JACKSON, Miss.—Ted DiBiase Jr. silently wept in federal court in Jackson, Mississippi, on Friday afternoon as a jury acquitted him on all federal charges related to millions that he and his companies received in Mississippi welfare dollars that should have gone to Mississippi’s poorest.
The retired WWE pro-wrestler faced 13 charges, including one count of conspiracy, six counts of wire fraud, one count of theft concerning programs receiving federal funds, and four counts of money laundering. DiBiase is the son of Ted DiBiase Sr., the famed former WWF wrestler popularly known as “The Million Dollar Man.”
As he left the courtroom on Friday afternoon, Ted DiBiase Jr. could scarcely describe his feelings.
“To God goes the glory,” he said.
Outside the courthouse, he spoke to the gathered press, thanking God and his defense team, in that order.
“Seven years of being slandered and made to be something that is completely false has about torn my family apart. But we’re strong,” he said.
The jury deliberated for roughly 4 hours, starting the morning of Friday, March 20, after a trial that sprawled across two months, two delays and numerous witnesses.
In the end, the defense’s argument that it was Mississippi Department of Human Services Director John Davis who was the villain in the trial carried the day. From 2017 to 2019, Davis misdirected over $77 million in Mississippi welfare dollars, including to multiple sports celebrities. Davis directed millions to NFL quarterback Brett Favre and causes he supported, including building a volleyball stadium at his alma mater and funds for Prevacus, a drug company he heavily invested in. Prosecutors have neither accused nor charged Favre with a crime, though he is a target of a civil lawsuit from the state.
Altogether, DiBiase Jr. and his companies netted more than $3.2 million in contracts while Davis led MDHS, paid for with a mixture of funds from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, and The Emergency Food Assistance Program, or TEFAP—federal programs intended to support impoverished families.
Text messages that prosecutors produced during the trial show that Davis promised to help Ted DiBiase Jr. and his brother, Brett DiBiase, build “generational wealth.” Davis and the brothers often showered one another with affection. Davis testified in February that Ted DiBiase Jr. referred to the relationship the three men shared as “DaViase” (which the prosecution likened to “Bennifer”) and fantasized about building a “DaViase Farm.”
The Defense: ‘John Davis Was the Boss’
Ted DiBiase Jr.’s trial snaked through years of his connections with Davis and MDHS. Only a day before, at the Southern District federal courthouse in Jackson, both prosecution and defense laid out their closing arguments, painting starkly different pictures of the millions in federal dollars DiBiase received for a raft of contracts with two subgrantees, the Family Resource Center and the Mississippi Community Education Center.
“Lies for money. Sham contracts for cash advances. Fraudulently obtaining and pocketing more than $2.9 million in federal funds intended for the poorest people in Mississippi in order to fund the defendant’s lavish lifestyle,” alleged U.S. Department of Justice trial attorney Adrienne Rosen. “This is the shape of the scheme.”
Teddy DiBiase Jr., in the eyes of the prosecution, was “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” alleged Assistant U.S. Attorney David Fulcher. The government’s case laid the allegations out: that DiBiase Jr. wilfully disguised himself as a mere MDHS employee, an underpaid associate of its executive director. All the while, prosecutors alleged, he surreptitiously arranged a web of shell companies to secret away millions in misappropriated federal welfare funds. Prosecutors alleged that DiBiase Jr. obtained the money through contracts for which he did no real work, hired no assistance, shouldered no expenses and served not one impoverished Mississippian.
What he did do, the prosecution alleged, was run a classic confidence scheme on the biggest mark in the state: John Davis, the whimpering tyrant; desperate for love, intimacy, adoration, Christian brotherhood, masculine bonding, or a curdled mix of them all.
“It’s called a lonely hearts scheme,” as common as a weed, Fulcher said. The power that first Brett DiBiase and then Teddy DiBiase wielded over Davis, the prosecution alleged, gave him the leverage necessary to extract outrageous sums of money in exchange for little more than his companionship.
But the victorious argument came from DiBiase’s defense attorney Scott Gilbert, who returned to court in recent weeks after a medical episode in late January left him sidelined. On Thursday, he was in fighting shape and temperament as he sought to unravel the prosecution’s case.
“(Davis) wasn’t a mark. You saw him on that witness stand. He’s not some softhearted poor little introvert,” Gilbert said. “The evidence shows that John Davis was the boss and everyone followed him.”
The prosecution’s lie, Gilbert proclaimed, was the reversal of authority between Davis and the DiBiases. It is Davis, in the defense’s case, who bears sole responsibility for the fraud: Davis the dictator, Davis the manipulator, Davis the magisterial, mercurial Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde who isolated, commanded, and abused young, would-be entrepreneurs—like Brett and Teddy DiBiase and others.
“Teddy wasn’t mean. He wasn’t a bully. He was kind and professional,” Gilbert said. “You haven’t heard a single thing about him that suggests he wasn’t trying his best to do the work that was assigned to him—by John Davis.”
MDHS, Gilbert asserted, was a maelstrom of chaos. After Davis received marching orders from then-Gov. Phil Bryant to privatize the agency, he said, it began a form of bureaucratic self-harm, gouging out massive chunks of its own organizational structure and assigning them blindly to ill-equipped nonprofits like the Family Resource Center and the Mississippi Community Education Center. DiBiase Jr.’s bizarre employment status, the defense argued, was an artifact of this top-down regime, not a scheme to deceive.
“He was hired first by MDHS. He was paid by the state. He had a contract with FRC. But he didn’t work at FRC, he worked at MCEC,” Gilbert said. “He didn’t get any feedback or communication from anybody.”
“And clearly, Teddy was not unique in this regard,” he continued, referring to a handful of other young men plucked into unaccountable plum positions by Davis. “This is just part and parcel of how they were doing business.”
Gilbert concluded his arguments with an extensive list of DiBiase Jr.’s activities during the contract periods—traveling with Davis, meeting with members of Congress, appearing on radio and cutting advertisements. It included a long agenda of work at the highest levels of MDHS, a position which subsumed and, in the defense’s position, stood in for the contractual obligations DiBiase Jr. had with MCEC and FRC. The fact that his work flew far afield of the stated contracts was the failing of the grantor, not the recipient, they argued.
Defense Witnesses: DiBiase Had ‘Ideas, Relationships and Connectivity’
After the prosecution rested, the defense’s witnesses took only a matter of days. The first witness was Kevin McClendon, formerly of creative services agency Telegraph Creative, whom Ted DiBiase Jr. had encountered in 2017 and collaborated with to conceptualize health and fitness phone apps.
Most notably, McClendon testified that DiBiase had helped sketch out plans for the Get Fit app, to “gamify some of the work that MSDH was doing to try to break the cycle of poverty within the state,” including healthy eating and nutrition.
The app, according to a pitch deck presented in court, would have featured a collection of Mississippi-connected influencers, each fitting into a specific category of healthy living. In their section of the app, they would have presented challenges to users to encourage better lifestyles, exercise routines, and eating practices. DiBiase Jr., for example, could offer a primer on strength training exercises; Archie Manning could give tips on wellness; Jerry Rice could teach fitness; or former Iron Chef Cat Cora could suggest healthy alternatives to fried food, like baking okra—a culinary prospect that seemed to haunt prosecutor Fulcher for the rest of the trial.
Aside from DiBiase Jr., the star-studded lineup, much like the app itself, was hypothetical. It never came to fruition, and as far as can be seen, none of the celebrities in the mockups ever agreed to participate in the project. Still, access to star power was to be one of DiBiase Jr.’s primary contributions.
He had “the idea for the app, the relationships and connectivity to a portfolio of proposed influencers that were going to participate in this cause,” McLendon said.
And the idea, as McLendon presented it, might have also served the purposes of MDHS in collecting valuable data about the locations, habits and needs of potentially at-risk Mississippians.
This app, though it was never actually produced, represented “easily 4-6 months worth” of DiBiase Jr.’s time, McLendon said. The app, and its applicability to the scope of services contained in the various contracts DiBiase signed with MCEC and FRC, may have been relevant to the trial’s outcome. It was among the primary pieces of evidence Gilbert referred to in his closing arguments to suggest that DiBiase Jr. had, in fact, made a good-faith attempt to satisfy the requirements of his nearly $500,000 TEFAP contract. FRC director Christi Webb previously testified that DiBiase did nothing in exchange for the contract beyond providing a single list.
After McLendon, the defense called Michael Theriot, a Louisiana-based consultant who spoke briefly about the nature of LLCs. He was a witness the defense used to argue that DiBiase Jr.’s use of LLCs for receipt of funds from MCEC and FRC was in keeping with standard business practices.
The final two witnesses from the defense were Nicholas Coughlin and Jesse Pierce, two other men who found themselves in John Davis’ orbit. Coughlin was an associate of both DiBiase brothers who, once Brett connected him to John Davis, found himself the enviable recipient of three separate contracts with MCEC, FRC and MDHS.
Pierce, at the time a broke young fitness coach, described how a mutual connection put him in touch with Davis, who brought him on board at MDHS directly, serving as a “staff officer.” Soon after, Pierce was deployed to MCEC, giving health presentations to public schools, in a bizarre departure from what he imagined his job would be. Not long after he quit, citing low pay and uninteresting work.
Davis eventually brought him back to MDHS as an independent contractor, paying him a lump sum of $100,000 for an open-ended job that allowed him to make his own career in the broader Families First coalition, a statewide initiative designed to connect struggling families to resources. Without much guidance, Pierce testified that he began making workout and meal plans for the agencies. Months into the contract, Pierce’s employment was terminated without much explanation. But no one asked for the money back, which he said made him nervous at the time.
The defense used Pierce and Coughlin to illustrate the unmonitored power Davis possessed over contracts and the way he personally selected young men to champion for obscure, poorly defined, but financially lucrative jobs.
“You didn’t see any evidence of them lavishing the lonely man in exchange for money,” Gilbert said in closing.
Davis: ‘It Is Me Who Tried to Buy All of Your Love’
During the trial, prosecutors cited texts between John Davis and Ted DiBiase Jr. in which the two expressed intense affection for one another, often with “I love you”s.
In one text on April 12, 2018, Davis wrote about his motivations for helping Ted DiBiase Jr. and his brother, Brett DiBiase.
“It is me who tried to buy all of your love,” he wrote.
“We are going to build generational security for our families and we are going to help many many many along the way,” Davis wrote in another text to Ted DiBiase Jr. in August 2018. “I actually have tears in my eyes because I believe with everything I got.”
Christi Webb, the director of the Family Resource Center who oversaw some of the welfare funds that went to DiBiase, testified that Davis “would pick up the phone and tell you to fund Teddy.”
“John Davis would call late at night, and he would be crying,” Webb said. “‘The only way I can have friends is to give them money. He’s got to keep getting this money,’ he said, ‘We’ll find some more money, but you’ve got to keep funding Teddy,’” Webb testified on Feb. 27.
The verdict marks the end of the first and only criminal case in the Mississippi welfare scandal to have gone to trial. Prior to the trial, multiple defendants accepted guilty pleas, including Davis, Webb, Brett DiBiase, Prevacus founder Jake VanLandingham and former Mississippi Community Education Center executive Nancy New.
The State has sued Ted DiBiase Sr. over more than $700,000 that Davis directed to his Christian ministry, Heart of David Ministries, but prosecutors have not accused the elder DiBiase of a crime.
In one text to Brett DiBiase that prosecutors presented in January, Davis discussed what he said was his reason for transferring funds to Ted DiBiase Sr.’s ministry.
“You have to know if the funding stops, Teddy’s contract stops too,” Davis wrote. “That’s why I transferred the $3 million to (Heart of David Ministries).”
Mississippi State Auditor Shad White, whose office first began the investigation into Davis’ use of welfare funds after then-Gov. Phil Bryant passed along a tip from MDHS Deputy Director Jacob Black in 2019, reacted with displeasure at the verdict.
“While I’m disappointed in the result of the trial, nothing changes the fact that seven people have already pleaded guilty to state or federal charges because of the welfare scandal,” he said in a statement minutes after the verdict came down. “My hope now is that the state’s lawyers will be able to recover as much of the misspent money as possible in civil court so hard-working taxpayers can see some accountability for what happened here.”
Disclosure: Nick Judin attended Nancy New’s New Summit School and in 2006 served as a production assistant on a project filmed at the school in partnership with MCEC.