Date: Sept. 11, 2024 Contact: newsroom@ci.irs.gov Anniston, AL — Two men have been sentenced in a scheme to defraud a professional athlete, announced U.S. Attorney Prim F. Escalona, IRS-CI Special Agent in Charge Demetrius D. Hardeman, ATF Special Agent in Charge Marcus Watson, and U.S. Postal Inspection Service Inspector-in-Charge Scott D. Fix, Houston Division. U.S. District Judge Corey L. Maze sentenced Anthony Lamon Frazier of Talladega, to 120 months in prison and Frederick Andre Spencer, 38, of Birmingham, to 49 months in prison. A restitution order of $500,000 for one victim and $239,316 for another was also entered, along with an order of forfeiture of various assets, including bank accounts, postal money orders, and cash. Earlier this year, a jury convicted Frazier on twenty-four counts of money laundering, four counts of structuring, and three counts of tax fraud. The jury convicted both Frazier and Spencer of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. According to evidence presented at trial, between 2017 and 2020, Frazier worked as a Talladega County Tax Assessor and used his county work truck for drug trafficking and money laundering the proceeds of drug trafficking. Frazier purchased and deposited postal money orders and input false information on the orders, purporting that they were for car sales, to launder his drug proceeds into his business bank accounts. Frazier also structured these proceeds into bank accounts and, in doing so, avoided reporting requirements for the U.S. Postal Service and for PNC Bank. At the same time, Frazier and Spencer agreed to work on behalf of a professional athlete to create a sports-marketing agency called “Head of Game.” The professional athlete invested $500,000 for the purpose of building this agency and based on promises made by Frazier and Spencer, wired the money into a “Head of Game” bank account held by Frazier. Frazier immediately wired almost half of the funds into a bank account for “Mom and Son’s Towing,” which was held by Spencer’s mother. In 2019 and 2020, Spencer and Frazier used the athlete’s money on various personal expenses rather than to build the marketing agency. Spencer and Frazier spent the money on luxury travel and dental bills and repeatedly withdrew bulk cash. By mid-2020, almost all of the initial $500,000 investment had been spent to enrich Frazier and Spencer and not for the agreed-upon purposes. Frazier used over $100,000 of the Head of Game money to purchase a house in Atlanta on a short sale and deposited the proceeds of the sale into one of his own accounts. The evidence also showed that Frazier substantially underreported his income on his 2017, 2018, and 2019 tax returns. Specifically, he did not report income relating to drug proceeds and fraud proceeds from Head of Game. Prior to trial but as part of the same indictment, Spencer also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, false statements on a loan application, and wire fraud for his involvement in submitting false loan materials under the Paycheck Protection Program and obtaining “COVID loan” money from the Small Business Administration based on those false representations. This investigation is part of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF). OCDETF is an independent component of the U.S. Department of Justice. Established in 1982, OCDETF is the centerpiece of the Attorney General’s strategy to combat transnational organized crime and to reduce the availability of illicit narcotics in the nation by using a prosecutor-led, multiagency approach to enforcement. OCDETF leverages the resources and expertise of its partners in concentrated, coordinated, long-term enterprise investigations of transnational organized crime, money laundering, and major drug trafficking networks. IRS-CI, ATF, and USPIS investigated the case along with the Talladega County Drug Task Force. Assistant United States Attorney Allison Garnett prosecuted the case. IRS-CI is the criminal investigative arm of the IRS, responsible for conducting financial crime investigations, including tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money-laundering, public corruption, healthcare fraud, identity theft and more. IRS-CI special agents are the only federal law enforcement agents with investigative jurisdiction over violations of the Internal Revenue Code, obtaining a more than a 90 percent federal conviction rate. The agency has 20 field offices located across the U.S. and 12 attaché posts abroad.
