun Sentinel request to attend an upcoming meeting, citing members' privacy concerns. However, he did make a meeting from 2020 public on YouTube. Following the prayer, Grant announced the week's theme, which was gratitude. As participants went around to share their stories, some described feeling thankful for their arrests.

"I don't know where I would be today if I did not get caught up by the FBI," said Jackie, from Connecticut, who said she failed to disclose a first mortgage when she took out a second one. "For me, I am grateful to them."

Over the last several decades, criminal justice advocates have deepened the public's understanding of the cultural and socioeconomic explanations for crime, while critiques of the justice system have grown louder, from police, to prosecutors, to prisons.

"In impoverished areas, it's very easy to see the environmental factors," Grant said, citing things like lack of access to healthcare and education and single-parent families. "But for many, many years, white people who were being prosecuted for white-collar crimes were seen as greedy. And not so much anymore."

The government's attitudes towards federal and white-collar crime have changed. As president, Joe Biden expanded the use of the pardon, granting more acts of clemency than any president before him, including for his own son, Hunter, focusing on non-violent drug offenses.

Trump, meanwhile, himself convicted of falsifying business records, has granted pardons to several high-profile, white-collar offenders, including Michael Milken, the "junk bond king," convicted of securities fraud and conspiracy; Steve Bannon, convicted of fraud; and reality stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, convicted of tax evasion and bank fraud.

Trump has also rolled back enforcement of white-collar offenses, a move that has received backlash. In South Florida, where white-collar crime is rampant, criminal justice experts say, that trend has continued; more than half of the prosecutors in the white-collar office of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami have left since 2024, according to Del Toro, who retired the same year.

"Imagine how much more white-collar crime there is that's not being prosecuted," he said.

The number of victims and total losses to fraud and scams continues to increase. In 2024, American consumers lost $12.5 billion to fraud, according to the Federal Trade Commission, a 25% increase from the previous year.

Yet for those in the white-collar world, the cultural shifts -- in particular, the presidential pardons -- have also presented an opportunity. In June, support group members and other advocates launched the federal expungement initiative, which seeks to create a path for those with nonviolent federal convictions to get their records erased, as long as they meet certain criteria. So far, Grant says, it has bipartisan support.

"The climate for, not just pardons, but maybe for the concept of actual expungement is out there," he said. "And we thought it would just be a very ripe time to try to put an expungement project out there in the federal system and see if there's any political will for it."

Proponents of the initiative emphasize that recidivism for white-collar offenders is low compared to other ex-felons. No one in the support group has reoffended, Grant said, and yet their convictions follow them for the rest of their lives. Many have useful skills but are unable to find work; some are even barred from coaching their children's sports teams.

"The existence of a criminal record -- which is completely one-off from almost everybody in the white-collar world, this is a one-off event -- is a stigma that is nearly impossible to overcome in society," Charles said. "Because no one knows how to deal with it for this class of offender."

Del Toro said he would support a path to expungement for those who had a less active role, giving the hypothetical of a receptionist whose sole task was answering phones without making any proceeds. But he was skeptical when thinking about offenders who spearheaded and profited off of their crimes.

"Somebody who's a small player, it doesn't really matter," he said. "If it's one of the leaders, you know, who drove a Bentley and bought a mansion, all with fraud and the proceeds of Medicare fraud, why should that person have their conviction expunged?"

Despite the governmental shifts, the public has grown less tolerant of the wealthy, not more, as economic unrest rises, seen in response to events like the killing of the United Healthcare CEO and the popularity of movies and shows like Parasite and The White Lotus -- the most recent season of which depicted a white-collar criminal realizing he is under federal investigation and contemplating familicide while at a resort in Thailand.

Sometimes, those sentiments have spilled over in response to Grant's group. On Reddit, under a 2021 New Yorker feature about the group, the top comment asked, "why would the new yorker think anyone would want to read an article about white-collar criminals and how hard their lives are?"

Asked about potential criticisms of a support group for more privileged offenders in the criminal justice system, members said that they lost most of their fortunes by the time they found Grant and one another.

"It's not privilege," said Charles. "You go back to zero like everyone else."

Grant said that most judgment he faces comes not from the less fortunate but from his own affluent community. When he first got out of prison, he remembered going to a party at the home of a wealthy Greenwich resident, where his conviction came up in conversation. A woman turned to her husband and said, "let's get out of here," he recalled, "as if we were lepers."