By Jose Navarro, MBA | The Navarro Report | Miami Affairs
Miami — For ten years, Charmaine Gatlin ran the finances of Jackson Health Foundation with almost nobody looking over her shoulder. Then a new chief executive arrived in October 2024, and within weeks, Gatlin was suspended. Two months after that, she was fired. Six months after that, she was under federal indictment. The math alone tells you something was badly broken at the Foundation for a decade — and something changed the moment new leadership walked in the door.
A Decade of Almost No Oversight
Gatlin joined Jackson Health Foundation, the fundraising arm of Miami-Dade’s public hospital system, as chief operating officer in 2014, drawing a base salary that eventually reached $290,000. She had come from an executive post at 100 Black Men of America, the Atlanta-based civic organization — a connection that would later prove central to her scheme, since it’s where she first knew Yergan Jones, the vendor who became her chief accomplice.
The structural failure that let Gatlin operate for a decade was simple and specific: she had sole authority to approve invoices and expenses up to $100,000, with no second signature required. Mark LeClair, a Fairfield University professor who studies nonprofit fraud, called that threshold “way too high” for an organization the Foundation’s size — under 20 employees, a $4 million operating budget, roughly $12 million in annual donations. For comparison, he said, a nonprofit of that scale should cap a single executive’s unilateral approval authority closer to $5,000. Every dollar between $5,000 and $100,000 was, in effect, Gatlin’s to move without anyone checking her work. In 2021, a performance evaluation went so far as to call her “highly ethical.”
She used that authority methodically. Between 2019 and 2024, Gatlin approved roughly $7 million in Foundation payments against invoices from Jones’s Georgia-based company, American Sound Design, for “audiovisual event services” that were never actually provided — including billing for a holiday party and a back-to-school event where the services in question had already been donated to the Foundation for free. She personally coached Jones, by email, on how to falsify the paperwork. Of the $2.1 million Jones collected across 53 wire payments, he kicked roughly half — about $1.1 million — back to Gatlin, some of it disguised as “consulting” fees. She also approved $55,101 in restricted donor funds for what invoices described as “10,000 first aid kits” for “trauma burn giveaways”; the money actually went toward luxury goods. Separately, she directed a merchandise vendor to buy her Louis Vuitton and Gucci handbags and Apple products in exchange for keeping the Foundation’s business, and had a $15,000 rose gold golf cart delivered to her home in Weston on a falsified invoice. The kickback money also covered Caribbean and Disney World vacations, an upscale golf club membership, and her personal credit card bills.
None of it tripped an alarm for five straight years.
The New CEO, and the Lie That Unraveled Everything
What finally caught Gatlin wasn’t an audit of her biggest fraud — it was a small, almost incidental lie. Flavia Llizo was named the Foundation’s CEO in October 2024. Weeks into the job, Llizo grew suspicious of a claim Gatlin made about a $10,000 sponsorship of the Girl Scouts of Tropical Florida’s annual “Campfires to Cocktails” gala: Gatlin said she had personally covered the donation. She hadn’t. The Foundation had paid it, and Gatlin took credit for generosity that wasn’t hers. That single inconsistency prompted Llizo to start pulling records, and the deeper she looked, the more falsified invoices surfaced — eventually revealing the five-year pattern with Jones and the broader misuse of restricted funds.
“It was her betrayal of the authority and the permission that she was given,” Llizo later said of what made the scheme work. The honest answer to how Gatlin lasted a decade is that nobody with the authority to catch her had any real incentive or mechanism to look. Her predecessors and the Foundation’s board treated a “highly ethical” executive with a decade of tenure as someone who had earned the benefit of the doubt on a $100,000 signing authority that should never have existed at that size of organization. It took an outsider with no personal investment in Gatlin’s reputation, examining the books with fresh eyes in her first weeks on the job, to ask the one question a decade of insiders never had: does this add up?
The Accomplices
Gatlin did not do this alone, and the case has not stopped at her sentencing. Yergan Jones, the Georgia audiovisual executive who billed $2.1 million for phantom services and kicked back roughly half to Gatlin, pleaded guilty in August 2025 to conspiring with her and was sentenced separately in December. A third figure, Darryl Holsendolph, was named “Co-Conspirator 3” in Gatlin’s federal indictment — his company submitted roughly 180 invoices totaling nearly $4 million to the Foundation over the same period. Holsendolph has not been charged. That has not stopped the city of Miramar, just north of Miami, from doing business with him: in June 2026, six months after Gatlin’s sentencing made national headlines, Miramar’s city commission voted 4-1 to renew Holsendolph’s company, Holsen Inc., as the exclusive food-and-drink concessionaire at a city-owned amphitheater. A separate Pembroke Pines event-planning firm, Premier Choice Group, also received Foundation money tied to Gatlin’s dealings with 100 Black Men of America — a thread investigators were still pulling as of her sentencing.
Gatlin was sentenced in December 2025 to six years and eight months in federal prison and ordered to pay $6.9 million in restitution. Jackson Health CEO Carlos Migoya told the sentencing judge that Gatlin “took from real people with real needs” — donors’ money meant for burn victims, sick children, and the medically needy patients who depend on Miami-Dade’s only public hospital system. The Foundation has since restructured its approval authority, but the deeper lesson for Miami-Dade taxpayers and donors alike is that a single unchecked signature line, held by one trusted person for ten years, was all it took. It wasn’t sophistication that finally stopped her. It was a new set of eyes willing to ask an obvious question about a Girl Scouts gala ticket.
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