At the Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre in Fort Myers, owner Will Prather will always remember what they were showing in March 2020.
“It was 'Kinky Boots.' Our biggest month of the year,” Prather said. “And two weeks into March, all of theatre shut down across the entire country.”
It was the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which gripped the country and left their stage dark for about six months.
“It was devastating. I pulled in my management team, and I honestly looked them all in the eye. I said, ‘I don't know what we're going to do,’” Prather said.
Eventually, he learned about the Paycheck Protection Program, which offers federal, often forgivable, loans to small businesses.
He was able to get a little more than a million dollars for the Broadway Palm. If not for it, he’s not sure what might have happened.
“I don't know if you and I would be sitting here today, to be honest,” Prather told NBC2. “It really became the lifeblood that kept my theater and kept my core staff and paying my rent.”
However, not everyone who got the loans used them for the right reasons.
In the past few years, NBC2 has reported on several cases of COVID-19 relief fraud.
That includes the case of Fort Myers businessman Casey Crowther , who was found guilty and sentenced to time in federal prison.
While it’s been several years since the pandemic, the work to uncover relief fraud is still ongoing.
“If I were to analogize it to a baseball game, I would say we're probably still in the middle innings of our COVID fraud prosecutions,” Roger Handberg, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Florida, told NBC2.
The district he oversees stretches from Jacksonville through Orlando to Tampa and Fort Myers.
Across the district, his team has prosecuted more than 100 cases totaling nearly $100 million.
In the Fort Myers division alone, 14 people have been charged, totaling more than $20 million in fraud.
“We're looking into brand new cases, and we're opening them all the time,” Handberg said. “The amount of fraud that's been committed in these cases is staggering.”
In the United States as a whole, tens of billions of dollars are estimated to have been obtained fraudulently through the COVID-19 relief program.
Handberg expects several more years of prosecutions. That means more time to get taxpayer money back.
“This is our money that is at the heart of these programs,” he said. “And it is our money that was stolen.”
The Broadway Palm is now back to how things were before and is getting ready for a busy holiday season.
But Prather won’t soon forget the help they got when they needed it most.
“I'm kind of a perfect example of, follow the rules, take care of the people that you need to take care of, pay your rent. And good things will happen," Prather said.