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Five Hooter’s Employees Get Federal Prison Time For False Oil Spill Claims
January 15, 2014
Five former Hooter’s employees have been sentenced to federal prison for filing fraudulent BP oil spill claims.
Charles C. Martin, 40, and Joseph B. Doyon, 43, of Pace, and Marquis R. Seals, 34, Bernard Cook, 39, and Tremayne C. Jamison, 42, of Pensacola, were sentenced in federal court after having pleaded guilty to mail fraud and filing false claims related to the 2010 BP oil spill.
Martin, Seals, Doyon, and Cook admitted to submitting fraudulent claims to the Gulf Coast Claims Facility (GCCF). They falsely inflated their income as employees of Hooters of Pensacola Beach and stated they lost money due to the oil spill in their GCCF claims. Martin, then general manager of Hooters, and Seals, then assistant manager, aided and abetted their co- workers by providing fraudulent employment documentation for their claims. Jamison filed a false claim with the National Pollution Funds Center of the U.S. Coast Guard, which included a letter from Martin stating a contract between Jamison’s company and Hooters of Pensacola Beach was cancelled due to the oil spill, when actually no such contract existed.
Tuesday, Martin was sentenced to 24 months in prison for his role in the scheme, and Doyon was sentenced to 12 months. Last month, Cook was sentenced to 12 months in prison, Seals was sentenced to nine months, and Jamison was sentenced to six months. More than $85,000 will be paid back to the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Trust due to the restitution ordered in this case.
The cases result from an investigation by the U.S. Secret Service.
Comments
6 Responses to “Five Hooter’s Employees Get Federal Prison Time For False Oil Spill Claims”
The lawyers are crooks, all they think about is how to screw someone out of their last dollar. They are the ones that need to be doing time.
Hmmm I wonder if they are going to really go after all the fraudulent claims. I am in the restaurant business and I know of a lot of servers and cooks that took advantage of the BP money. Restaurants as far as Cantonment had servers and cooks that made claims. During the oil spill Most restaurants not on the beach were actually up in sales, not down, but these people still got a check.
These employees could have gotten another job, then when they picked up went back, nobody would have blamed them.
Lets not just focus on the guity ones, the lawyers whipped up a feeding frenzy in order to cash in…opportunistic parasites…honorable men and women, what a joke.
Before you go running your mouth about people who worked out there making false claims based on these few, My daughter worked out there, lost a lot of her income for that summer and she got crap back. For two years those employees on the beach who stuck it out because they love it there lost a lot of there income and didn’t get what they should have.
You can bet there are lots more folks who got questionable big settlements.
Know a guy whose daughter was a server at a restaurant on the gulf side of the beach and she got around 10K for lost wages. Not sure if she applied or if the restaurant had a hand in that.
Some lawyers were advertising that “even if you didn’t have a loss” to contact them to see if there was a payment available. That just appears to be wrong to encourage people to apply when they had no losses.
Seems the folks at Hooter’s should have been charged with conspiracy and a few other wrong doings. Guess maybe in prison they may get more than a mouthful.