PRETEND

My cousin spent 23 years in an Illinois prison for a crime she says she didn't know she was committing. She was 33 when a judge handed down a 60-year sentence. She would have been 93 before she saw the outside again.

This episode is personal.

In "Only God Pardons," we follow my cousin Iris (not her real name) through the Illinois clemency system: what it takes to apply, what the odds actually look like, and what it means to finally get out, only to discover that freedom comes with its own kind of sentence.

Along the way, we hear from Margaret Byrne, a Chicago attorney who has spent 45 years fighting for people inside Illinois prisons who shouldn't be there, including the women she represented through the Illinois Clemency Project for Battered Women. And we talk to Jeff Grant, attorney, minister, and co-founder of the White Collar Support Group, who argues that the pardon system doesn't go nearly far enough and who is pushing Congress to add federal expungement as a tool alongside clemency.

We also look at what's happening at the federal level, where a booming paid-pardon industry has taken root around the White House. According to federal lobbying disclosures, clients paid firms more than five million dollars in 2025 just to get their clemency cases in front of the president, eight times what was spent seeking pardons from the Biden administration. And then there's Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor convicted of corruption, commuted by Trump in 2020 and fully pardoned in his second term, a man who turned the governor's office into a shakedown operation, pardoned by a president who turned clemency into currency for whoever could afford the cover charge.

Meanwhile, my cousin filed her petition the right way. Through the right channels. And waited.

In this episode:

Margaret Byrne, founder of the Illinois Clemency Project for Battered Women and veteran clemency attorney

Jeff Grant, attorney, minister, and co-founder of the White Collar Support Group and the Federal Expungement Initiative

Learn more:

White Collar Support Group: whitecollaradvice.org

Federal Expungement Initiative: contact Jeff Grant through the White Collar Support Group

Illinois Prisoner Review Board: illinois.gov/agencies/prisoner-review-board

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Content Warning: This episode contains detailed descriptions of nursing home neglect, including accounts of residents found in unsanitary conditions. Listener discretion is advised.

You're about to hear the story of a man who built a nursing home empire from a tiny office above a pizza parlor in New Jersey.

His name is Joseph Schwartz. At its peak, his company Skyline Healthcare owned or operated more than 100 facilities across eleven states. What happened inside those facilities (the rationed diapers, the unpaid bills, the maggots, the residents left without food or clean water) is one of the cruelest stories of corporate neglect you will hear this year.

When Schwartz finally got convicted of defrauding the government out of $38 million, he started making calls.

In this episode, we'll follow the money from a nursing home empire to a presidential pardon, and then to a violent extortion plot that ended with an FBI arrest in Midtown Manhattan.

EPISODE RESOURCES & SHOW NOTES

ARTICLES & INVESTIGATIONS

Brookings Register: Wave of SD nursing home closures hitting hardest in rural small towns URL: https://www.brookingsregister.com/article/wave-of-sd-nursing-home-closures-hitting-hardest-in-rural-small-towns

Arkansas Advocate: Nursing home owner pardoned by Trump ordered to serve state sentence URL: https://arkansasadvocate.com

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (2019): Firm's fall risked care in homes for frail URL: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2019/apr/28/firm-s-fall-risked-care-homes-frail-201/

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (2025): Judge orders former nursing home magnate to prison URL: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2025/dec/18/arkansas-judge-orders-former-nursing-home-magnate/

The Washington Post: Joseph Schwartz Trump Pardon Fraud (Coverage of the $960k lobbying effort) URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/11/23/joseph-schwartz-trump-pardon-fraud/

The New York Times: Pardon Industry Offers Rich Offenders a Path to Trump

The New York Times: Trump Pardons: Lobbyist Charged in Extortion Attempt

Philadelphia Coverage: Skyline Healthcare: Scenes from the collapse of a nursing-home operator by Harold Brubaker

BROADCAST COVERAGE

NBC Nightly News: Nursing Home Chain Collapses Amid Allegation Of Unpaid Bills, Poor Care

KELOLAND News: Skyline Healthcare owner facing federal charges

PRIMARY SOURCE DOCUMENTS

State Petition: Attorney General Tim Griffin's Petition to force Schwartz to serve his state sentence URL: https://arkansasadvocate.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Arkansas-v-Schwartz-12022025-Motion.pdf

State Civil Lawsuit: State of South Dakota ex rel. Jason Ravnsborg v. Joseph Schwartz, et al. (Case No. 32CIV22-000010)

Federal Criminal Complaint: U.S. v. Joshua Nass (Attempted extortion affidavit, Case No. 26-MJ-54)

Lobbying Disclosures: Federal filings for Joshua Nass (Merkava Strategies Corporation) and Jack Burkman (J.M. Burkman & Associates)

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Introducing Season Seven of Nobody Should Believe Me. Andrea revisits the case of Maya Kowalski—the story at the center of the Netflix film Take Care of Maya–and the family’s high-profile lawsuit against Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital. What became widely framed as a story about “medical kidnapping” began when hospital staff reported suspected medical child abuse after Maya arrived with a history of extreme ketamine treatments. 

How did a case of horrific abuse become a story about evil doctors kidnapping children?

Listen to Season 7 on Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3l3MDM959yf6f4fEbw4Dmz?si=6dba402bffa8435b
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You know that little bottle of 5-Hour Energy sitting on the counter of almost every gas station in America? Someone was faking it. Millions of bottles, mixed by hand in a filthy warehouse by day laborers with no training, no sanitation licenses, and no recipe. Just plastic barrels, canoe paddles, and industrial chemicals that may not have been approved for human consumption.

In this episode, you meet Geoffrey Potter, an anti-counterfeiting attorney at Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler who only takes cases where the fake product can kill you. Think of him as a private prosecutor with powers most people don't even know a private attorney can have. He helped bring down one of the most sophisticated food counterfeiting operations in US history.

You'll also learn what happened after the convictions. How a woman with no obvious connection to the President of the United States managed to secure not one, but two acts of presidential clemency. And how, just 42 days after walking out of prison, she was already running a $59 million scheme in the background.

This is the story of Adriana Camberos — a woman who was convicted twice, freed twice, and is still out there. This series is called I Beg Your Pardon for a reason.
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Twelve days. That’s how long David Gentile spent in federal prison for a $1.8 billion fraud that wiped out the retirement savings of 17,000 people.

On Thanksgiving 2025, President Trump signed a one-page clemency grant, commuting Gentile’s seven-year sentence to time served and erasing a $15 million restitution order in the process.

In this episode, we talk to one of those 17,000 victims, CarolAnn Tutera, a 70-year-old still working because she can’t afford not to. We also talk to securities fraud attorney Adam Gana and Ponzi Playbook co-host Neal McTighe about how the scheme worked, what the pardon means, and what it says about the current climate for white collar crime.

CarolAnn Tutera

GPB Capital investor and CEO of Tutera Medical

tuteramedical.com

Adam Gana

Securities fraud attorney, Gana LLP

ganalawfirm.com/adam-gana

Neal McTighe

Co-host, Ponzi Playbook podcast

Ponzi Playbook on Spotify

The Conviction and Sentencing

DOJ Press Release

justice.gov

The Blueprint of the Fraud

SEC Civil Complaint

sec.gov

The White House Response

Forbes Breaking News — search: “Karoline Leavitt Asked About Trump’s Commutation Of Private Equity CEO’s Fraud Sentence”

00:00  CarolAnn’s Story

04:06  David Gentile’s Promise

04:38  I Beg Your Pardon

07:02  How a Ponzi Scheme Works

14:21  The Smoking Gun Emails

15:47  CarolAnn’s $400K

16:42  The Takedown

18:38  The Verdict

19:22  The Pardon

20:06  The White House Response

23:12  Restitution Wiped Out

29:51  The Pay-to-Play Pattern

33:41  The Perfect Storm

GuestsResourcesChapters36:44  Ponzi Playbook Returns
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