Saga of attorney-turned-fugitive Eric Conn featured Monday night on CNBC’s ‘American Greed’

A national true-crime television show will feature the rise and fall of Eric Conn, an Eastern Kentucky lawyer who was charged with Social Security fraud, escaped before sentencing and spent six months on the run.

“American Greed,” CNBC’s long-running true-crime show, will feature the story of how Conn masterminded the largest Social Security fraud in history at 10 p.m. EST Monday. Conn once had one of the biggest practices in the country specializing in representing people seeking disability payments from the Social Security Administration.

In April 2016, a grand jury found Conn had engaged in fraud on a staggering scale, submitting false evidence of his clients’ physical and mental impairments to bilk the federal government out of $600 million. While on home incarceration awaiting sentencing, Conn removed his ankle-monitoring bracelet and went on the lam for six months before he was captured in Honduras in December. Conn was sentenced to 12 years while he was in on the lam. Conn is now in custody while he awaits trial on additional charges.

Conn’s former clients, FBI agents, several Kentucky lawyers and Lexington Herald-Leader reporter Bill Estep are featured in the hour-long program.

This is not the first time “American Greed” has featured a story about dodgy Kentucky lawyers. In 2012, “American Greed” also did an hour-long program about how Lexington-area lawyers William Gallion, Shirley Cunningham Jr. and Melbourne Mills Jr. took millions from clients in a $200 million settlement over the diet drug fen-phen.

This story was originally published March 30, 2018 at 1:43 PM with the headline "Saga of attorney-turned-fugitive Eric Conn featured Monday night on CNBC’s ‘American Greed’."