Pentecostal Leaders Accused Of Conspiracy To Steal $250 Million
Eli Lilly has accused several Church of God in Christ leaders of orchestrating a $250 million fraud scheme tied to Trulicity prescriptions. (RR Graphic)
Drug manufacturer Eli Lilly is accusing a Pentecostal bishop, two pastors and an elder of $250 million fraud.
According to a lawsuit filed in federal court on Tuesday, four leaders in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) were involved in a years-long scheme to steal rebate money. They allegedly bought and sold massive quantities of Trulicity, a drug to control blood sugar in people with type-2 diabetes, and pretended to give the medicine to church members.
The patients and their prescriptions were fictional, the lawsuit claims.
But Lilly issued rebates to tens of thousands of patients with those prescriptions from 2020 to 2025, costing the company hundreds of millions.
According to Lilly, the entire church-affiliated, healthcare cost-share program, which was run by a for-profit business called “COGIC Department of Health,” was a sham.
Lilly is not suing COGIC, a predominantly Black Pentecostal denomination based in Memphis. Lilly’s philanthropic arm has given COGIC several major grants in the last few years. And the lawsuit notes that another church-affiliated cost-sharing program has all the “hallmarks of legitimacy.”
But the company says the church leaders behind the COGIC Department of Health are guilty of fraud. The lawsuit names Bishop Jerry Maynard Sr., Pastor Jerry Maynard II, Pastor Misha Maynard and Elder Readus C. Smith III.
Other defendants include two businessmen, three managers and five different businesses, all allegedly “interrelated entities and individuals” implicated in a “lengthy string” of schemes.
They “unlawfully, knowingly, and willfully combined, conspired, confederated and agreed together to defraud Lilly,” the lawsuit says. “Each committed and caused to be committed a series of overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy.”
Prominent positions in church leadership
Four implicated in the alleged scheme are prominent leaders in COGIC; one is also a civic leader.
Jerry Maynard Sr. is bishop of Nashville and sits on COGIC’s 12-member general board. The younger two Maynards are brother and sister, both pastors at Cathedral of Praise, a megachurch in Northwest Nashville.
Smith, who started a mail-order pharmacy in 2000, is COGIC’s Secretary General of Health and Business. He was appointed to the position by the church’s current presiding bishop, J. Drew Sheard, who made racial disparities in healthcare a COGIC priority.
None of the church leaders responded to emails from the Roys Report requesting comment. Their lawyers have not had time to respond to the claims of the lawsuit.
Lilly is asking the court for “full restitution,” including all “profits unlawfully earned,” punitive damages, legal fees and “such additional relief as the Court finds just, equitable, and appropriate.”
Unusual data raised suspicion
Lilly says it discovered in 2025 that a company named DrugPlace, part of the same corporate entity as COGIC Department of Health, was responsible for an enormous volume of rebate claims.
Lilly had previously stopped working with DrugPlace in 2015 when the company failed to provide adequate documentation during an audit. A decade later, according to the lawsuit, DrugPlace was buying hundreds of thousands of boxes of Trulicity every year, but the business was “concealed through multiple layers of middlemen.”
After the company purchased the medicine, it was allegedly using a rebate aggregator that worked with a pharmacy benefits manager to apply for refunds.
Trulicity retails at more than $1,000. Lilly offers rebates to offset the cost individuals pay out of pocket until they reach their insurance deductible.
But a data analysis of three months of rebate claims filed by DrugPlace, through the two intermediaries, looked strange, according to the lawsuit. Every prescription was identical: one box of one medicine in one quantity. The records showed no one ever failed to pick up their prescription. And no one ever came back for a refill.
GLP-1s — prescription drugs that mimic a naturally produced called glucagon-like peptide-1 — are very popular. But most pharmacies fulfill prescriptions for multiple GLP-1s, such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro, in addition to Trulicity. And most request rebates from other types of drugs as well.
Lilly expanded its review of the rebate data and found the same implausible pattern in all of DrugPlace’s claims from 2020 to 2025.
The drug manufacturer says it asked for the unique prescription identification numbers and contact information for the prescribing physicians, but DrugPlace didn’t produce any records.
Numbers don’t add up
Auditors noticed another problem too. DrugPlace and COGIC Department of Health didn’t seem to have enough members to justify the purchase of tens of thousands of doses of one medication every year.
DrugPlace said that about 2.5 million of COGIC’s 7 million members were qualified to enroll in Community Health, according to the lawsuit. But COGIC only has an estimated 1.9 million members.
Statistically, Lilly argues, the percent of those 1.9 million church members who need an alternative to commercial or government insurance should be about 210,000. And the number of those diagnosed with diabetes and prescribed this GLP-1 should be a little under 2,000.
“DrugPlace’s purchases of Trulicity in a given year are over five times the expected demand,” the lawsuit says. “If one assumes that Community Health members prescribed Trulicity follow to the national average for adherence … then DrugPlace’s purchases of Trulicity in a given year are approximately eight times the expected demand. Neither scenario is plausible.”
Investigator followed truck
In May 2025, Lilly sent an investigator to stake out COGIC Department of Health’s office in Nashville near the airport. The investigator didn’t see any customers going in and out of the building. Nor were their individual packages getting shipped out via Federal Express or United Parcel Service, the lawsuit said.
“The observed activity … was inconsistent with either a retail or mail-order pharmacy,” according to the investigator. It looked more like an unauthorized wholesale business.
The investigator followed a truck 20 miles south to the suburb of Murfreesboro. It made deliveries at nine locations where the drugs could be resold to individuals.
“DrugPlace … never actually sold, dispensed, or shipped any boxes of Trulicity to patients,” Lilly says. “Meanwhile, DrugPlace submits, through intermediaries, fraudulent rebate claims to Lilly for hundreds of millions of dollars, as if DrugPlace had operated as a pharmacy and actually dispensed the medicine.”
According to Lilly, the church leaders and their partners received an average of about $40 million per year in illegitimate rebates. Now the drug manufacturer would like its money back.
The COGIC leaders have a month after being served to reply to the lawsuit.
This article was originally published by The Roys Report.
Daniel Silliman is senior reporter/editor at The Roys Report. He began his two decades in journalism covering crime in Atlanta and has since led major investigations into abuse and misconduct in Christian contexts. Daniel and his wife live in Johnson City, Tennessee.