Greg McAtee first joined the Knights of Columbus 16 years ago, when he was 55.

He was joining a formidable club, the largest Catholic fraternal organization in the world with alumni like Babe Ruth and John F. Kennedy, and it continues to have powerful political allies in 2019. He was also, though he didn't realize it at the time, becoming a pawn in an alleged scheme to inflate membership numbers for a multibillion-dollar life insurance company.

But to him, the Knights were mostly just a group of nice men from his parish in Mobile, Alabama, who wore matching shirts with shield insignias. They raised money for charity, had Christmas parties for good causes, and fried fish for its friends and family in the local community center.

Today, however, McAtee is a witness for the plaintiffs in a massive lawsuit that could shake one of America’s most powerful socially conservative groups to its core. The case is accusing the Knights of Columbus of “fraud, deception, theft, and broken promises,” a 2017 complaint in the US District Court for Colorado reads. The court will begin hearing the case Monday.

According to multiple sources and the lawsuit, the alleged scheme went like this:

In order for life insurance companies to be appealing to prospective policy holders and get them to buy its plans, it's beneficial for them to have a top rating from an insurance rating company.



The key thing insurance rating companies are looking for is the ability to pay back the claims of policyholders. One of the main indicators of that is whether a company’s customer pool is growing, and whether young people who will pay their life insurance claims for a long time are buying policies.

Knights of Columbus currently has an A+ rating from AM Best.

The Knights of Columbus can only sell life insurance to its members (or someone who becomes a member within 90 days of applying for insurance) and its members can only be men who are “practical Catholics” (meaning they accept all the teachings of the Catholic Church) and live in the US, Puerto Rico, Guam, or Canada.

The lawsuit claims that the Knights’ membership is not in fact growing, but shrinking and getting older.

To hide this, the lawsuit claims, it has made it extremely difficult to remove members from its rosters, even if they haven’t paid dues in years. So, as some more members join, and none of the members who leave are recorded, it appears to insurance rating companies that its pool of potential customers is growing.

Unfortunately for the Knights on the ground in local chapters, who are largely uncompensated volunteers, this means they have to cover the cost of the nonexistent members they couldn’t take off the books, the lawsuit alleges. When they couldn’t get them removed, they ended up paying out of pocket, or sometimes dipping into the funds they had raised for charity, five of the men told BuzzFeed News.

The lawsuit was originally filed in 2017 by UKnight, a Colorado-based IT firm hired by the Knights of Columbus to update communication software for its more than 10,000 local US chapters, referred to as councils. In the lawsuit, UKnight alleges that the Knights’ senior leadership (namely senior executives Thomas Smith and Matthew St. John) were “engaged in an elaborate conspiracy to artificially inflate the Knights of Columbus’ insurable membership numbers and artificially improve” its ratings by insurance rating companies, thereby making people more likely to buy its life insurance. UKnight and one of its managers, Leonard Labriola, an individual plaintiff in the case, claim the Knights unlawfully terminated its contract after UKnight discovered the alleged conspiracy.



In court documents, the Knights dismissed the suit as “a disappointed prospective vendor that offered the [Knights] inferior and outdated website services that the [Knights] refused to endorse.”

In a comment sent to BuzzFeed News Friday, a spokesperson for the Knights of Columbus said the group, which she referred to as the Order, “believes strongly in the judicial process and looks forward to responding before a jury to the claims made by the plaintiff in this contract dispute.”

“The Knights of Columbus has a long-standing, thoughtful, and well-conceived membership retention process in place that reflects sound practices and the values of the Order,” the statement continued. “One of those values is to ensure that members of the Knights provide mutual aid and assistance to fellow members of our organization.”

After around two years of failed negotiations, Monday, Aug. 26, will be the first day the case will finally go to trial.

BuzzFeed News spoke to seven current and former Knights of Columbus, two of whom are involved in the case, and reviewed emails, court documents, and internal membership spreadsheets and contact lists. All of the men were in leadership positions in their local chapters that enabled them to have access to membership information. The men were from four different states and seven different towns, but their stories were nearly identical. All of them said that they noticed large numbers of inactive members on their local council’s rolls, that senior members of the Knights of Columbus ignored their questions about it, and that they had to use donations meant for charity or pay out of pocket to cover dues owed by what they began calling “phantom” members.

Each of the men said they joined the Knights of Columbus years ago because they wanted to do good work; the group was influential and respected in their local parishes. And the Knights did do good work, giving back to their parishes and creating a sense of community. It was worth the $30 to $100 annual membership fee. Once they entered leadership positions, however, they each noticed something odd — there were dozens of inactive members on each of their books who hadn’t paid their dues or participated in the Knights in years, sometimes over a decade.

The men tried to contact the members to see why they weren’t paying their dues, but many of them had moved away, changed parishes, left the Catholic Church, or, in some cases, were listed as over 100 years old and were almost certainly no longer alive. In one case, an internal membership spreadsheet provided to BuzzFeed News showed that of one council’s 399 members, 97 were inactive. After making several efforts to get in touch, the leaders of the council managed to track down most of them, but two were dead, about 40 said they planned to withdraw from the Knights, and they never managed to find another 30 of the members.

When they tried to alert the state and national council of Knights, known as “the Supreme Council,” about the issue, they were instructed to jump through nearly impossible hoops to get the inactive members off their rolls, they said. Several of the men pointed out that this goes against a section of the Knights of Columbus constitution that states that after three months of a member not paying his dues, he “ipso facto forfeit[s] his membership.” But this didn’t seem to matter to their higher-ups.

“And I just I found myself at work one day and I was like, 'You know what? There's got to be something going on with the Knights. This is too strange," Danny Gonzalez, 50, a librarian and former Knights trustee from El Paso, Texas, told BuzzFeed News. “So I started doing my research ... and asking questions.”

Five of the men told BuzzFeed News that when they started pointing out the issue and reporting it to their higher-ups, they were met with silence, discouragement, and warnings. (The Knights of Columbus declined to respond to the individual claims of the local leadership.)

“There was a threat when I and the financial secretary said, 'Listen, we're not gonna pay dues for these nonpaying people,'” McAtee told BuzzFeed News. “And they came back and said, under the Knights' constitution, if the council doesn't pay the dues, they have the right to suspend the council.”

A series of letters and emails between McAtee and Knights at the state and national level provided to BuzzFeed News support McAtee’s story. In the letters, membership records manager Kevin Brady tells McAtee that the Knights had changed its policy on quickly suspending nonpaying members out of consideration for people who couldn’t pay dues for temporary reasons like military deployment or illness. Brady said the Knights encouraged councils to contact every member before requesting their suspension.

An affidavit filed in the case by the Knights of Columbus used nearly identical language to that in the emails. The man giving the affidavit was Gary Nolan, the vice president of the Knights’ Fraternal Education, Training and Ceremonials. Nolan walks through the membership removal philosophy, saying that “three or four years ago” the Knights switched from an “Intent to Suspend” to an “Intent to Retain” philosophy with its members. This means they ask local councils to make every effort to contact the lapsed members and encourage them to reengage with the Knights before they file official paperwork, showing they have done this, for their removal. The only mention in the affidavit of not being able to contact the lapsed members at all — a common problem among all of the men who spoke to BuzzFeed News — is to blame the council for not keeping track of the members throughout all their years of membership.

“In many situations, the council had failed to reach out to the member for many years, a man who was supposed to be their Brother Knight! These situations were usually a lost cause,” the affidavit reads. “Sad cases occurred when a member did not attend a council meeting, and the council would forget about him, his family, his life circumstances.”

The affidavit says that if a member has lapsed on his dues for medical or financial reasons, they can apply for a waiver, or another Knight can “volunteer” to subsidize his dues. It does not mention what happens to the dues of someone they cannot contact but haven’t been able to remove from the rolls.

But when McAtee sent official forms to the state representatives requesting that they remove members his council had contacted who no longer wanted to be Knights, the requests were apparently rejected, according to an email from March reviewed by BuzzFeed News. In the same email, an Alabama state representative for the Knights warned McAtee’s council that if it didn’t cover the nonpaying member’s dues, its members would all lose their benefits and the council would be suspended.

Another former Knight in his seventies, who asked to remain anonymous because he was considering filing his own lawsuit, said that when he discovered some of the members on his list didn’t exist, he went to the Supreme Council, who responded with what he called “a threat with a smile.”

“It was very obvious to me, when you’re looking at a man face-to-face and you bring this up, and the conversation is ‘You don’t want to go there,’ and then just a glaring stare with no further response,” the man said. “I knew that if I opened my mouth, I wouldn’t be there anymore.”