A former employee of the state Department of Human Services told jurors Friday that when she met Anthony Leon Waits in late 2012, she was already accepting bribes to protect people who were defrauding a state-administered feeding program for underprivileged children.
Eventually, she acknowledged, she used her position to allow Waits, who had become her boyfriend, to benefit from the fraud scheme as well. Then she helped some of his family and friends get in on the scheme, she said. She married Waits in August 2013, about two months before she left the department.
Gladys Elise Waits, 37, of England is one of two former DHS workers to testify over the past week as star witnesses in the first of nine wire-fraud conspiracy cases related to the federally funded feeding programs to go to trial. The trial for Anthony Waits, 38, of England and Jacqueline Mills, 41, of Helena-West Helena began Monday in the Little Rock courtroom of U.S. District Judge James Moody and is expected to last three weeks.
Gladys Waits and the other former state employee, Tonique Hatton, have admitted being the "gatekeepers" for the program through which Mills is accused of stealing $2.7 million, and Anthony Waits is accused of stealing $1.6 million.
Prosecutors said the fraud scheme that the state workers made possible resulted in nearly $11 million of theft -- that has been discovered to date -- from programs meant for at-risk and low-income children.
The scheme generally operated from 2011 through 2014, prosecutors said, although different defendants are accused of being a part of it at different times.
Gladys Waits, who has a bachelor's degree in criminal justice and a master's degree in counseling, testified that she began working for the Department of Human Services' Special Nutrition Program in 2009, after leaving a job at a law firm.
She said that at DHS, she worked alongside Hatton and was responsible for helping people fill out applications to be sponsors of feeding programs and then approving them. Her job also required her to visit the proposed sites to make sure they were suitable for feeding children.
Waits testified that she met Mills, a sponsor for after-school and summertime feeding programs at Mills' day care in Helena-West Helena, after she was sent to investigate a complaint about Mills. She said the complaint was about discrepancies in the number of children Mills reported feeding and an allegation that Mills was giving checks to Hatton.
Mills wasn't there, but Waits said she and Hatton later talked to Mills by telephone, and "we discussed her inflating her claim numbers."
But they didn't try to stop her, she indicated. Instead, Waits said, the three women discussed how to help each other defraud the government. She said her role in the scheme was to make sure every participant had a "good review" and that she also agreed to give Mills a "heads up" when it was time for another review.
Waits, who also uses her maiden name, Gladys King, said Mills soon began increasing the numbers of children she reported feeding, thereby increasing her "reimbursement" payments from the state. And Mills began paying Waits, through checks written to her or her sister that bore false notations that they were for "supplies" or "equipment."
Waits identified checks of $7,000 and $9,000 that she received from Mills, as well as other checks for amounts of $5,000, $8,000 and $10,000 that were made out to Anthony Waits with false notations such as "construction/at risk," "tables/chairs," or "consulting."
Gladys Waits said she and Anthony Waits would drive to Helena-West Helena and meet Mills at a local McDonald's parking lot to receive the checks.
Soon, Gladys Waits indicated, Anthony Waits began getting other people involved in the fraud scheme, including his nephew, Christopher Nichols, who has pleaded guilty, and a friend, Dortha Harper, who was expected to stand trial alongside Mills and Anthony Waits but pleaded guilty a day before the trial began.
Gladys Waits testified that the feeding sites Nichols claimed to have operated used the North Little Rock address of Anthony Waits' auto repair shop, but no children were ever fed there. She said Anthony Waits received money from Nichols after each direct-deposit payment Nichols received from the state in response to his phony reimbursement claims.
Gladys Waits testified that her husband collected cash payments from several other people in the same manner, after he had her approve them as sponsors. Some of them also used the auto shop as their feeding site address.
Under cross-examination by Mills' attorney, Bill James of Little Rock, Gladys Waits acknowledged she told several lies to authorities before pleading guilty. Asked what she used the money for, she said she bought clothes, shoes and purses. She said she spent cash and never deposited the money into a bank account.
While she admitted also accepting bribes from Kattie Jordan of Dermott, who has pleaded guilty to stealing $3.6 million in the scheme, Waits told James that she lost track of how many people she accepted bribes from.
"People were brought to me," she said.
"How did you think you were going to get away with it?" James asked.
"I was not thinking about that at the time," Waits replied.
She confirmed that the scheme was underway before Mills became involved, saying, "I have no evidence that she started it."
Mills testified in a pretrial hearing that she oversaw 34 feeding sites in several cities, and that all the claims she turned in about the number of children who were fed at those sites came from the individual site supervisors. She said she believed the program was being operated legitimately.
Metro on 04/01/2017