Peggy Ann Fulford, 60, claimed to have graduated from Harvard and had a Wall Street career that netted her millions before becoming a money manager for some of the biggest names in pro sports. But that was then and this is now and Fulton is in federal prison in Alabama for swindling her clients out of millions of dollars over just a few years. Her clients included Dennis Rodman, Ricky Williams, and Travis Best.
Fulton never went to Harvard. She didn't make a small fortune on Wall Street. Instead she was taking control of her clients' bank accounts and moving their money as quickly as she could spend it on her lavish lifestyle and expensive toys. Sports Illustrated reports that she bought two Bentleys, a Maserati, four Mercedes, three Range Rovers, a Porsche and a Rolls Royce Ghost with stolen funds. She rented a condo in Trump Towers in Miami and had large mortgages on homes in in multiple states, private school tuition, and nearly $2 million in American Express bills.
Her crimes were exposed when her clients found that they didn't have enough money for groceries, let alone taxes or their own mortgages and car payments. Still, many of her clients were unable to accept that the woman they called "Mama" would so ruthlessly steal everything they'd worked for.
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How was she able to steal so much for so long? She had multiple aliases thanks to her five failed marriages. She pitched her services to athletes by telling them she had her JD and MBA from Harvard. She offered to work for free, claiming she didn't need the money because she'd made millions on Wall Street buying and selling hospitals. She also claimed to have made a big profit on real estate in the Bahamas. She didn't need or want a fee from her clients, she claimed she just wanted to protect them from losing their money as so many professional athletes are prone to do.
In reality Fulford used her clients' money for her own purposes. Federal prosecutors stated:
"Fulford communicated with victims in person, by phone and by email, inducing them to open or give her access to bank accounts which she raided and used for personal expenses such as luxury cars, real estate, jewelry and airline tickets."
Court papers filed by Dennis Rodman revealed how frequently she moved money around. The amount of money in one of his accounts varied by tens of thousands of dollars every day.
Fulford offered to manage her clients' expenses and use their money to pay their bills, their income tax payments, and make retirement investments for them. She did none of that. She laundered her clients' money – millions of dollars of it – through dozens of bank accounts and then spent it on herself.
In November 2018, Peggy Ann Fulford was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Rodman lost over $2 million and Williams $6 million as a result of Fulford's theft. In Rodman's case, she stopped making child support payments to the mother of his child. Fulford was also ordered to pay $5,794,870 in restitution to the victims.
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