LE††UCE PREY
A Florida pastor and his son were arrested Wednesday on charges of fraudulently obtaining more than $8 million in federal Covid relief funds and attempting to use some of the money to buy a luxury home near Walt Disney World.
Evan Edwards and his son, Josh, 30, were taken into custody five months after an NBC News report raised questions over why they hadn’t been charged in the alleged scam, which federal prosecutors first identified in court papers in December 2020.
The case dates back to April 2020 when Josh Edwards applied for a $6 million Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan to cover payroll, rent and utilities for his family’s ministry. In the loan application, he claimed that the organization, ASLAN International Ministry, had 486 employees and a monthly payroll of $2.7 million, according to a federal forfeiture complaint.
But when federal investigators showed up at the ministry’s office in Orlando, the door was locked and workers at the neighboring businesses told them nobody was ever seen inside, the complaint says. A review of the ministry’s website found that the donation links were inactive and sections of text were apparently lifted from other religious sites, according to the complaint.
Florida police officers pulled over the family’s Mercedes SUV later that evening. They were speeding on I-75 north of Gainesville, according to a police report. Federal agents arrived on the scene and found bags of shredded documents in the vehicle, as well as suitcases full of financial records and their electronic devices stuffed into so-called Faraday bags, which block radio frequencies to keep them from being tracked, according to the civil forfeiture complaint.
They had tried to use a portion of the money to purchase a $3.7 million home in a new Disney World development called Golden Oaks, according to the complaint. But the deal never went through. The authorities seized the $868,000 that was set aside for the down payment on the 4,700-square-foot home, the complaint says.
