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Paul Lacoste, a fitness trainer and one of the retired athletes ensnared in Mississippi’s ongoing welfare scandal, is firing back at the state agency suing him.

In his recent counterclaim, Lacoste alleges that someone from the state invited him to a meeting in mid-2018 to discuss awarding him a contract, and that former Gov. Phil Bryant directed the welfare agency to hire Lacoste’s organization to conduct free fitness boot camps throughout the state.

At this time, the athlete had already been putting on classes for professionals and government officials in the Jackson metro area, which included then-Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves and many other lawmakers.

Lacoste’s organization, Victory Sports Foundation, eventually received $1.3 million in funds from the federal welfare program Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, through a private nonprofit called Mississippi Community Education Center, auditors found in 2020. 

“In return for those funds, Victory Sports and Lacoste conducted fitness boot camps, none of which were designed to achieve, or did achieve, any lawful TANF purpose,” MDHS’s complaint reads. “… Lacoste and Victory Sports Foundation owe MDHS a debt of $1,309,183.”

The payments led to criminal charges against nonprofit founder Nancy New and her son Zach New, who admitted that they defrauded the government by funneling welfare money to Lacoste’s program.

But Lacoste maintains that he never knew the money he received was meant to help poor families, and now he’s alleging the former governor and federal officials were in on it. 

Lacoste joins a growing number of defendants in the civil case — including Nancy New, the former welfare director’s nephew Austin Smith and former NFL quarterback Brett Favre — who are implicating Bryant. The former governor has not faced civil or criminal charges.

Mississippi Today first reported on Reeves’ connections to the fitness contract, including meetings he had with both Lacoste and former welfare director John Davis, who is awaiting sentencing in the criminal welfare fraud case. The revelations prompted Smith’s attorney to demand Reeves be added as a defendant to the lawsuit. 

But Lacoste’s recent motion doesn’t mention Reeves by name, only Bryant. 

Because Reeves controls the welfare department, an agency under the governor’s office, he’s also in charge of the civil suit, which targets Lacoste along with dozens of others. Lacoste also endorsed Reeves for governor in 2019.

Lacoste’s counterclaim said he’s been “ridiculed throughout the State as someone who knowingly took money from indigent people in Mississippi.”

“He did no such thing,” the filing reads. “This damage has and continues to be suffered as the proximate result of the negligence by the State through MDHS (Mississippi Department of Human Services) when MDHS negligently paid for the fitness camps with TANF funds.”

Lacoste asked the judge, Hinds County Circuit Court Judge Faye Peterson, to enter a judgment against MDHS and award him damages for emotional distress among other things.

The athlete said he attended a meeting with Bryant and Davis in mid-2018. He said representatives from the federal government, whose policies govern how states can spend their welfare funds, were in attendance.

Lacoste said Bryant and Davis told him that they wanted to hire his organization as part of the state’s initiative to reduce obesity and improve wellness for Mississippians. Though they were engaging the welfare department, Lacoste’s filing does not say that they discussed reserving the program for poor families.

“At the conclusion of the meeting, the state and federal attendees in the meeting asked Lacoste if he would be interested in providing the services on a statewide basis,” Lacoste’s counterclaim reads. “Ultimately, Governor Bryant instructed John Davis to work with Lacoste, and VSF (Victory Sports Foundation) ultimately was selected to provide the services.”

The civil charges MDHS filed against Lacoste also discuss this meeting, but in a much different tone, and omitted the fact that Bryant and federal representatives were there.

“Lacoste facilitated a meeting with Davis, during which Lacoste proposed to MDHS Executive Director John Davis that Davis steer substantial grant funds to Victory Sports (and thus to Lacoste) in exchange for Lacoste’s continuing provision of ‘fitness camps’ to elected officials, their political staffs, and fee-paying participants,” reads MDHS’s amended civil complaint.

Lacoste, Davis and Reeves then met to discuss the fitness program in early 2019 – after Lacoste’s organization entered into the contract with New’s nonprofit but before it received the bulk of the money. The agency was in financial turmoil at that time and had recently notified grantees that their funding would be cut. MDHS subgrants are conditional on money being available, so a contract itself is not always a guarantee of payment.

Lacoste told Davis that Reeves wanted to meet alone, adding, “Tate wants us all to himself.”

Two days later, Davis instructed his deputy to make covert payments to New’s nonprofit to pay for the Lacoste contract, calling it “the Lt. Gov’s fitness issue,” referring to Gov. Reeves, lieutenant governor at the time of the scandal. 

State Auditor Shad White, the former Bryant campaign manager whom Bryant originally appointed to his position, questioned the payments to the Victory Sports program because “no eligibility determination was made to verify participants were TANF eligible or needy.”

But a forensic audit released in October of 2021, which MDHS has used as the basis of its civil complaint, questioned the payments to Victory Sports Foundation because they were indicative of undue influence by Davis.

“John Davis’s influence was needed for Victory Sports to be awarded a grant from MCEC,” auditors wrote.

None of the audits mentioned Bryant’s or Reeves’ involvement in securing the contract or payments for Lacoste.

MDHS’s amended complaint alleges that Davis “created a culture of secrecy and fear within the agency to cover his illegal and fraudulent misuse of the public funds entrusted to his authority.”

“He fraudulently abused his position at MDHS to ingratiate himself with these former athletes by employing them or arranging to provide them with federal TANF grant funds,” it said.

Davis, who is cooperating with the prosecution in its ongoing investigation, has not made any public comments regarding the involvement of Bryant or Reeves.

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A bill to substantially overhaul Mississippi’s college financial aid programs died in conference on the final day of the legislative session, joining a long list of failed efforts to update the decades-old grants. 

Instead, lawmakers funded Mississippi’s state financial aid programs as-is, with a roughly $50 million appropriation. 

Had it passed, House Bill 771 would have ushered in wide-ranging changes to two key state programs that help Mississippians pay for college: The Mississippi Resident Tuition Assistance Grant (MTAG) and the Higher Education Legislative Plan for Needy Students grant (HELP). MTAG is the state’s most accessible, and least generous, financial aid award, and HELP is the only college aid program for low-income students. 

The bill, proposed by Rep. Donnie Scoggin, R-Ellisville, was introduced following a closed-door process, led by a Mississippi-based nonprofit called the Woodward Hines Education Foundation, that was meant to create consensus. 

But the final version of the bill proved too unpopular for lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. It would have reduced awards for low-income students under the HELP grant – which currently pays for all four years of college, regardless of what institution a student attends – to the cost of tuition at the least expensive in-state university or community college. 

The changes to MTAG would have expanded eligibility to part-time and adult students, but at the cost of excluding students from families that make more than the state median family income ($74,888 in 2022 for a four-person family). 

Though studies have shown that MTAG is not currently an effective program, any changes are contentious because tens of thousands of Mississippians receive it, said Toren Ballard, a K-12 policy analyst at Mississippi First who had been tracking HB 771. He supported the changes to MTAG. 

“By changing a program like MTAG, you have this built-in constituency of people who get a little bit of money from it,” he said. “That is a tricky political tight-rope to walk.” 

To fully fund the programs, lawmakers would have had to increase the budget for the Office of Student Financial Aid (OSFA) by an estimated $21 million. But the Senate Appropriations Committee was averse to increasing the office’s budget without more consensus, raising the possibility that awards under the new programs would be prorated. 

“The overall cost did impact the proposal ultimately,” said Jennifer Rogers, the director of OSFA. “I personally believe that the state needs to be investing more in state financial aid but I also understand our legislators and policymakers have to juggle a lot of competing priorities for funds.” 

Ballard said the proposal was also impacted by the lawmakers who had championed the proposal being seemingly unprepared to defend it at key moments. He cited a line of questioning that Scoggin faced on the House floor in the final week of the session. 

After Scoggin presented the conference report, Rep. Missy McGee, R-Hattiesburg, said HB 771’s changes to MTAG would mean she’d have to tell her constituents that lawmakers voted to take away money for college they might currently receive. Then she questioned Scoggin about the bill’s policy goal. 

“The objective is to reach more students,” Scoggin answered. 

“But is it at the expense of our full time or lower income students?” McGee asked. 

Scoggin shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he said. 

Another line of questioning from Rep. Jansen Owen, R-Poplarville, followed. He said HB 711 would mean HELP recipients would no longer be able to afford the state’s more expensive in-state universities. 

Scoggin replied that would happen because of a lack of appropriations.  

“Have you spoken to our universities in the state?” Owen asked. “Would you be surprised to know there are actually universities in the state that are opposed to the legislation?” 

“I would be very surprised,” said Scoggin. “I’ve spoken to all of them that come to the Capitol, and everyone from the IHL and the community college board is in favor of this legislation.”   

Owen then made a motion to recommit the bill to conference, effectively killing the bill since the House did not opt to take up the legislation again before the session adjourned.  

Rogers said she is disappointed lawmakers did not pass HB 771 but that she is trying to look at the bill’s death as an opportunity to create a more tenable proposal next year. Her office has been involved with efforts to update Mississippi’s financial aid programs for years. HB 771 made it closer to becoming law than any other proposal since 2018. 

“I do not know what will happen in the future,” she said. “But I know I am not ready to give up.”

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Mississippi Today and the Millsaps Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Campus Center are hosting a panel discussion on “Inequities in the Healthcare System” on Thursday, April 6, 2023 at 6 pm. The event is free and open to the public and includes a reception.

Sponsored by the Mississippi Humanities Council, this event will take place in the James and Madeleine McMullan Lecture Hall, room 122 of the Richard and Selby McRae Christian Center at Millsaps College and will be livestreamed here.

Millsaps alumna and Community Health Editor for Mississippi Today Kate Royals will lead the discussion. Panelists include Dr. Nelson Atehortua De La Peña, Director, Office of Health Data and Research, Mississippi State Department of Health; Lamees El-sadek (class of 2011), Doctoral Candidate, Harvard School of Public Health; LeJeune Johnson, founder and CEO of Therapy Plus, LLC; and Dr. Alan Penman, Professor, Department of Preventative Medicine, University of Mississippi Medical Center.

This panel comes out of a grant application that the Millsaps Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Campus Center made to the Mississippi Humanities Council.

For this event, the panelists will investigate the idea of “racial healing” through the lens of health care and the inequities that make it harder for many Jacksonians (and Mississippians) to find the resources they need to heal and live healthy lives.

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ROLLING FORK – The University of Mississippi Medical Center worked with the Mississippi State Department of Health and Mississippi Emergency Management Agency to deploy a mobile field hospital to Rolling Fork after tornadoes devastated the state’s Delta and northern regions on March 24.

The fully operational mobile field hospital will serve as a temporary home for the Delta Health Center hospital and medical clinic system for both Sharkey and Issaquena counties.

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Mississippi Today investigative reporter Anna Wolfe took a little time out from her journalism duties to sit down with Mississippi Today Editor-at-Large to talk about her career, her passion, and how she broke the story about the biggest case of fraud in Mississippi government history.

Anna Wolfe, a native of Tacoma, Wa., is an investigative reporter writing about poverty and economic justice. Anna has received national recognition for her work, including the 2023 and 2021 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, the 2021 Collier Prize for State Government Accountability, the 2021 John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting Award, the 2020 Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award and the February 2020 Sidney Award for reporting on Mississippi’s debtors prisons. She received the National Press Foundation’s 2020 Poverty and Inequality Award. She also received first place in the regional Green Eyeshade Awards in 2021 for Public Service in Online Journalism and 2020 for Business Reporting, and the local Bill Minor Prize for Investigative Journalism in 2019 and 2018 for reporting on unfair medical billing practices and hunger in the Mississippi Delta.

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APRIL 2, 1855

John Mercer Langston became the first Black public official in the U.S., serving as a town clerk in Brownhelm, Ohio. A year earlier, he had been the first Black lawyer admitted to the Ohio bar. 

Born free in 1829 in Virginia, he was the youngest son of a white planter from England and a freedwoman of African and Native American descent. After his father’s death, he and his brothers moved to Ohio, where they attended prep school, becoming the first black students admitted. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s degree in theology in 1852 from Oberlin College. 

Because of his race, law schools in New York and Ohio denied him entrance, but he remained determined, becoming an apprentice under future U.S. Rep. Philemon Bliss and was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1854. He became active in the abolitionist movement, delivering speeches and helping runaways escape slavery. 

“The enslavement and degradation of one portion of the population fastens galling, festering chains upon the limbs of the other. For a time these chains may be invisible; yet they are iron-linked and strong; and the slave power, becoming strong-handed and defiant, will make them felt,” he said. “White Americans cannot stand as idle spectators to the struggle, but must unite with us in battling against this fell enemy if they themselves would save their own freedom.” 

During the Civil War, he enlisted hundreds of Black Americans to fight for the Union Army, and when the war ended, he argued that those who fought in the war had earned the right to vote. 

“A nation may lose its liberties and be a century in finding it out,” he said. “Where is the American liberty?” After the war ended, Langston became education inspector for the Freedman’s Bureau and later helped draft the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Two years later, he served as a U.S. minister to Haiti. He founded the law school at Howard University and later served as the first president of what is now known as Virginia State University. In 1890, he became the first Black Virginian to serve in Congress — one of the last African Americans to serve in that capacity before the Jim Crow era arose at the end of the 19^th century, Southern states disenfranchising black citizens. He practiced law until his death in 1897 in Washington, D.C., and his great-nephew became one of the nation’s best-known poets, Langston Hughes.

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As the Mississippi Senate recently was considering and passing legislation to provide $103 million for a grant program for the state’s beleaguered hospitals, Sen. Angela Hill, R-Picayune, asked a pertinent question.

She wanted to know if the $103 million would provide real help for the hospitals — many of which experts say are in danger of closing.

“Just looking at the totals, it looks to me like these individual hospitals will burn through this pretty fast,” she said during debate of the bill on the Senate floor. “So, I guess my question is was there any thought, if an aggregative amount of $103 million that has been split up by what looks like 100 hospitals or more, could that have had a greater impact in any other shape or form?”

Hill, a fiscal conservative, was looking for ways to get more bang for the buck. If only there were a way to do so.

Senate Medicaid Chair Kevin Blackwell, R-Southaven confessed to Hill that, “We didn’t look at any other funding mechanism.”

But both Hill and Blackwell had been told about other options — less than 24 hours earlier on the Senate floor, in fact.

“The most important thing Mississippi can do to help our hospitals is expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act,” said Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson. “The choice you are making with this legislation is you put $100 million in the fund and get $100 million, or you put $100 million in a fund allowing Medicaid expansion and you get $1 billion.”

Projections are that it would cost the state about $100 million annually to expand Medicaid to cover primarily the working poor. According to projections, that $100 million would be about the state match needed to pull down more than $1 billion in federal funds annually that Blount referenced.

And based on projections made by the University Research Center, Medicaid expansion would result in much more than $1 billion annually to the state for the first two years of Medicaid expansion. Because of incentives offered by the federal government under COVID-19 relief legislation, it is estimated the state would receive $1.61 billion the first year and $1.64 billion the second year of expansion. After the first two years of expansion, the incentives would go away, but the state still would be receiving more than $1 billion annually in federal funds.

READ MORE: Mississippi leaving more than $1 billion per year on table by rejecting Medicaid expansion

The theory is that the $1 billion would help health care providers, especially hospitals, because they would be treating fewer people with no insurance and no ability to pay.

Hill was not asking her question because she is touting Medicaid expansion. As a conservative Republican, she has long voiced her opposition to Medicaid expansion. Many conservative Republicans, including Gov. Tate Reeves and Speaker Philip Gunn, say they oppose the big government expansion.

And Blackwell could rightfully point out the $103 million being directed to the hospitals is from federal COVID-19 legislation and would not be available in the coming years to provide the required annual state match to expand Medicaid.

But the day before Hill asked her question, Sen. Hob Bryan, D-Amory, told members that Medicaid expansion would not cost the state anything.

Because of the multiplier effect of the federal fund and because of other factors, “the state treasury would make money. In theory there is a state match, but in practice there is not a match at all. In practice, the state treasury is doing without money because of the prohibition on Medicaid expansion.”

Various studies back up Bryan’s bold claim.

The 2021 University Research Center study, for instance, found that the 10% matching costs the state must provide if it expanded Medicaid would be more than covered by health care-related savings to the state and new tax revenue generated.

More and more states are reaching the conclusion that Medicaid expansion makes money for them. Forty states have expanded Medicaid, leaving Mississippi behind 80% of the country.

First it was just so-called blue or Democratic states expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. But in more recent years, red or Republican states have followed suit. States like Montana, Utah, North Dakota and South Dakota have expanded Medicaid. Those that have not, for the most part, are located across the Southeast.

But the number of Southern states not expanding Medicaid also is dwindling. Just in recent days, a Republican-controlled Legislature in North Carolina sent to Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper a bill he signed into law expanding Medicaid.

But instead of expanding Medicaid, Mississippi legislators continue to provide state funds to help hospitals and other health care providers one dollar at a time instead of using that dollar to get at least $9 in federal funds.

“This hospital grant program is putting a Band-Aid on a situation in this state that requires surgery,” said Sen. Derrick Simmons, D-Greenville.

READ MORE: The death of rural hospitals could leave Mississippians ‘sick, sick, sick’

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APRIL 1, 1935

Before an integrated audience of 2,000, the “Great Debaters” of historically Black Wiley College of Marshall, Texas, defeated the reigning national champion, the University of Southern California. The victory meant a defeat for scientific racism, which pervaded the day. 

Professor Melvin B. Tolson organized the first debate team at the college in 1924 and began challenging the first White teams six years later. As the “Great Debaters” took on all comers across the nation, Tolson saw these debates as a way to improve race relations. 

“In the South,” he said, “I have seen ex-slaves shaking hands with the grandsons of the masters after the debate.” 

His teams over the decade saw unparalleled success, reportedly losing only one time. The experiences became a great training ground for the debaters. Henrietta Bell Wells, the first female member of the debate team, became a prominent poet. James Farmer Jr. joined the team when he was only 14 and went on to become one of the nation’s most important civil rights leaders, heading the Congress of Racial Equality, which sent Freedom Riders across the South in 1961 to challenge segregation on interstate buses. The Freedom Riders were met by violence in Alabama and arrested in Mississippi. Farmer was among those arrested. 

A year before his death in 1999, Farmer received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2007, he and others were depicted in the film, The Great Debaters, directed by Denzel Washington. After the movie, Washington donated $1 million for Wiley College to resurrect its debate team. 

In 2014, Wiley won the national championship — the championship the college had been barred from in 1935.

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