Federal prosecutors focused heavily on the theme of deception as trial began Tuesday for suspended Georgia Insurance Commissioner Jim Beck.
Beck, who was indicted and suspended less than six months after taking office in 2019, is accused of stealing $2 million from his former employer, the Georgia Underwriters Association, before he won the election.
To conceal his alleged crimes, Beck lied to people — friends and a cousin — to dupe them into helping his scheme, prosecutor Sekret T. Sneed told the jury Tuesday.
“They trusted him for years and believed what he told them,” Sneed said. “Every step the defendant took was...so no one except Beck would know the full scheme.”
So complicated was the plot, Sneed said, that Beck had to make a flowchart to keep it all straight.
Beck’s attorneys accused the U.S. Department of Justice of not knowing enough about the insurance industry to properly investigate the case. They said the evidence will show that Beck did nothing wrong and actually worked to help Georgia Underwriters Association turn a profit for the first time in 40 years.
“The government’s got the facts wrong,” defense attorney Randy Chartash told the jury. “The government doesn’t know anything about Mr. Beck.”
Beck, a Carrolton native, swept into office in 2018 even though he was being investigated by the U.S. attorney’s office after media reports suggested he held full-time state and private-sector jobs at the same time.
In January 2019, he took over the Georgia Insurance Commissioner’s Office, which regulates the insurance and small-loan industries and investigates suspected arson cases. After his indictment, Beck, a Republican, maintained his innocence but asked Gov. Brian Kemp to suspend him. Interim commissioner John King is running to make the job official.
In court, much time was spent Tuesday on explaining to the jury various ins-and-outs of the insurance industry and the little known Georgia Underwriters Association.
The association, based in Suwanee, is a state-created entity that offers property insurance to high-risk homeowners who have trouble getting coverage. All companies that sell insurance in Georgia are members of the association. People from major insurers, such as All State and State Farm, have members on the association’s board.
Beck was general manager of operations for about seven years, though witnesses said he liked to call himself the president, the same title he’d once held at the Georgia Christian Coalition.
Beck is accused of using four companies to help with a project to verify that some customers were properly insured. Prosecutors said three friends and one of Beck’s cousins helped him, but Beck hadn’t told them a lot of the money would end up in his pocket.
Judy Strickland, who did bookkeeping at the association, took the stand and recalled a day when Beck walked into her office with an invoice.
Strickland was puzzled looking at it, she testified. The company was Green Tech. The invoice was just one page and had very few details compared to the ones she normally received. Invoices tended to come in the mail, not handed over by the boss and for a company she’d never heard of the two decades she’d been with the association.
The invoice number, Strickland noticed, was 1. Was this the first invoice the company had ever sent?
Strickland said she tried to ask Beck more about it, but he didn’t seem up for talking about it. Strickland said Beck referred to Green Tech as “they.” He said to leave the check up front on the receptionist’s desk. That, Strickland said, was unusual.
Beck didn’t mention that Green Tech was a company formed by Beck’s cousin at Beck’s suggestion, according to Strickland. Beck also didn’t say he had financial interest in Green Tech.
Strickland said she didn’t think much about it. She didn’t think she had a reason to distrust him about the company.
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