Mississippi’s former welfare director John Davis cited his need to maintain a friendship with Teddy DiBiase Jr. as he ordered nonprofit operator Christi Webb to dole out welfare dollars to the retired pro-wrestler under contracts he never fulfilled, she testified in federal court.
Webb, the former head of the Family Resource Center, and one of the principal recipients of federal welfare funds eventually funneled to DiBiase Jr., took the stand on Feb. 26. Webb’s direct examination took several days, as prosecutors breezed through two years of contracts, checks and communication from DiBiase, Webb and John Davis, the disgraced Mississippi Department of Human Services director and the scandal’s ringleader.
DiBiase Jr. is the first, and thus far only, individual named in the sprawling Mississippi Department of Human Services fraud scandal to have gone to trial. Over the course of years, investigators allege MDHS and its subgrantees wasted or misspent up to $94 million in federal welfare grants and other funds. Brett DiBiase, Ted DiBiase Jr.’s younger brother, pled guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States in 2023.
DiBiase Jr. was the recipient of multiple lucrative contracts with Webb’s FRC, including the following eye-watering sums over a short matter of years:
- June 1, 2017 – $250,000 cash in advance, $250,000 per year for four years, paid monthly: $1.25 million in total.
- May 15, 2018, $500,000
- May 22, 2018, $497,987
- June 26, 2018, $1,000,000
Altogether, more than $3.2 million in contracts for the son of the Million Dollar Man culminated from Davis’ promise to DiBiase of “generational security.” All in a year, all extracted from the Family Resource Center and all paid for with a mixture of funds from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, and The Emergency Food Assistance Program, or TEFAP—two federal programs intended to support the most impoverished Mississippi families.
And what services would Mississippi’s poor receive for these extraordinary contracts?
DiBiase was supposed to “identify the current state of Families First for Mississippi leadership,” a statewide initiative, to “develop a strategic course of action for implementation of leadership development initiatives.” One-on-one coaching sessions. Leadership workshops. Trainings, seminars and more.
Were these necessary? No, Webb testified in late February. “We had a well-qualified staff,” credentialed, educated and specifically trained in leadership. “We had ample people who were leaders.”
After Webb’s testimony, the next to testify was Nancy New, the founder of the Mississippi Community Education Center and the other key recipient of fraudulent funds in the MDHS scandal. New testified that, much like Webb, she had seen no benefit to her organization from DiBiase Jr.’s contracts. To her knowledge, she continued, none of the various activities the defense highlighted—advertisements, radio appearances, talks with politicians—fulfilled one letter of his lucrative contracts with her organization.
David to Nonprofits: ‘Fund Teddy’
For the million-dollar contract, Ted DiBiase Jr. was supposed to lead the creation of a program called RISE to “address the multiple needs of inner-city youth.” Did FRC need such a program? No, Webb said again.
But perhaps the most revealing of the contracts discussed in court was the third, for $497,987. It was to administer funds from a TEFAP grant, a USDA program intended to provide emergency food assistance to the needy, including through food banks and pantries. Davis and MDHS provided the TEFAP money to FRC, a prospect that excited Webb and her staff.
Four FRC employees were on deck to administer that grant. “Where did this money end up going?” Assistant U.S. Attorney Dave Fulcher asked.
“It went to Teddy,” Webb admitted. “(Davis) sent us the scope and grant. Two days later, he said Teddy is going to be the administrator of this grant. … We were devastated,” she said. “We were at a loss. We didn’t know what to do.”
But that was the price of the devil’s bargain with John Davis, she testified, adding that his largesse often came with marching orders. “It was done in the way that John Davis conducted his business with us. He would pick up the phone and tell you to fund Teddy,” Webb said.
However senseless such contractual arrangements may be in theory, the verdict in DiBiase Jr.’s trial may come down to what he actually did in practice. In Webb’s testimony, the answer was simple: barely anything at all.
For the TEFAP contract, Webb said, DiBiase Jr. “sent me a list of all the food pantries in North Mississippi.” And was that single list, composed of easily accessible information, useful? No, she explained. FRC was an institution with more than 300 employees, serving at least 3,000 needy Mississippians a month. They already had that data.
“Truthfully,” she said, “I threw it in the garbage can.” This list, in the testimony of Christi Webb, was the only direct contribution to FRC from any of Ted DiBiase Jr.’s contracts.
Beyond that, Webb recalled seeing DiBiase Jr. alone in Tupelo, where FRC was headquartered, after Davis ordered Webb to replace the emcee at a Jason Crabb benefit concert with DiBiase Jr.
“I see you closing your eyes,” attorney Fulcher noted.
“ It just makes me too sick to even think about it,” Webb admitted. “This was bad. I … just did the wrong thing.”
Webb: Davis’ Orders Were Absolute
These were the contracts behind Christi Webb’s March 16, 2023, guilty plea for theft concerning federal funds, a crime for which she has yet to serve time, as she continues to serve the state as a witness.
But why? What possessed a veteran teacher and administrator to repeatedly offer a former wrestler exceptionally lucrative contracts far in excess of his skill and value to her agency, outside the scope of its core mission and needs?
Webb’s answer was simple. She had nothing to do with the contracts. John Davis prepared them and sent them to her to sign. Davis’ orders were absolute. The “dictator” that both prosecutors and defense spoke about emerged.
And Davis, Webb argued, was visibly in the thrall of DiBiase. His personality had changed. The avuncular fellow she had met years ago was gone, replaced with a tyrant, as she described him in court. On one occasion, as her mother lay dying, Webb said DiBiase and Davis showed up in Tupelo to pay their respects—and later to pick up a check.
The check, made out to DiBiase’s company Familiae Orientem, was for $350,000, dated June 26, 2018: the day Webb’s mother died.
Webb testified that it wasn’t long before she knew what she was doing was wrong, and when she pushed back on Davis, he would often fall to pieces.
“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.
At times, Webb said she challenged DiBiase’s value for the contracts he had received. At least once, Davis agreed, planning to light a fire under his charge. One October evening in 2017, he spoke about DiBiase as though he was planning to cut him loose.
“It just bothers me that I allowed these guys to gain access and it feels like they are using (me). If you don’t mind tell Ted Jr. to report to my office Friday morning. We are going to engage his ass,” he wrote in part in a text message on Oct. 17, 2017. “It’s almost like the three guys Ted. Jr. Adam and Chris are trying to start their own world on your dime. May should consider looking at both contracts. Can you legally break them … We can hash this out again cause I caused (sic). So so so so sorry.”
Davis’ concerns do not seem to have lasted long. In spite of all this, Webb testified that she had virtually never seen DiBiase during the contract period, much less received documentation—or any evidence at all—of any work he might be doing to fulfill his obligations. “As far as Family Resource Center, Teddy was MIA,” she said. “I don’t know that we ever saw him during that time.”
But when she attempted to end the contracts in August 2018 after a shortfall in Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services funding and a shift in priorities at MDHS caused a massive one-third cut of FRC’s grant funding, she said Davis-the-dictator emerged in full.
“John Davis said, ‘The other director, Nancy New, has never said no.’ I said, John, if you have to pull all the money back to DHS, you do that. But I’m not funding Teddy.”
Not long after, she testified, “We got a letter in January in 2019. We received a letter at the FRC that said our contract had been cut. We had $10 million that year. It was cut by either $5 or $6 million. We had to come up with funds for the end of the month. Everybody took a huge cut in salary.”
After the enormous cut, Webb said she met Davis, who made the consequences of her disloyalty clear.
“On March 6, 2019 I went in to see John,” she testified. “I walked into his office and said ‘John, we need to know if you’re going to keep funding the Family Resource Center.’”
Davis’ response was simple, Webb said: probably not.
“He put his finger on the table,” testified Webb, “and said, ‘You drew a line in the sand when you refused to fund Teddy. … You tried to take my job and make my decisions. Christi, I am the grantor and you are the grantee.’”
‘We Never Got a Call From Teddy’
Christi Webb’s testimony came after muddled days of back-and-forth with John Davis, the scandal’s ringleader and a key witness. That process was complicated by the sudden departure of lead defense attorney Scott Gilbert due to a health scare, and a brief interlude where Eric Herschmann, former senior adviser to President Donald Trump, took over DiBiase’s defense. Soon after the trial resumed, Gilbert was back, and Herschmann had departed. Previously, Judge Carlton Reeves vetoed repeated attempts to force a mistrial.
The defense pushed back in their cross-examination of Webb, stressing whether she had actually communicated to DiBiase Jr. that his activities failed to satisfy his contractual obligations. “Did you say, ‘Teddy, this is great, but this really isn’t what we hired you to do,” Lampton asked.
“No,” Webb said. “We never got a call from Teddy. If I talked to anybody about that, it would’ve been John Davis.”
Associate attorney Sidney Lampton repeatedly pointed out text exchanges between Davis and Webb in which the latter maintained her loyal disposition toward the DHS head, even as she said she privately distrusted him.
As FRC’s funding was slashed, Webb continued to speak warmly to Davis in texts, referring to herself as a friend. Pressed on the matter, Webb stated that she had considered Davis a friend, that she had even liked him.
Webb testified that she said plenty to Davis that she didn’t mean, just as she argued John Davis would often “tell one person one thing and another person another.”
Lampton also brought up a text exchange in the time period where DiBiase Jr. and Davis descended on Tupelo to acquire a check, allegedly stamped in Webb’s name, the same day that Webb’s mother had died. Webb testified previously that she had no knowledge of the check, which DiBiase Jr. and Davis picked up from FRC’s office while she was with her mother.
But text messages from that day showed Webb acknowledging just that. “ The check is ready. I wrote it to Priceless Ventures,” Webb wrote then. “If I need to change it, please let me know.”
Webb may not have actually written the check; her signature could have been applied to it via a stamp. But she said she didn’t remember the text.
Much of the rest of the cross-examination involved the defense’s alternative theories for the slashing of FRC’s funding. Webb strictly maintained that Davis, fulminating, had told her directly that her unwillingness to continue funding DiBiase Jr. was the direct cause of FRC’s funding cuts.
But the defense retorted that external factors could instead explain the FRC cuts, including the one-month government shutdown starting at the end of 2018, challenging the notion that a refusal to fund DiBiase Jr. explained the cuts to Webb’s agency.
Repeatedly during Webb’s cross-examination, sustained objections curtailed Lampton’s attempts to interrogate Webb.
Most notably, the defense attempted to present a video, which it said was filmed at Webb’s house, which the defense argued would show her hearing straight from Davis that the funding cut was the result of the government shutdown.
But Judge Reeves spiked the recording due to many conflicting narratives as to why money was withheld or granted and after the defense was unable to prove that Webb made the recording, leaving DiBiase’s defense visibly frustrated.
Nancy New, Who Pled Guilty, Takes Stand
Nancy New’s testimony, and the defense’s cross-examination, served mostly as an extension showed a similar pattern.
New, and her organization Mississippi Community Education Center, much like Christi Webb and FRC, served as a privatized extension of previously core MDHS services. Executive fiat allowed the groups to take on a massive, poorly defined range of services and a ballooning budget that reflected their outsized role in Mississippi’s welfare programs.
Ted DiBiase Jr. had been the beneficiary of contracts, with MCEC individually and with Families First for Mississippi as a whole, that allotted him specific services for the two organizations.
But had DiBiase performed services—such as leadership training—for MCEC, one of the core organizations under Families First for Mississippi? Not to New’s knowledge.
“I do not know that he did the things listed in the services,” she testified.
Nor did she fully understand what, exactly, those services were.
“Whereas MCEC is willing to authorize contractor to provide the services and activities as outlined on the scope of services attached hereto as Exhibit A,” some of DiBiase’s contracts read.
New testified that no Exhibit A had come attached to the contracts. Nor had she ever seen it. Her organization was paying DiBiase handsomely, but allegedly had no idea what, if anything, he was expected to do.
Just as with Webb, the government objected to and the judges blocked videos the defense attempted to introduce to expand their argument around cuts to subgrantee funding and the work DiBiase supposedly did during the contract period with FRC and MCEC. Judge Reeves argued that they would prove more unfairly prejudicial—due to their breezy, unverifiable implications of the work DiBiase supposedly performed for Families First—than illustrative.
During New’s cross-examination, Lampton honed in on DiBiase Jr.’s value in promoting the broader umbrella of Families First for Mississippi, discussing trips to speak in front of Congress, commercials popularizing the FFM initiative, meetings with politicians, and other figures on trips with Davis, New and others.
She brought up various commercials, an appearance on the Paul Gallo radio show, and the Law of 16 training curriculum, as well as a trip DiBiase Jr. had taken with New, Webb and Davis to present a PowerPoint presentation on the Law of 16 to Congress. In Washington, they had met with “important people,” including officials from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as well as several U.S. congresspeople, Lampton said.
Few witnesses remained for the prosecution as the trial paused for a break at the end of the week. Both New and Webb have testified that virtually none of DiBiase Jr.’s work had fallen under the scope of services outlined, however flimsily, in the contracts he received.
Now, the defense faces the task of arguing that, contained in the massive body of evidence from DiBiase’s years in Davis’ employ, is proof he made a good-faith attempt to fulfill his contractual obligations.
The trial is set to resume on Monday, March 16.
Disclosure: Investigative reporter 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 the Mississippi Community Education Center.
