Suburban man convicted of ripping off orphans and federal PPP program in trouble with feds again
Rahshone Burnett said he was ashamed.
The year was 2013 and he was standing before a federal judge in Chicago to learn his fate for stealing more than $1 million from the children of his sister — who had died in a fire.
Burnett told the judge he wrongly “felt entitled to stuff” when he looted a fund set up to help raise his sister’s five children.
His sister and her youngest child died in a fire at her Chicago Housing Authority home in 2001. The surviving kids continued to live in relative poverty on the West Side while Burnett blew money from their $5.5 million CHA court settlement on a Bentley with the license plate "FLYHI," diamond jewelry and a home for him and his girlfriend in west suburban Westchester.
Prosecutors said Burnett stole more than $1 million, but he said he was responsible for less than that — somewhere between $400,000 and $1 million.
The judge sentenced Burnett, who had been the legal guardian of the children’s estates, to a combined nine years in prison for fraud and heroin dealing. Later, health concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the court to let Burnett finish his sentence at home under the supervision of the Salvation Army beginning in May 2020.
But Burnett still felt entitled to more stuff, prosecutors said. This time, he set his sights on federal benefits intended to help people struggling with their finances during the pandemic.
In August 2020, Burnett fraudulently received $20,832 from the federal Paycheck Protection Program, which was set up to help struggling businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic that year.
On his PPP application, Burnett claimed he had owned a construction company in 2019 — when he was actually sitting in prison, unemployed, that year.
According to a phony bank statement he submitted to get the PPP money, payroll withdrawals were made from his account in February 2020 to “Mario Speedwagon,” “Petey Cruiser,” “Anna Sthesia,” and “Gail Forcewind,” which, prosecutors said, “appear, based on the names, to be fictional individuals."
Burnett also put fake information on an application for a loan to buy a 2020 BMW X7 sport utility vehicle in November 2020. He said he had earned $125,000 a year working for a company where he’d been employed for a decade when he was actually in prison, prosecutors said.
In June, he was sentenced to 21 months in prison after pleading guilty to fraud in that case. A federal judge has allowed Burnett to remain free on bond as he appeals his PPP conviction.
But Burnett’s problems with federal prosecutors still aren't over. On Sept. 25, he was charged with even more pandemic-related fraud.
An indictment says he illegally got federally funded pandemic unemployment assistance from programs administered by Illinois, California and Kansas. The indictment says he received the money in the fall of 2020 but doesn’t say how much he got.
Burnett's lawyer, Beau Brindley, said the new indictment is unfair. "By indicting him again now for nearly identical conduct for which he was already sentenced, the government showed a degree of prosecutorial vindictiveness that is rarely seen. We intend to move to dismiss." Brindley had represented Burnett in the case involving the money he swiped from his nieces and nephews.
Brindley himself faced criminal charges in federal court when he was accused in 2014 of coaching Burnett and other clients to lie under oath during their trials. Brindley was acquitted of wrongdoing after a two-week trial on perjury and obstruction of justice counts in 2015.
Burnett, 47, is among thousands of people across the country who are suspected of stealing billions of dollars from federal pandemic relief programs, including the PPP program.
Many people like Burnett have stolen PPP funds while in custody — either in prison, jail or home detention. Last year, the Chicago Sun-Times found dozens of Cook County Jail inmates had schemed to loot the PPP program and other government COVID-19 relief programs during the start of the pandemic in 2020.