Jury selection begins in trial of Macon tech-firm man accused of swindling Bibb schools
Jury selection began Monday in the trial of Dave L. Carty, a Macon businessman accused in an allegedly fraudulent technology deal to dupe Bibb County’s public schools out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Carty, 49, and his business partner at Progressive Consulting Technologies, Isaac J. Culver III, have been accused of defrauding the schools via emails and wire transactions in late 2012 when ex-superintendent Romain Dallemand was in office.
Culver was convicted in July of multiple counts of wire and mail fraud and money laundering. He has since been sentenced to seven years in prison.
Testimony in Carty’s trial, the final matter in a pair of federal cases that arose from Dallemand’s stormy tenure, was expected to begin here Tuesday in U.S. District Court.
According to prosecutors, earlier this decade, Progressive, the Macon firm run by Culver and Carty, won a multimillion-dollar contract to oversee an upgrade of the schools’ antiquated, third-rate computer systems. That contract precluded Progressive from selling equipment to the school system.
Prosecutors at Culver’s trial in July argued that to get around that hurdle, Progressive improperly enlisted Comptech Computing Technologies Inc., an Ohio firm, as a so-called “pass through” to bill the Bibb schools for the purchase a total of 15,000 NComputing devices or terminals to make it appear that the Ohio company was the firm making the sale to the schools here.
According to documents in Culver’s case, the alleged scheme involved Progressive negotiating “with NComputing, the manufacturer of the terminals, to purchase 11,000 terminals for $1,749,000. To give (Bibb schools) a ‘great deal,’ NComputing had substantially lowered the price and, on top of that, gave the Defendants to give (Bibb schools) an additional 4,000 computer terminals at no charge. The Defendants then instructed CompTech to send to (Bibb schools) a proposal to sell the 15,000 computer terminals for the total amount of $3,768,000.”
The documents — filings related to Culver’s sentencing — note that as the school system’s project manager, Progessive, “through multiple misrepresentations” arranged for the Bibb schools to wire $3.7 million to the Ohio outfit. The Ohio firm then sent $3.69 million to Progressive in Macon, of which $1.74 million went to NComputing and the rest to Progressive. Only a few hundred of the devices were installed. The remaining thousands, according to prosecutors, were deemed unusable and as of last year were sitting in a school-system warehouse.
Carty’s lawyers are expected to argue that his role in the dealings came in good faith and at the direction of Culver, Progressive’s president and CEO.
At a pre-trial hearing earlier this month, one defense theory emerged and suggested that Carty believed the deal he is said to have helped broker was carried out without fraudulent intent, that he was merely doing what he was told by Culver.
At that recent hearing, Judge Marc T. Treadwell, asked, “The defense is to throw Culver under the bus?”
One of Carty’s attorneys, Franklin J. Hogue, replied: “Completely.”
This story was originally published January 28, 2019 at 4:29 PM.