When Amanda Coulson was a child, she visited her mother at a hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas. Doris Coulson was a nurse, and her daughter had an unforgettable memory. A code blue was called and suddenly the mother was running next to the patient’s bed.
“She jumped into the middle of the bed and was doing CPR on the bed flying down the hallway,” Amanda Coulson told the court years later. “I noticed that she worked all day and didn’t play.”
Her mother was such a caregiver. She was someone who understood what quality care meant because she had spent her life providing quality care to others.
After Doris Coulson retired, she became a patient at a nursing home owned by Joseph Schwartz, a New Jersey businessman who was buying up nursing homes across the country. The staff should not have offered her solid food, but they did and she died. Doctors told the family they found scrambled eggs in his lungs.
Nine years after Mr. Coulson’s death, President Donald Trump pardoned Mr. Schwartz in a federal lawsuit in which he admitted to withholding $39 million in employee payroll taxes from Mr. Schwartz’s nursing home empire and diverting the money to other purposes. Mr. Schwartz’s lawyers argued that Mr. Schwartz’s actions were not an attempt to gain personal enrichment, but to save the company. The White House called Schwartz “an example of overprosecution,” arguing that his tax returns were managed by a third party and that it would have been harmful for Schwartz to serve the entire three-year sentence because of his age and poor health.
Behind the tax bill was a business that families and lawsuits allege left real people ignored, injured and dead.
The Coulson family sued Mr. Schwartz and his company for wrongful death. Schwartz did not appear in court to contest the lawsuit. Six years ago, a judge awarded Amanda Coulson, her sister and brother nearly $19 million. (He later claimed he never received the key filings and mistook the complaint for the same lawsuit first filed in 2017, arguing that the company that took over the house was the rightful defendant.) Schwartz never paid. Amanda has since passed away.
Doris Coulson’s family has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against New Jersey businessman Joseph Schwartz and his company. The Coulsons were awarded about $19 million in damages, but have yet to receive any compensation from Schwartz. Provided by Melissa Coulson
Stories about pardons are often told as stories about presidential power: who got clemency, who had access, and who persuaded the president to intervene. What attracted me to Mr. Schwartz’s pardon were the people on the other side of the gracious act. People like Doris Coulson and her family already had their lives shattered long before the White House celebrated Schwartz’s first Sabbath with his family after President Trump released him from prison and a senior Justice Department official declared him “free to rebuild.”
Mr. Schwartz’s pardon came as I was covering President Trump’s sweeping pardon policy favoring allies, donors, and other connected defendants, including those convicted in major financial fraud cases.
This pardon felt different to me.
To understand the human cost, I turned to court records. In the state where Mr. Schwartz owned a nursing home, he found harrowing accounts of suffering patients and insiders desperately trying to protect them as problems mounted.
Employees were also affected. As the facility collapsed, some employees said they were using their own money to buy food for the residents. Even after insurance premiums were deducted from their paychecks, some people were left with medical expenses because no funds were invested in their insurance coverage.
Still, it appears Schwartz still has money, and perhaps even a lot of money. Lobbying disclosure forms show he paid more than $1 million to lobbyists to secure his pardon. And even after the business collapsed, prosecutors said he still had $58 million in assets, none of which were in his own name.
The White House said the president would not grant pardons at the request of lobbyists.
Even after being pardoned, Schwartz still had to return to Arkansas in late December to serve a nine-month prison sentence for defrauding the state’s Medicaid system.
I took his return as an opportunity to talk to him. The prison system said the only way I could contact him was by mail. In the first week of January, I sent a letter requesting a phone, email, or in-person meeting, stating that I could easily drive from my home in Missouri.
Lawyers for the Coulson family saw that same narrow frame as an opportunity to do something more significant, subpoenaing Mr. Schwartz for a deposition and records that could help identify his assets and force him to pay the judgment he ignored.
The window closed quickly for both of us. One of Mr. Schwartz’s lobbyists was also hired to seek relief for Mr. Schwartz in Arkansas. Within three weeks, the parole board released him.
My letter was returned as undeliverable. Lawyers had no luck tracking him down.
Thanks to that episode, I was able to understand the story more clearly. At first it felt like a failure of the report. The more I sat, the more I realized that the windows I missed were actually reflecting a larger story. Even after criminal convictions, civil judgments and years of litigation, Mr. Schwartz remained elusive to those seeking answers and accountability.
A machine was in operation to shorten his sentence. But nothing helps the victim.
