Former New York Giants cornerback Brian Carpenter pleaded guilty on Friday to orchestrating a conspiracy to defraud the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA).
The United States Department of Justice alleges that Carpenter devised a scheme “whereby the WMATA employees permitted him to charge their credit cards for supplies that were never in fact delivered.”
In these instances, Carpenter would retain a substantial portion of the amount charged from the sales for his own personal benefit and the employees received cash payments in exchange for permitting Carpenter to charge their cards. To make it appear that Carpenter ran a wholly legitimate business and to circumvent WMATA’s internal credit card controls, he used at least 10 different companies to process transactions from the credit cards, most of whom were not in the janitorial supply business and had never met the WMATA employees whose cards they charged.
Carpenter then provided the WMATA employees with fake and fraudulent invoices representing that WMATA paid for and received all of the products it ordered.
Carpenter’s company, the Flintstone Group, sold and distributed janitorial products, some of which were created and labeled during his time in the NFL.
In total, the WMATA spent in excess of $310,000 on products that were never delivered by Carpenter and his company.
After pleading guilty, Carpenter will be sentenced on December 15 and faces a maximum of 20 years in federal prison.
A fourth-round pick of the Dallas Cowboys in the 1982 NFL Draft, Carpenter was signed by the Giants shortly after being waived by Dallas in September of 1982. He appeared in four games for New York that season and was released in August of 1983.
After his time with the Giants, Carpenter spent time with the Washington Redskins and Buffalo Bills before retiring following the 1984 season.
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