The Big Conn

Eastern Kentucky lawyer Eric C. Conn runs a disability-claims empire that drains more than half a billion dollars from Social Security until whistleblowers and federal agents tear the scheme apart.

The Big Conn follows Eric C. Conn, a flamboyant attorney in rural eastern Kentucky who turns Social Security disability filings into a high-volume business. Conn advertises aggressively, lives large with planes and entourages, and steers thousands of clients onto the federal rolls while a cooperative judge helps rubber-stamp claims. Inside the system, employees Sarah Carver and Jennifer Griffith notice the volume, the shortcuts, and the money flowing through Conn’s firm. Their tips draw investigators into what becomes one of the largest government fraud cases in U.S. history. The series reconstructs how the operation thrived in a hard-hit coal region and how paperwork, wiretaps, and insider courage finally cracked it open.

As the net tightens, Conn’s flashy public image collides with mounting evidence of kickbacks, fake medicals, and a pipeline of approved claims worth hundreds of millions. Federal agents move in; Conn bolts, sparking a manhunt that ends with his capture and a cascade of guilty pleas and sentences for the lawyer, the judge, and others in the circle. Whistleblowers face retaliation and career fallout even as the case validates their warnings. The series stays with the money trail, the courtroom reckoning, and the human cost to taxpayers and the disability system Conn exploited, closing on the scale of the theft rather than a moral lecture.