In a faith-betraying financial saga, William Dexter Lucas, a 61-year-old self-proclaimed pastor from College Station, has been sentenced to over seven years in prison for concocting a multi-layered fraud scheme that pilfered funds from the Payroll Protection Plan and various car dealerships, according to the press release of the U.S. Attorney's Office.
Lucas, who on December 8, 2022, confessed to a conspiracy to commit wire fraud, operated under the guise of his fictitious entity, the "Jesus Survives Ministry. As a church that bore no fruit outside of falsified documentation, he leveraged this imaginary foundation to procure ill-gotten gains that amounted to upwards of $400,000 in losses, affecting not just local businesses but also taxpayers who ended up funding the charlatan's lavish lies.
U.S. District Judge Charles Eskridge, in passing the judgment, pointed to the nefarious extents pursued by the fraudulent clergyman, including an array of forged documents and botched witness manipulations,” according to the press release. Lucas painted a picture of a man who has made a career of deceit, refusing to admit the full scope of his transgressions even as justice bore down upon him.
U.S. Attorney Alamdar S. Hamdani minced no words in their statement: "William Dexter Lucas, a con man who worked several schemes at once, cloaked himself in the robes of a fake church so he could defraud local businesses and steal from taxpayers," and "he stole not to give to the poor, but to line his own pockets with money meant to help those struggling with the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic." He now faces the consequences of his avarice shadowed by the bars of his cell.
The investigation headed by Homeland Security Investigations, with help from the Small Business Administration and Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, unfolded Lucas's tapestry of deceit. A series of orchestrated ploys from 2017 to 2020, where Lucas, assuming roughly 20 different aliases, exploited the PPP loans and hoodwinked car dealerships using fraudulent forms. When the heat of law enforcement bore down, Lucas scrambled with failed gambits to conceal his tracks, including false filings of stolen identities with the Federal Trade Commission.
