When Amanda Coulson was a child, she visited her mother at work at a hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas. Doris Coulson was a nurse and one memory never left her daughter. A code blue was issued and suddenly his mother rushed to the side of a patient’s bed.
“She jumped into the middle of the bed and was doing CPR in the bed as he flew down the hallway,” Amanda Coulson told the court years later. “I realized she wasn’t playing at work all day.”
That was the kind of caregiver her mother was: someone who understood what quality care meant because she had spent her life giving it to others.
After Doris Coulson retired, she became a patient at a nursing home owned by Joseph Schwartz, a New Jersey businessman who purchased nursing homes across the country. The staff were not supposed to serve her solid food, but they did and she died. Doctors told the family they found scrambled eggs in his lungs.
Nine years after Coulson’s death, President Donald Trump Schwartz pardoned in a federal case in which he admitted to withholding $39 million in payroll taxes from his nursing home empire and diverting that money for other purposes. Schwartz’s lawyers argued that his actions were not an attempt at personal enrichment but an attempt to save his business. The White House said Schwartz was “an example of excessive prosecution” and argued that a third-party entity handled the tax returns and that serving the three years of his prison sentence would have been detrimental for someone of his age and in poor health.
Behind the tax was a company that families and lawsuits allege left real people neglected, injured and dead.
The Coulson family sued Schwartz and his company for wrongful death. Schwartz did not appear in court to contest the case. Six years ago, a judge awarded Amanda Coulson, her sister and brother nearly $19 million. (He later claimed he never received the key documents and had confused the complaint with the same lawsuit first filed in 2017. He argued the company that took over the house was the correct defendant.) Schwartz never paid. Amanda has since died.
Stories of pardons are often told as stories about presidential power: who was granted pardon, who had access, who persuaded a president to intervene. What drew me to Schwartz’s pardon were the people on the other side of that act of mercy: people like Doris Coulson and her family, whose lives had already been shattered long before the White House celebrated Schwartz’s first Shabbat with his family after Trump released him from prison and a top Justice Department official declared him “free to rebuild.”
Schwartz’s pardon arrived while I was reporting on Trump’s wave of clemencywhich favored allies, donors and others well-connected defendantsincluding people convicted of serious financial fraud cases.
This forgiveness felt different to me.
To understand the human toll, I turned to court records. In states where Schwartz owned nursing homes, I discovered harrowing accounts of patients suffering and insiders desperately trying to protect them as problems piled up.
The damage also affected workers: As facilities collapsed, some employees said they bought food for residents out of their own pockets. Others were left with medical bills after insurance premiums were taken from their paychecks, but coverage was never funded.
And yet, Schwartz still seems to have money, maybe even large amounts of it. Lobbying disclosure forms showed he paid more than $1 million to lobbyists to help him secure his pardon. And even after his business collapsed, prosecutors said he still had $58 million in assets, although none was in his own name.
The White House said the president was not granting clemency at the request of lobbyists.
After the pardon, Schwartz had to return to Arkansas in late December to serve nine months in prison for defrauding the state’s Medicaid program.
I saw his return as an opportunity to talk to him. The prison system said I could only reach him by mail. During the first week of January, I sent a letter requesting an interview by phone, email, or in person, emphasizing that I could easily drive from my home in Missouri to meet with him.
A Coulson family lawyer saw in that same narrow window a chance to do something more consequential: serve Schwartz with a subpoena for a deposition and records that could help him locate his assets and force payment of judgments he had ignored.
The window for both of us closed almost immediately. One of Schwartz’s lobbyists had also been hired to seek relief for him in Arkansas. Within three weeks, the parole board released him.
My letter came back as undeliverable. The lawyer had no luck finding him.
This episode helped me understand the story more clearly. At first it seemed like a failure of reporting. The more I looked at it, the more I realized that the missed window was actually a mirror to a larger story. Even after criminal convictions, civil judgments and years of litigation, Schwartz remained elusive to those seeking answers or accountability.
There was a mechanism working to shorten his sentence. But nothing to help the victims.
