Agent Matt Sluss
Appearances
The Binge Cases: Baby Broker
Baby Broker | 7. Gotcha Day
As Agent Matt Sluss told me, This was not just a, I'm stealing your money case. Often, in a fraud case, pain is only inflicted by, oh, I've lost my life savings. In this case, it was that plus I thought I was going to be able to adopt a baby or now I've been coerced out of my baby.
The Binge Cases: Baby Broker
Baby Broker | 6. Don’t F**k With Parents
Tara then even solicited funds from the adoptive parents to help cover funeral costs.
The Binge Cases: Baby Broker
Baby Broker | 6. Don’t F**k With Parents
She's taking adoptive parents to the point that they're remodeling their houses to create nurseries. And people are raising money through church fundraisers. They're cashing out their retirement funds. You have birth mothers that are being coerced, pressured into giving up their babies or dealing with the loss of their children. You have adoptive parents that do have kids.
The Binge Cases: Baby Broker
Baby Broker | 6. Don’t F**k With Parents
And, you know, these kids are expecting to be a big brother or a big sister. And now you have to explain to them, you know, why that's not going to happen. You know, Tara would bring people to the point of traveling across the country to Detroit, Michigan, to complete my family. And then that doesn't happen.
The Binge Cases: Baby Broker
Baby Broker | 6. Don’t F**k With Parents
So they could give us contracts. They could show us exactly how much and when they paid.
The Binge Cases: Baby Broker
Baby Broker | 6. Don’t F**k With Parents
In most fraud schemes, you've made the lie, you've taken the money. The communications are often done. In this particular situation, you have a whole pregnancy now where you have somebody on the hook for fraud early on that you have to continue to lie, continue to make misrepresentations, and continued to make something very sensitive feel very real for months.
The Binge Cases: Baby Broker
Baby Broker | 6. Don’t F**k With Parents
At the end of those, you know, six to eight months, now Tara has a problem because there's no baby. And she has to lie to them again and in order to end or fail that adoption match.
The Binge Cases: Baby Broker
Baby Broker | 6. Don’t F**k With Parents
And then over the next months, as Tara typically would do, she would provide updates about the pregnancy, making the adoption situation feel as real as she could. In this particular situation, Tara failed the match by telling the adoptive parents that Roshanda, the birth mother, had been shot and killed, and the baby died in utero.
The Binge Cases: Baby Broker
Baby Broker | 5. The Last Adoption
And I went into our conference room and I took that big rollout paper that's three, four feet wide and tore off like a 10-foot section and put it across the conference table.
The Binge Cases: Baby Broker
Baby Broker | 5. The Last Adoption
And then just literally started drawing, hand-drawing, handwriting a roadmap of every name, who's connected to who, about the parents' names, birth parents' names, match date, how much money was paid, did the match succeed, was it failed, a quick note on how did it fail if it did.
The Binge Cases: Baby Broker
Baby Broker | 5. The Last Adoption
It was early October of 2018. There was an individual who was intimately connected with Tara Lee's adoption business that brought information to our FBI Detroit field office.
The Binge Cases: Baby Broker
Baby Broker | 5. The Last Adoption
Okay, what is the exact violation here?
The Binge Cases: Baby Broker
Baby Broker | 5. The Last Adoption
It was a Friday afternoon, and I had returned from a meeting with a prosecutor in a different case.