For decades, radio industry leaders and managers became connected to The T.J. Martell Foundation, a cancer research non-profit started by and fueled through music industry executives and recording artists.
In years’ past, a silent auction at a R&R Convention would have served as a fundraiser for the foundation. A May 2020 event was to have honored the late WFUV in New York programmer Rita Houston, marketing star Bozoma St. John and Country music superstar Trisha Yearwood, but then came COVID-19.
Behind the scenes, the foundation’s EVP/GM was personally benefiting from her role as its head. Now, she’s going to prison and must pay every cent of the more than $3.7 million she embezzled from the non-profit.
In an announcement made Thursday, the U.S. Attorney Mark H. Wildasin, with the Department of Justice for the Middle District of Tennessee revealed that Melissa Goodwin has been sentenced to four years in prison.
The decision, courtesy of U.S. District Judge William L. Campbell Jr., also ordered Goodwin to pay $3,949,800.70 in restitution.
Goodwin was charged with wire fraud in January 2022 and one month later pleaded guilty to devising and operating a scheme to defraud the Foundation. Specifically, Goodwin was found to have purchased approximately $3.96 million in tickets from online ticket vendors Ticketmaster, Stubhub, Primesport and On-Location with a T.J. Martell Foundation credit card she had obtained in her own name.
These tickets were not for a legitimate Foundation purpose. And, the tickets purchased on the credit card, including tickets to Lady Gaga and Celine Dion concerts and to sporting events, including Super Bowl LIV in Miami on February 2, 2020.
To be clear, Goodwin did not use these tickets. Rather, she provided these tickets to an individual in New York who owned and operated a charity auction business.
This business, which was not named, conducted auctions for clients, offering consignment items such as event tickets and sports memorabilia to the clients for use in their auctions.
Here’s the criminal part of Goodwin’s actions: As part of the scheme, she led the individual at the charity auction business to believe that she had acquired the tickets at no cost or at a discounted rate.
There’s more. Goodwin was found to have used the T.J. Martell Foundation’s credit card to purchase other items that were not for legitimate Foundation purposes — such as expensive and rare alcohols, plane tickets, and hotel stays.
While stories of personal use and reimbursement of company credit cards are hardly rare, Goodwin was found to have used the Foundation’s bank accounts to pay all of the credit card bills.
The DOJ offered details of how, to accomplish this, Goodwin concealed the ticket purchases by providing falsified credit card statements and phony expense reports to the Foundation’s accounting firm. In particular, Goodwin adjusted the credit card statements by altering them to conceal the ticket purchases, as well as other expenses. “She often replaced the name of the actual vendor with the name of a different vendor so that the charges appeared to be legitimate Foundation expenses,” the Justice Department said.
In total, Goodwin concealed over $3 million in fraudulent credit card expenses.
The foundation’s accounting firm prepared the Foundation’s periodic financial statements based on these falsified credit card statements and expense reports. The accounting firm then emailed those statements to Goodwin, whose job it was to provide them to the foundation’s CEO. At the time it was Laura Heatherly, who earlier this year relocated to Dallas and is a member of the Monument Realty team. However, before providing them to the CEO, Goodwin falsified those financial statements, too, by inflating the T.J. Martell Foundation’s assets and lowering its liabilities to make the foundation appear to be more liquid than it was at the time.
These falsifications prevented the Foundation from detecting Goodwin’s fraudulent transactions.
Lastly, FBI investigations found that Goodwin also forged the signature of the foundation’s CEO on six checks totaling $966,275.78 that were not approved by the Foundation.
The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn W. Booth.
Goodwin assumed the role of EVP/GM of the organization on August 30, 2018. This gave her oversight of all office operations, including finance, human resources and staff. She joined the foundation in 2004 and was previously SVP/Operations and Human Resources.
At the time of her promotion nearly four years ago, Goodwin commented, “I have the privilege of working with an incredible group of people who are on the team at the T.J. Martell Foundation. I look forward to always pursuing the standard of excellence Tony Martell set forth when he founded the Foundation as a way to honor his son. I am honored at the trust the Foundation has put in me and look forward to elevating the awareness of the organization — music’s promise for a cure.”
It turns out that Goodwin failed to live up to this mission.
The T.J. Martell Foundation began in 1975 when music industry executive Martell’s son passed away from Leukemia at the age of 21. Since then, the foundation had committed itself to funding unique and innovative medical research that is designed to find treatments and cures for cancer and AIDS.
In every instance, we ensured that every receipt was accounted for. For our silent auctions, every item was donated from businesses or individuals. Whenever a credit card purchase was made on a LLS-issued credit card, every single receipt was accounted for via Concur. There was no room for error. There was no room for an ethical breach. That’s what makes the actions taken by Goodwin in her role at T.J. Martell Foundation so despicable.
