Fraud Museum Game: Country Music Hall of Shame
/Sponsored by Fraud Magazine
Past ACFE Global Fraud Conference Fraud Museum giveaways featured artifacts, memorabilia, documents and other pieces of fraud history collected by ACFE founder and Chairman Dr. Joseph T. Wells, CFE, CPA. But this year we’re doing something a little different and featuring some of the most infamous frauds in country music to honor our host city, Nashville, home of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
To participate in this year’s game, read about the inductees in the Country Music Hall of Shame below and answer the questions in this quiz to be entered for your chance to win a $250 gift card. The game begins, Sunday, June 19, and closes at 11:59 p.m. Central Time, Tuesday, June 21. Only attendees of the 33rd Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference are eligible to participate. Please read the official rules before submitting your entry. The winner will be notified via email.
1930s to 1970s: Riley Shepard
Riley Shepard was a bit of a Renaissance man — a country music singer, songwriter, record promoter, itinerant philosophy lecturer and serial fraudster. While his first brush with small-time fame occurred when he started performing country music in 1930s North Carolina, he gained infamy by using various stage names and pseudonyms to con people out of money, evade creditors and break numerous recording contracts.
And Shepard was known to tell a few tall tales. One of his most infamous claims was that he wrote “Blue Christmas,” a song made famous by Elvis Presley. The truth is, though, Billy Hayes and Jay W. Johnson wrote it.
Shepard might have only had a 5th grade education, but that didn’t stop him from billing himself as a philosophy lecturer with a doctorate. In the 1940s, he developed a persona as Dr. Richard Riley Shepard, Ph.D., the Cowboy Philosopher, and traveled around the U.S. giving talks on a variety of subjects.
By the 1970s, Shepard settled down for a spell in California to raise a family and work on what would become a passion project for him — an encyclopedia of folk music. It was during this time that his daughter, Stacya, got a glimpse into her father’s life as a fraudster. On her blog and in an episode of NPR’s “The Hidden Brain,” Stacya recounted when she was 12 years old and answered a phone call from a man who angrily told her Riley Shepard had absconded with his money.
“Your father’s a crook, did you know that? He ripped off my entire life savings,” he told her. Stacya’s mother confirmed the man’s accusation. According to Stacya, her mother said, “Riley probably did rip that man off … I tell everyone not to give him money.” Stacya concluded that her father had gotten an investment from the man by befriending him and convincing him that there was money to be had in the folk music encyclopedia.
Shepard died in 2009, but his encyclopedia lives on in the U.S. Library of Congress.
1960 Congressional Hearings on Payola
Not everything was on the up and up in the early days of radio. Stations determined which songs were popular and which songs got played on shows like NBC’s “Your Hit Parade.” Advertising agencies and radio networks weren’t required to reveal their methods for determining a song’s popularity. All this led to the practice known as “payola,” in which record producers paid radio stations to make a song a hit.
Payola was widespread in the 1950s — just in time for the birth of rock n’ roll radio — and the shady practice earned the attention of the U.S. Congress’s House Oversight Committee. After the committee concluded an inquiry revealing that many television-game shows were fixed, it set its sights on corruption in the radio industry. The hearings, which began in February 1960, revealed that at least 335 DJs throughout the U.S. admitted to receiving more than $263,000 in “consulting fees” — about $2.6 million in 2022 dollars.
The hearings are forever linked to DJ Alan Freed who was singled out by Congress for his role in accepting payola. Freed, who famously coined the term “rock n’ roll,” was abrasive and uncooperative with the committee. He would later go on to plead guilty to two charges of commercial bribery, received a fine and a suspended sentence, and was fired from his job at WABC. In contrast, Dick Clark, the host of “American Bandstand,” cooperated and agreed to testify before the committee. He escaped repercussions because he gave up his rights to his ownership interest in music-industry holdings.
After the hearings, Congress amended the Federal Communications Act to outlaw payola, making it a crime similar to commercial bribery, punishable by a fine up to $10,000 and a year in prison.
1989: The Infamous “Murder on Music Row”
Some people kill for fame, but others kill to cover up bribery.
On the evening of March 9, 1989, an unknown gunman shot Cash Box magazine country music chart director Kevin Hughes and his friend, aspiring singer-songwriter, Sammy Sadler, as they were leaving Evergreen Records in the heart of Nashville’s Music Row. Sadler survived, but Hughes died at the scene.
Hughes, 23, was known by his colleagues as a “straight-shooter” in a shady business. At the time, the music chart scene was rife with corruption, and chart directors were known to take bribes from record promoters to elevate a new artist’s chart position. But Hughes took his job at the country-music trade publication seriously and wanted to clean up the corruption he saw happening around him.
According to Nashville Scene, the local news originally reported the case as a robbery gone wrong, but those in the know suspected there was much more to the story. Word on the street was that Hughes was about to blow the whistle on fellow Cash Box employee, Richard “Tony” D’Antonio and record promoter, Chuck Dixon, for a bribery scheme the two were perpetrating to get artists on the magazine’s music chart.
The case received national news attention, but it took more than a decade to bring D’Antonio and Dixon to justice. As ABC News reported in 2003, despite theories about who was behind the hit, police had trouble pinning it on anyone. D’Antonio, who had actually hired Hughes for the Cash Box job, was eventually arrested in 2002 and sentenced to life in prison in 2003 for the murder. He died in prison in 2014. Dixon died in 2001 before he could be charged for his part in the scheme.
2005: Jonathan Roda
A con man who travels from town to town, leaving behind a trail of dupes sure sounds like the subject of a country song, but it’s the real-life ballad of a serial con artist. Jonathan Roda posed as a record producer and destroyed the dreams — and the bank accounts — of many aspiring performers. According to the Tampa Bay Times, he conned people into giving him thousands of dollars by telling them he could make them famous. Instead, he used their money to fund a life of luxury.
Roda, wanted for fraud in Florida, fled to Nashville in 2005 where he sparked a friendship with country music star Mindy McCready — perhaps his greatest claim to infamy. Roda reportedly convinced McCready that he was Julian “Jules” DeAngelo, a record producer from Florida. In June 2005, he and McCready were at the airport in Tucson, Arizona, when Roda spotted a heavy police presence and thought they were there for him. They weren’t, but they were soon enough when Roda took off running, stealing a limousine and involving them in a high-speed chase.
Roda got probation for the original Florida charges; however, by 2008 he was back to conning people and left a trail of victims in Florida, Austin and Las Vegas. He told people he was a Grammy award-winning music producer and bilked one woman out of her $60,000 life savings by saying he could transform her daughter into a successful model. He even claimed to be Frank Sinatra’s grandson.
After stealing $400,000 from at least 32 Florida residents, the law caught up with Roda for good. In 2008, a judge in Hillsborough County, Florida, sentenced him to 30 years in prison — the maximum for violating his probation.
2007: Robert McLean
From the outside looking in, life was good for Murfreesboro, Tennessee, financial advisor Robert McLean. He was running a successful business, and his many clients were investing in “high-yield promissory notes,’’ which he promised would bring them huge returns. Life was so good, McLean lived generously. Middle Tennessee State University used his $1.5 million donation to purchase 54 Steinway pianos for its school of music. The university even renamed the music school in his honor.
McLean could also indulge his passion of collecting historical country music memorabilia. In time, he owned a vast collection of musical instruments from country music greats like Bill Monroe, Mother Maybelle Carter and Johnny Cash. He was generous with his collection too — he donated instruments to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
But that was all a facade because, according to federal investigators, McLean was running a $67 million Ponzi scheme. In 2007, McLean stopped paying his investors, and, in the usual way Ponzi schemes end, he was served with an involuntary bankruptcy petition. According to the New York Times, McLean’s scheme was particularly treacherous because he relied on his good reputation to take advantage of friends, farmers and the elderly in his close-knit community.
In 2007, McLean took his life before any criminal charges could be filed against him.
2019: Australian country music Ponzi scheme
Becoming the ‘’next big thing’’ is the dream of many aspiring country music singers. Generally, though, the would-be stars are in on the plot to make it big.
In 2019, Tanya Pluckhahn and Aaron Parsons of Mount Coolum, Australia, were arrested and charged with five counts of fraud each for allegedly conducting a Ponzi scheme and stealing nearly $1 million from five victims in Australia. According to police, the couple convinced their victims they were bankrolling the career of Australian country music singer Alys Ffion and were seeking investments to pay for her travel to Nashville and help her break into the U.S. country music scene. Pluckhahn and Parsons dubbed Ffion ‘’the next Taylor Swift.”
But instead of helping Ffion make it big, Pluckhahn and Parson’s investors alleged the couple used their money to buy vehicles and pay off bills from their hospitality business. And while the pair was reportedly acquaintances of Ffion, investigators say the musician was totally unaware of their scheme.
Inspector Daren Edwards, a detective on their case, said there were no written contracts with the victims and investment discussions were conducted over email.
“As investors put money into the enterprise, some of the money was then given to some of the other investors to appear to them that they were receiving some funds back, but that wasn't the case in the long term," Inspector Edwards told ABC News.
