Bonus: The Beach House Sheriff (Todd Entrekin)
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Hello. I just wanted to let you know that we will be taking a short mid-season summer break. In fact, I'm at the beach already, digging my toes into the sand. I'm definitely not sitting in my dark, cramped office staring at a screen like usual. I'm having so much fun. I promise. Don't worry about me. Anyway, the glorious, full-length episodes of Swindled will return later this month, but I didn't want to leave you empty-handed.

So here's a brand new, unreleased bonus episode for everybody to enjoy. You're welcome. Also valued listeners on Patreon and Apple will receive an additional exclusive bonus episode next week with a very exciting announcement to follow. So stay tuned. You know I will. Enjoy the show. This episode of Swindled may contain graphic descriptions or audio recordings of disturbing events which may not be suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.

This is the major story. Heroin. Heroin fentanyl.

We've got to do something. We've got to realize that it is a problem. We've got to realize that treating folks isn't the way to stop this problem. We've got to put people back in jail. Our politicians in Washington and in Montgomery have got to realize that we've got to put folks in jail and make them accountable, hold them accountable for what they're doing.

For the lives that are being taken, that we're losing every day, treatment is not the answer. Putting folks in jail and holding them accountable for what they do and put on our streets is the only way for us to stop this. Those brilliant ideas belonged to Todd Intrican. By 2018, he had been the sheriff of Etowah County in Alabama for 11 years. During his career, Intrican had been extolled for being tough on crime, especially drugs.

Naturally, this made him a quote, rising star in Alabama politics. That's according to a profile on the Alabama Republican Party website. And like every Alabama Republican, Todd Intrican was very concerned about babies. So concerned that he solicited the friends and families of those struggling with addiction to turn in their loved ones to the sheriff's office. When you see your friend or relative pregnant, you want to give her gifts that will keep her baby safe and comfortable.

But if she's struggling with addiction, a warm toy may be too little, too late. You can give them both the gift of healing. Call the Etowah County Sheriff's Office today. We'll give your friend the opportunity to get clean, stay clean, and build a healthy bond with her baby. It's not the easiest gift to give, but it's one that will impact mom and baby for life.

That's right, baby. Todd Intrigan will throw your mother in jail and let her sweat it out in the most unforgiving conditions. You might even be born there. Lucky you. It'll be good practice for you. Orphaned children grow up to make mighty fine inmates too, you know? And now that you're born, well, you're certainly not our problem anymore. But we'd hate to see that happen to you, little baby. For you are the reason we're doing all of this, remember?

It would be such a waste if you continued the cycle no matter how statistically probable. Want some advice on how to stay out of jail when you're older? Don't be like your mom. That comes courtesy of Etowah County Sheriff Todd Intrican, who says, "Just don't try it." "Don't try it, not even once. Just tell them it's not your thing." In addition to solving Etowah County's drug problem, Sheriff Todd Intrican also helped with the country's scourge of illegal immigration.

Etowah County prided itself on housing hundreds of federal immigration detainees that poured in by the busload. Sheriff Intrickin had to continuously expand the jail in order to keep up with the demand. He also flew to Washington, D.C. in 2011 to lobby the federal government to continue pumping in the undocumented immigrants. Etowah County would lose thousands of jobs if their supply of incarcerated human beings dried up.

The prison industrial complex was working as intended. Sheriff Todd Intrican made sure every bunk in his county was occupied with a body or two. Also, Sheriff Intrican had additional incentive to keep his jail full. It was buried in a Depression-era Alabama state law. Every year, the federal government distributes substantial funding to states to feed its federal immigration detainees.

Usually the state governments contract and provide the meals with that funding. But as we all know, the state of Alabama is unique. In Alabama, it is the duty of the county sheriff's offices to contract and provide meals to the inmates housed in their facilities.

And according to that Alabama law, whatever food funds are left over at the end of the fiscal year could be kept by the county sheriff as income. Under a state law written before World War II, county sheriffs may keep and retain excess prisoner food allowances. In other words, what they don't spend, they can pocket. The more inmates Etowah County housed, the more food money the county was allotted, which meant more money for Etowah County Sheriff to put in the bank.

It was a strange, obscure law that not many people in Alabama or the United States knew about, but the county sheriffs in Alabama were certainly familiar, evidenced by the measures they would take to minimize the food cost and maximize their profit. A former Etowah County inmate told AL.com, "...they fed the inmates up their stuff I wouldn't feed to my dogs. That's just the God's honest truth. I guarantee that Todd Intrican wouldn't eat it."

The food served to inmates at Etowah County Jail was sourced from local churches and non-profits who were happy to hand over their expired inventories. There were usually dry goods and stale cereal and some kind of meat product that arrived in a long tube. It looked like gray chicken or turkey but tasted like neither. We called them starfish patties because they look more like a starfish than anything, the former inmate told AL.com.

The package is literally said in bold red letters, plain as day on the top, bottom, and sides of the box. Not fit for human consumption. "We would get chicken thighs and we'd have to cut the rotten shit off," one former inmate said. "He's feeding these inmates garbage," another claimed. As someone who's been in there, seeing the corners he's cutting and everything, it all comes down to greed.

Another former inmate of Etowah County Jail told AL.com that food was the cause of almost every problem at the facility. "Every riot I've seen was because of some bullshit they fed us," he said. "Every single one I've seen was because of the food."

That former inmate also described situations in which some detainees would take their own lives because of hunger, either to put an end to the torture or to get the attention of the jail administration. Sometimes it worked. That former inmate recalled one incident during his time there that led to the guards bringing all the detainees half a peanut butter sandwich, two cookies and a cup of juice for three days in a row. But after those three days, the man said, everything returned to normal.

I would not be scared to sit on the stand under oath and swear on a Bible to say that every suicide and suicide attempt in that jail was related to the food," the former inmate told AL.com. "Either people aren't getting enough good food, or you get in debt because you're trading all your food off and everything so you attempt suicide. If they were feeding everyone enough, you wouldn't be waking up in the middle of the night thinking your throat's been cut because the hunger pains are so bad."

Perhaps most horrifying of all, Etowah County was not just one of those rare bad apples. According to a lawsuit filed on January 5th, 2018 by the Southern Center for Human Rights and the Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice,

49 of Alabama's 67 county sheriffs were pocketing the excess food funds, which are taxpayer dollars, and they were, quote, refusing to produce public records showing whether, and if so by how much, they have personally profited from funds allocated for feeding people in their jails.

It's happening across the state. The Southern Center for Human Rights has filed a lawsuit against 49 sheriffs asking to know how much they're profiting from excess food money. The public has a right to know how public funds are being spent, and so we've sued to ask the court to order that they produce those records. In the following months, many of those records would surface, and it was worse than anyone could have imagined.

For example, between 2014 to 2016, Sheriff Thomas Tate of Monroe County received more than $420,000 to feed inmates. According to his own handwritten records, during those three years, Sheriff Tate pocketed more than $110,000 in excess funds, and the amount had increased every year.

When AL.com asked Sheriff Thomas Tate for a response or justification for keeping the "excess taxpayer funds," he responded, "I do it just like the law tells us to. That's about all I have to say about that." Pickens County Sheriff David Abston didn't have much to say either. He had also received more than $400,000 in food allowance money and kept the change.

In order to cut his jail's food expenses, Sheriff Abstin reportedly fed his inmates donations from a local food bank and a church that were earmarked for the needy. Sheriff David Abstin eventually pleaded guilty to federal charges of wire fraud and filing a false tax return related to the scheme. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Up north, in Morgan County, Sheriff Anna Franklin found herself in hot water for profiting from the inmate food program as well. I certainly would like to apologize to the courts if there was any misinterpretation that I've been given or any incorrect advice.

It was a bad look for Morgan County. Back in 2009, Sheriff Franklin's predecessor, Greg Bartlett, became known as Sheriff Corndog after it was discovered that he had pocketed more than $200,000 in food funds while the inmates in his county ate corndogs twice a day for weeks. Anna Franklin decided to continue the practice despite the semi-recent controversy and despite a county decree enacted in Bartlett's honor that prevented her from legally doing so.

But not only did Anna Franklin collect hundreds of thousands of dollars from the inmate food fund for her personal use, but it was also discovered that Sheriff Franklin loaned $150,000 of that money to a used car lot called Priceville Partners in June 2015, soon after Priceville Partners was caught selling stolen cars. By 2016, the co-owner of the lot had been arrested, and Priceville went bankrupt.

Sheriff Anna Franklin's $150,000 investment was uncovered after a former warden of the Morgan County Jail leaked information to a local blogger. Amid the scandal, Sheriff Anna Franklin decided not to seek re-election in 2018. She was later sued by the whistleblower for illegal termination, by the blogger who claimed the sheriff had instructed deputies to install spyware on her computer, and by state and local prosecutors for the unauthorized use of jail food funds.

A jail food money lawsuit against former Morgan County Sheriff Anna Franklin is settled. The lawsuit settled with $45,000 of unspent inmate meal money being paid to the county. Prosecutors sued Franklin in December of last year just before she left office to prevent her from personally keeping $55,000 of unspent jail food money. The settlement was reached yesterday between Franklin, state and local prosecutors.

Still, no sheriff was more obscenely abusing the inmate food funding law than Etowah County Sheriff Todd Intrican. According to a report by AL.com, Todd Intrican and his wife Karen, a former parole officer, owned more than $2 million in real estate, including a $740,000 house on Orange Beach.

When the couple purchased the beach house in 2017, Sheriff Intrican's salary was a little more than $93,000 a year. Apparently, he was able to qualify for the half-million-dollar mortgage. Due to $750,000 in additional compensation, the Intrican identified in ethics disclosures as food provisions.

Todd Intrican reportedly deposited those food provisions into a personal account named the Todd Intrican Food Provision Account. AL.com obtained a check featuring that account name, along with Sheriff Intrican's personal address printed in the corner.

Intrican had used that particular check to pay a teenager to mow his lawn in 2015. That teenager, Matt Qualls, was now 20 years old and putting two and two together. He told AL.com, quote, I saw that in the corner of the checks it said food provision, and a couple people I knew came through the jail, and they say they got meat maybe once a month, and every other day it was just beans and vegetables. I put two and two together and realized that the money could have gone towards some meat or something.

Coincidentally, on February 22nd, 2018, four days after AL.com published Matt Qualls' comments about Endrickon's food provision account, he was arrested after an anonymous tip reported the odor of marijuana coming from his apartment. When police entered the residence, a small quantity of weed was visible on a table, but a few Adderall pills were in Qualls' possession. There was also a jar of cannabis-infused butter in the kitchen, which Matt and his friends had made.

Just tell him it's not your thing.

In response to the report and the lawsuit, like the other Alabama sheriffs, Todd Intrican claimed that what he was doing with the food account was legal and by the book. In an email to AL.com, Intrican wrote, "...the law says it's a personal account and that's the way I've always done it and that's the way the law reads and that's the way I do business."

However, a staff attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights told AL.com that Intrigan and the other sheriff's interpretation of the law was incorrect and argued that such an interpretation establishes perverse incentives. Assuredly, the law in question had been interpreted and abused this way since before World War II. Eighty years later, thanks to the lawsuit and investigative reporting by Connor Sheets at AL.com, the law and its abusers were finally being questioned.

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I do want to remind everybody, please make sure that your cell phones are on vibrate or completely turned off. Thank you. Good morning. I'm Sheriff Todd Etrigan. I want to thank you for being here this morning. Over the past two weeks, me, my family, my office, the citizens of Etowah County have been targets of miscellaneous fake news stories. And I'm here today to set the record straight.

On March 23, 2018, Etowah County Sheriff Todd Intrigan held a press conference to dispel the myths perpetuated by the quote, fake news stories about his personal use of the taxpayer-funded food provisions for inmates. On the screen behind me, you'll see a series of documents that will support each and everything that I say here today. You also have copies of these documents in your press kit, and after I'm finished, I will take questions. Let's get started.

Myth number one. Myth number one. The population housed in Etowah County's facility is underfed or improperly fed.

Nothing could be further from the truth, Intrican claimed. Quote, Now let me be clear. This is a jail. This is not a bed and breakfast. Domino's does not deliver here. We don't run to McDonald's and get these prisoner detainees Big Macs. We do not serve cake on their birthday. But we do provide a healthy meal that is prepared on site here and served three times a day. It is true that many of our population are not happy with the food we serve.

If you used to eating grandma's fried chicken ordering pizza several times a week, you're not going to be happy. This is not a restaurant. This is not a buffet. You do not get to place an order and expect us to fill it. Eat what you're served.

and you will eat a balanced, nutritious meal. Again, this is not a bed and breakfast. Myth number two, according to Sheriff Intrican, was that he and his wife used the food provision account to purchase a beach house. This is a bald-faced lie. According to Todd, he and Karen used proceeds from the sale of a condo for the down payment on the beach house. Not a dime came from the provisions account, he proclaimed.

It is sad that my wife and I are having to go through so much of our personal and financial stuff publicly and defend ourselves against false attack and fake news. That's why, well, that's what's wrong with politics today. That's why it scares so many people away from running.

Accountability. According to Todd Intrican, that's the problem. The sheriff also went on to explain that the food provision program had crippled him with debt his first few years in charge. Intrican said he was publicly asking for help back then and asked the state legislator to change the law, but they never did. I lost money for years and nobody said a word about it. Nobody come to my defense when I was $400,000 in debt. Nobody.

Nobody. I mean, and I was public about it, that I was borrowing money, that I was taking it out of my family's pocket, and nobody said anything about it. When I finally changed it, now here we are. I guess some people don't want to let facts get in the way of a good story. Shh, you be quiet over there.

Todd Intrican also said that he couldn't just give the excess money back to the state or the county because that would be against the law. Intrican said he has to pay the taxes on those funds so they should stay in his account. So in order to do what some in the media have implied I should do would be breaking the law. Again, don't let the facts get in the way of a good story. Sheriff Intrican did agree with one of the reporters that the optics were bad, but his hands were tied.

He had tried to get the law changed and couldn't legally give the money back, so what else was he supposed to do besides keep it for himself? Simply no other options. Couldn't think of one. Again, it's the law. I haven't done anything wrong. If it's wrong, somebody needs to change the law. I have asked them to change the law, and they have not changed it. Anybody else? Sheriff Todd Intrican had more important things to worry about.

Etowah County Sheriff Todd Intrican announces over the weekend that he is running for re-election in 2018. Intrican is seeking a third term as sheriff. He has held that office since 2007 when then-Governor Bob Riley appointed him as sheriff after the death of Sheriff James Hayes. Intrican has worked in law enforcement for more than 35 years.

Sheriff Todd Endrickon's election opponent was Rainbow City Police Chief Jonathan Horton, who was already promising not to keep any of the excess inmate food money. But Rainbow City Police Chief Jonathan Horton had dirt of his own. The gloves were off. Jonathan Horton is telling you that he wants to be the chief law enforcement officer for Etowah County. That same Jonathan Horton has already resigned from the Etowah County Sheriff's Office in shame.

Why? Because Horton was drinking and driving in his county vehicle when he hit an innocent young woman head-on, forcing her to undergo several surgeries. Etowah County deserves better than a drunk driver.

A website called ExposeTheSnake.com appeared online. It included three commercials all aimed at Chief Horton. One reminded the public of their potential sheriff's drunk driving accident from 2006. Another displayed multiple domestic violence reports filed against Horton by his wife. And a third contained a cell phone video from 2017 of Jonathan Horton drinking in a bar, though he had claimed to have been sober for a decade.

Don't let this snake con you and the people of Etowah County. Incumbent Sheriff Todd Intrican, who Horton pointed out had a working history with the media company that produced the commercials, claimed he had nothing to do with the ugly campaign. My campaign had nothing to do with it. Either way, it wasn't enough. We've got 19 boxes in and we're up $1,547. Woo!

On June 6, 2018, Todd Intrican lost the election to Jonathan Horton by a huge margin. The Beach House sheriff was on his way out the door, but his pockets were full of treasure. According to financial documents obtained by AL.com and ProPublica, Todd Intrican received an additional $269,184 worth of checks from sheriff's office accounts in the six months after his electoral loss.

Again, it was all originally provisioned for inmate food. It was also revealed that Todd Intrigan had profited far more during his time as sheriff than he had originally reported. Budget documents show that for every year since 2011, the jail food fund had an excess between $772,000 and $1.2 million, of which Intrigan pocketed the majority.

On July 17th, 2018, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General and the State Ethics Commission announced they were conducting separate investigations into the way Todd Intrican handled public money allocated to feed inmates in the Etowah County Jail. As of today, no charges have been filed, but there were major ramifications.

On July 31st, 2018, former Etowah County Sheriff Todd Intrigan sold his beach house. He made a $50,000 profit during his one year of ownership.

Etowah County Sheriff Todd Intrican is selling one of his beach houses less than a year after its purchase. Intrican bought the beach house in September of last year on Alabama's Gulf Coast for $740,000. Remax Realty of Orange Beach has that property listed on their site for $799,000.

The home that is now listed on the market is the same beach house that made national news when it was revealed that Sheriff Intrican had personally pocketed thousands of dollars left over from feeding inmates in the Etowah County Jail. Intrican has denied purchasing the home with the money from the inmate feeding funds, and he says it was bought through past real estate investments.

Also in July 2018, another investigation was launched after a Tuscaloosa woman alleged that Todd Intrican had raped her multiple times when she was 15 years old in a camper that sat on a piece of property that Intrican still owned. The now 41-year-old woman told AL.com that Intrican used to host cocaine-fueled parties there for his fellow officers and teenage girls back when he was the commander of the Drug Task Force.

The woman claimed that Todd Intrickens' family man rhetoric during his most recent campaign and public support for the alleged child molesting U.S. Senator from Alabama, Roy Moore, inspired her to come forward.

Again, Enderkin referred to the allegations as fake news. Quote, That investigation ended in March 2019. Again, no charges were ever filed.

In response, former Sheriff Todd Intrigan filed a defamation lawsuit against AL.com and two law enforcement officers for publishing the story about these sexual allegations. A judgment has yet to be made.

A media outlet is reporting that allegations against a former Etowah County Sheriff, Todd Entrecain, will not be taken up by the state attorney general. A Tuscaloosa woman alleged the sheriff of having sex with her while she was underage in 1992. The Gadsden Times says the attorney general's office looked into the state bureau of investigations report and closed the matter without further action. The state attorney general's office is not commenting. There is a happy ending, though.

Alabama Senate Bill 228 was signed into law by Governor Kay Ivey in May 2019. Leftover jail food funds must now be used for future food expenses. Although 25% of unspent funds may be used at the end of the fiscal year for other law enforcement purposes, it was a victory for human rights in Alabama for once.

In an op-ed for AL.com, Carla Crowder, the executive director of the Alabama Appleseed Center, and Aaron Littman, a staff attorney for the Southern Center for Human Rights, wrote, This session, we moved administration of jail food funds out of the 1930s. Good government, transparency, and basic human decency won out over business as usual. Until next time.

Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen, with original music by Trevor Howard, a.k.a. Deformer, a.k.a. Sheriff Corndog. For more information about Swindled, you can visit swindledpodcast.com and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at Swindled Podcast. Or you can send us a postcard at PO Box 6044, Austin, Texas 78762. But please, no packages. We do not trust you.

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My name is Ashley from Palm Beach, Florida. My name is Mark from Philadelphia, where bad things happen. Hi, my name is Jill. I'm calling from Ireland. Let me give that to you once more in Irish. Do you only worry if I'm dumb? It's off air in May. And I'm a concerned citizen and a valued listener. Thanks for everything. Keep doing what you're doing. Bye. Just tell them it's not your thing.

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