Former highflying corporate attorney humbled by prison stint

In writing about Thad Bereday’s unusual life arc — and how it led to his current path of redemption — one of the toughest things is to pick the point where he truly hit bottom.

There’s the obvious one, the public spectacle one morning in October 2007 when dozens of FBI agents — some armed — raided the Tampa headquarters of health insurance giant WellCare, where Bereday was general counsel. (“We were ambushed,” Bereday says, “designed to create fear.”) Bereday was one of five WellCare executives eventually charged in what authorities said was a $35 million health insurance fraud case, setting the attorney off on a decade-long legal odyssey.

But Bereday’s life-bottom point has competition: There was the time, before his first possible trial, where he was diagnosed with leukemia. Years later the father of four went through a painful divorce. In between, his cancer went away and came back; he underwent a bone marrow transplant; he admitted to himself he was an alcoholic; and, of course, there was the six months he spent in federal prison in Georgia in 2018 after his November 2017 guilty plea to making a false statement to Florida’s Medicaid program.    

While Bereday has lots of life low points, 2021, so far is shaping up to be a brighter year. Now 56, Bereday’s story of trying to rebuild his life with a new purpose and mission has some markings, I think, of what makes a great leader. The list includes resilience, vulnerability, service to others and humility, among other traits.     

“I have found my calling in life, which is something I’ve never felt before,” Bereday tells me in a recent Zoom call. “I know that every day now is a gift. I used to have a big ego and used to say, ‘what can this do for Thad?’ But I’ve learned that when it’s all about Thad it doesn’t work out well for me in the end.”

“I was a card-carrying Republican lawyer, thinking I was doing everything the right way,” Bereday adds. “But I wasn’t paying attention to issues of social justice.”

Prison time

Bereday’s life initially took a relatively predictable path for a corporate attorney. A native of Boston, Bereday was raised in New York City with what he calls a privileged upbringing. He graduated from Brown University and then Case Western University Law School in Cleveland.

He soon went to work for Jones Day, one of the largest and most prestigious law firms in the country. The firm had a high-pressure, alpha-male culture, says Bereday, where billable hours were the only currency that mattered. Back then, in his 20s, that was a perfect fit. The firm, for example, required new attorneys to bank at least 2,000 billable hours a year. “I was the league leader, doing 3,000 billable hours a year,” Bereday says. “And that’s not padding the bills. That’s working 90, 100, 120 hours a week. I was a workaholic.”

It wasn’t clear then, but as a young attorney Bereday also developed another characteristic that might have played a role in some of his future troubles: a willingness to get behind his client’s risks. For an entrepreneur, of course, timing calculated risks in the right places is what separates icons like Richard Branson and Elon Musk from everyone else.

Bereday says he didn’t want to be the kind of lawyer clients hate, the attorney constantly chirping about what’s wrong with a decision, the stereotypical deal-killer. “I prided myself on being a ‘get to yes lawyer,” Bereday says. “I didn’t want to create obstacles and prevent my clients from doing what they wanted to do and from reaching their (goals.)”

It’s not linear, but Bereday eventually became the top legal person for WellCare executives Todd Farha, Paul Behrens, William Kale and Peter Clay. The company was a runaway national success, creating a multibillion-dollar niche in administering health care plans for government employees. Farah, the CEO, and others grew WellCare from a $300 million business to a $3 billion company in five years. The company went public, and even in seeing the stock quickly go from $17 to $125 a share, Bereday says “we felt we had hadn’t reached our ceiling of our growth.”

But federal authorities believed a portion of WellCare’s revenues were generated under false pretenses, when it overstated the amount its subsidiaries spent on mental health services on behalf of Medicaid patients. Farha and the others were indicted and later convicted of fraud-related charges after a lengthy jury trial. Farha, Behrens and Kale were sentenced to prison.

Bereday, meanwhile, initially planned to fight the charges in court. His cancer diagnoses pushed that back for years, and after seeing the legal arguments prosecutors used in court against his co-defendants, he decided to plead guilty to one charge. He was sentenced to six months in federal prison, followed by three years of home confinement, which was eventually shrunk to one year.    

In our interview, Bereday doesn’t deny the charges or dispute what the government alleged, per se, but he does dispute that it should have been a criminal case. “Different lawyers can look at different set of facts differently,” he says. “We looked the events in question, I came up with a certain solution and the government’s lawyers looked at it and came up with a different understanding.”

‘We do punishment and accountability really well in our criminal justice system but we don’t do mercy well. The system needs to be more focused on dispensing mercy.’ Thad Bereday

Bereday’s remorse, he adds, is over what the criminal case cost for his colleagues and their families at WellCare. (St. Louis-based Centene acquired WellCare for $17 billion in 2020.) He says he oversaw a high-energy, accomplished legal department with 40 employees, including 13 in-house lawyers. “It’s a major regret for me that this is what the final endpoint will be for me in my legal career,” he says. “Despite what happened with the government, I’m extremely proud of what we accomplished.”

Surprise pardon

Bereday’s life got a major post-prison jolt Jan. 20 — when President Donald Trump pardoned all five former WellCare executives in his last day in office. In noting the CATO Institute and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers supported the pardon, the Trump Administration sided with the view that the case was about reporting methodology, not a crime. “Notably, there was no evidence that any of the individuals were motivated by greed,” the Administration said in a statement. “The sentencing judge called the likelihood that there was any personal financial motivation ‘infinitesimal.’”

Bereday believes the pardon — which he says neither he nor his attorney requested — is another positive turning point for him. His goals going forward are twofold: to help others trying to reenter life after prison time and to advocate for criminal justice reform. “I’m devoting my life to making amends to my family, to my friends, to people in the community,” he says.

How will Bereday do that?

For starters, he’s a group leader for the Justice Ministry within the church he belongs to, Hyde Park United Methodist. He works with people in the church, in its Downtown Tampa Portico branch, helping homeless and others find housing and work — unabashedly saying he’s now part of a “citadel of social justice warriors.” He’s doing volunteer work for the Committee of HOPE, the Hillsborough Organization for Progress and Equality and supports groups like the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition and the Innocence Project.  

Bereday’s personally ministered to 50 to 60 people so far, he says, many who are fresh off prison stints, working on mental health, substance abuse issues and more. “We seek to make God’s love real,” he writes in a blog post, “and change our community one person at a time.”

He also plans to reestablish his law license, not to practice again necessarily but to be able to work on and lobby for criminal justice reform. With his personal experience at the forefront, Bereday aims to bring more balance to a system he says is too hyper-focused on punishment — not what happens next. “We do punishment and accountability really well in our criminal justice system,” he says. “But we don’t do mercy well. The system needs to be more focused on dispensing mercy.”

Bereday’s transformation, what he calls a work in progress, wasn’t an immediate thing, a thunderbolt of light moment. “Federal prison stinks. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone,” he says. “But I was able to use my time in there to deepen in my spirituality. In my life, my goals were designed wrong. I was chasing money and wealth. Now I’m recalibrating my life.”