A former NFL star’s letter asked a judge to go easy on a swindler. It was a fake.
The two-page letter to Maurice Deberry’s judge made an emotional plea for leniency, and it cited an NFL background to elaborate on the importance of trust.
“I trust Maurice with my life, and he is the only man I trust like this outside of my former teammates and my two brothers,” according to a letter filed in Charlotte’s federal court 10 days before Deberry’s sentencing for a financial crime. “Maurice is like a brother to me and an uncle to my four children.”
In closing, the letter urged the judge to “consider ways to return Maurice to our family.”
That may be the last time Deberry’s name and the word trust appear in the same paragraph.
The letter cited above bore the name of former Carolina Panthers star Roman Harper.
Except, Harper didn’t write it. Deberry did — while he was an inmate in the Mecklenburg County Jail — in hopes of persuading U.S. District Judge Max Cogburn to go light on Deberry’s sentence.
According to Deberry’s prosecutors, the Charlotte man sent another letter to Cogburn that he tried to pass off as being written by his mother.
That missive asked the judge “to bring my son home to me as soon as possible ... I do not want to die alone. I pray to have him hold my hand to say goodbye.”
For the record: Deberry wrote that one, too.
In a phone interview with the Observer on Tuesday, Harper acknowledged a previous friendship with Deberry but said he had written nothing in Deberry’s behalf.
Harper also said he had no inkling that Deberry had confessed to bilking more than a dozen of his investment clients.
“Yeah, he’s a friend of mine, but obviously he’s not the person everybody thought he was or he said he was, which is disappointing,” Harper said.
“I don’t really have the words to describe it. You think you know somebody, but you really don’t.”
That Deberry, 57, did his letter-writing in jail involved an especially audacious breach of trust.
Deberry’s scams and lies
After signing a plea agreement with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in June that kept him out of custody and promised him a lighter sentence, Deberry scammed a woman out of $30,000, then tried to filch her again, documents show.
In all, according to prosecutors, Deberry leveraged lies about his education — he never attended the London School of Economics as he claimed — lies about his professional background — he never worked at Goldman Sachs — and lies about his legal problems — he hid a cease-and-desist order from selling securities in North Carolina from clients by using the last name of “Dewberry” — to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars in his customer’s investments. He spent most of money on personal expenses such as rent, entertainment and travel.
Deberry’s attorney, Assistant Federal Public Defender Erin Taylor of Charlotte, did not respond to an Observer email Tuesday seeking comment.
As for the letters, criminal defendants routinely ask friends and family for written character references in hopes of getting shorter sentences. But judges typically don’t respond well to being conned.
On Monday, Cogburn cited the fraudulent correspondences from Harper and Deberry’s mother as grounds for sending Deberry to prison for nearly five years for a single count of wire fraud. According to a statement from prosecutors, Cogburn said he needed to protect the public from Deberry’s further predations.
In court filings only days before Deberry’s sentencing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Ryan had called on Cogburn to pour it on.
Not only did Deberry continue to swindle clients while under the supervision of the court, Ryan wrote, “Defendant’s conduct since signing his plea agreement demonstrates that he is not remorseful, has not given up his criminal ways, and needs to be severely punished.”
Letters from Harper and mom
Harper? The former Super Bowl-winning safety for the New Orleans Saints who played two seasons in Charlotte appears to be another Deberry’s unwitting victims.
At least, Harper didn’t lose any money. He told the Observer that Deberry never asked him for any, which Harper said was one of the only true statements Deberry included in the letter sent to the judge in Harper’s name.
In an interview with federal law enforcement agents about the letter before Deberry’s sentencing, Harper said he and the broker had not spoken since Deberry was jailed on his bond violation in September. Harper added that someone had approached him a year earlier to write a letter for Deberry, and that he had probably agreed. But nobody had gotten back to him.
Harper, who retired after the 2016 season and is now an ESPN analyst, told the Observer that much of what Deberry wrote under the former player’s name was untrue.
That Deberry had recognized an error in Harper’s portfolio that saved Harper $5 million?
Never happened, Harper said.
That Deberry had become an erstwhile uncle to Harper’s children?
Not true, according to the player.
Instead, all those literary enhancements had been handwritten by Deberry inside the jail and sent to a woman — identified in court documents by the initials D.R. — who typed them up, then mailed them back to Deberry for filing with the court.
D.R. told prosecutors that she did not consider herself to be one of Deberry’s victims, even though she said she had lent him $100,000 for one of his fraudulent schemes and had never been repaid, documents claim.
As for the letters, D.R. said Deberry told her that they were what his mother and Harper wanted to submit to the judge.
Except, his mother was too old to write it herself, and Harper was too busy.
In his interview with the Observer, Harper said he is still dealing with the revelations about his one-time friend.
“To find out that all these cases are being brought against him, it makes you question how you judge character.”
Harper is asked: Did Maurice Deberry violate your trust?
“Yeah, that sums it up perfectly,” he replied.
Staff writer Gavin Off contributed to this story.
This story was originally published May 19, 2021 at 6:15 AM.
