A convicted felon who hopscotched his way into high-paying health executive positions all over the country despite a federal prison term has once again landed in a top position — albeit briefly — this time at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia, according to news reports.
In an investigative story last spring, MedPage Today detailed the long saga of how Larry D. Butler obtained executive-level jobs at numerous health organizations from Baton Rouge to Sacramento to Coos Bay, Oregon, sometimes by falsifying key details in his resume and pretending to be his own reference, according to court documents.
He was convicted of using the institutions’ credit cards to buy tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of personal items such as furniture, and changing the address so the facilities wouldn’t see the charges. In a 2015 press release announcing his sentence, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Louisiana called Butler a “con man.”
According to a September 21 story in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Butler, now 58, was hired July 17 as the senior director of facilities at Pennsylvania Hospital after claiming he had worked for a California hospital for the last 8 years — even though for 5 of those years he was locked in a Louisiana prison after being convicted of defrauding a cancer center and a health insurance cooperative.
He was in charge of operational oversight, including building security and safety, and capital project management, according to the story, which attributed the information to an all-staff email from the hospital’s acting CEO Daniel Wilson.
On August 14, Wilson sent out another email saying Butler had resigned.
Several news stories, including MedPage Today‘s, quoted hospital officials saying they used private companies to check references of job applicants, including for key administrative positions, and assumed they did their due diligence. Clay England, chief human resources officer for Bay Area Hospital in Coos Bay, Oregon, said the vendor they used checked Butler’s history for the prior 7 years.
“There’s a lot of ways that people can falsify that information,” England told MedPage Today earlier this year after Butler left his hospital. “We go off a social security number, and there’s ways for people to manipulate that. … The information he provided to us was false.”
In an interview with the Inquirer earlier this month, Butler said his criminal record never came up during his latest hiring process. He admitted that he “embellished” parts of his resume, such as falsely saying he worked at the California hospital since 2015. He said he was concerned that employers would not consider a convicted felon for such positions.
“I’m just trying to work. That’s all,” he told the Inquirer, emphasizing that he’s been a model employee since leaving prison in 2019. “I want to move on.”
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