Former NC housing director sentenced to prison for bid-rigging, kickbacks scheme
The former director of the Chatham Housing Authority was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison Wednesday for a bid-rigging scheme that awarded contracts to friends and relatives and paid out over $200,000 for jobs that in some cases were never done.
Joanna Johnson Davis, 65, of Durham, pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit wire fraud that victimized the Chatham County Housing Authority, U.S. Attorney Sandra J. Hairston of the Middle District of North Carolina announced.
Davis was ordered to pay $194,136 in restitution and will be placed under supervised release for two years after she gets out of prison, according to a U.S. Department of Justice news release.
Davis had initially pleaded not guilty after she and three others were arrested in March 2023 by U.S. Marshals in Greensboro and taken into federal custody. The prosecution has evidence that stretched 8,000-plus pages “not including voluminous bank record data and Excel files,” The News & Observer reported last year.
How prosecutors say the scheme worked
The federally funded housing authority receives money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to help low-income families, the elderly, and people with disabilities find and afford decent, safe, and sanitary housing, according to the release.
Davis and others engaged in a ”bid-rigging, no-work jobs conspiracy” between 2016 and 2020 while she led the Chatham County Housing Authority, the release stated.
Prosecutors said between 2016 and 2020 Davis steered contracts to 13 friends and relatives by creating false bids to “compete” with them. She and co-conspirators used stolen identities and company letterhead of actual people and businesses to make the fake bids look real, according to the release.
“Davis would then select the bid proposal submitted by her friend or family member as the winner and award the CCHA contract to that individual, knowing there had been no assessment of ‘reasonable’ cost, and regardless of whether that friend or family member was qualified to perform the contracted work,” the release stated.
“Often, no work at all was performed under these contracts,” and Davis received kickbacks from those receiving the contracts., it stated.
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