PRECIOUS JEWELS: A Fayetteville benefits consultant mixed personal and business accounts and missed a tax filing, catching authorities' eyes.

• Author: Martin, Edward

This was no boardroom. They were just Muzzy and Chris, shooting the bull, talking business outside the office. Square-jawed with thinning hair, Muzzy, a prominent Texas businessman, preferred the nickname rhyming with Buzzy to Mouzon Bass III.

He owned or had stakes in more than a dozen enterprises, including Fayetteville-headquartered EbenConcepts, now known as eBen, which provided employee benefits and human resource services to companies in North Carolina, Georgia, Texas and Virginia.

Christopher Scott Harrison was CFO with a $300,000 annual salary and a majority stake in EbenConcepts. He had a penchant for fine things, like timepieces. His $1.2-million Fayetteville home on Forest Creek Drive featured two-story, square brick pillars and an ornate grandfather clock in the foyer. Harrison now awaits sentencing this spring in federal court for financial wrongdoing.

"Muzzy and Chris would sit at Muzzy's kitchen table and talk about how things were going, the financials and all that," says an EbenConcepts executive. "That's why Muzzy is so angry. It wasn't just an employee relationship. He was a friend."

Between 2012 and 2018, Harrison withdrew $25 million from EbenConcepts in a stunningly simple scheme of purchasing personal items and reporting them as business expenses, which led to him underreporting his income, according to court records. He had help from the company controller, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Now, based on court records, company sources, state and federal investigators and others, EbenConcepts appears to be a textbook case of fraud, playing out over years and motivated by a time-worn impulse. "Money," says a Bass acquaintance familiar with the company, "is thicker than friendship sometimes."

Harrison's scheme and subsequent prosecution paint a detailed look inside the American justice system. He was targeted by the Internal Revenue Service's criminal division, rather than the Federal Bureau of Investigation or other agencies more often associated with crime.

If Harrison goes to prison, it won't be because he stole $25 million of his company's money. Rather it's because he failed to pay $6 million in taxes that U.S. Eastern District Attorney Michael Easley Jr. in Raleigh says he would have owed if he earned and reported it legally.

Such prosecutions have long been a weapon against those who commit financial crimes. Gangster A1 Capone famously escaped punishment for countless murders and mayhem, but he...