From Staff Reports

Former Buncombe County Manager Wanda Greene pleaded not guilty in June to a second round of charges resulting from an ongoing federal investigation.

The charges, which took almost an hour to read, included 23 new counts, among which were wire fraud, federal program fraud, and money laundering.

The latest indictment concerned 10 whole life insurance policies and an annuity Greene had purchased through the county for herself and select other employees, including her son Michael and her sister Irene Wolfe. 

Greene is a CPA and a trained internal auditor, and so she appears to have contrived a smokescreen so complex, it took investigators 10 months to figure out what had happened.

On Aug. 4, 2015, Greene came before the commissioners asking approval for checks totaling $8.59 million. The North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission had determined five men had been wrongfully convicted in the investigation of the murder of Walter Bowman in 2011. Former Buncombe County Sheriff Bobby Medford, who himself now serves time for accepting more than $300,000 in bribes from illegal gaming machine operators, was judged to have used coercive techniques to wrest false confessions.

Greene praised attorney Curt Euler, who still works for the county, for negotiating the settlements down to $71,42,250. She said the victims’ representatives had first asked $17 million, costs could have been as high as $44 million, and the amount the county was going to pay was definitely less than a jury would award.

On top of the settlements, the county had accumulated $767,000 in legal fees, and that number would increase. Greene added, nervously, the county might be eligible to collect “2-point million” from its insurance policies.

During the meeting, Greene emailed Bo Cauble at Park Avenue Securities, “Just waiting for a signal we are a go.”

 Cauble is not under investigation, apparently having believed Greene was working in with him in good faith. After all, Greene had used the budget amendment approved by the commissioners for the “Bobby Medford settlement” as documentation of their approval for the life insurance policies.

 While the “Bobby Medford settlement,” representing an entire two cents of the tax rate, was scorned throughout the year as a Republican-versus-Democrat feather in the cap for high-ranking partisans, the settlement accounted for only half the amount the commissioners approved. The rest went to buy whole life insurance policies.

According to the indictment, Greene had asked those receiving the policies not to tell others they were among the chosen few. She further misrepresented to staff the total amount of the policies as $15,000 when half the “Bobby Medford settlement” had been used to pay for them. On top of that, the county paid the annual premiums for the accounts, and CFO Tim Flora confronted Greene the second time she tried to increase the payments. One thing that made discovering the device so difficult is Greene kept no master list of policyholders.

Greene did, however, quickly after her retirement, cash out her two policies, valued at $458,437.59, and send $155,000 to a Nashville law firm for real estate closing costs. With the exception of Greene’s son Michael, the other recipients of the policies, having been made aware of the fraud, have since reassigned them to the county. 

The insurance company is cooperating to help the county recover losses, and the county has retained attorney Ron Payne to help recover general losses from the former administration.

Also in the indictment were charges that former Buncombe County Chairman David Gantt’s signature had been forged on documents awarding certain employees retention incentives.

Greene’s lawyers requested a jury trial, and Greene is scheduled to appear in court Aug. 6. 

Until then, she is not allowed to have contact with certain people involved in the case, and she must have the permission of her probation officer to spend more than $10,000 at a time. The account Greene used for the Nashville real estate transaction has been frozen.