Former Jacksonville teachers union leaders sentenced to prison for $2.6M fraud

Terrie Brady and Ruby George were sentenced today after fleecing the Duval Teachers United organization of about $1.3 million each.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The women who ran Jacksonville’s teachers union for nearly a quarter-century are both headed to prison for cheating the union out of $2.6 million, a federal judge ruled Feb. 9.

Terrie Brady and Ruby George pleaded guilty in 2025 to “selling back” to Duval Teachers United thousands of days more vacation time than they possessed from respective careers as president and executive vice president of a union with more than 5,000 members.

After an extended hearing where supporters recounted both women’s histories of good works, Chief U.S. District Judge Marcia Morales Howard sentenced 70-year-old Brady to 27 months of incarceration and George, who is 82 and was in a wheelchair, to a year and a day in prison followed by six months of home confinement.

Howard said she was “firmly convinced” that nothing more lenient for either woman would serve justice and meet the standards spelled out in federal law.

“It does not erase all the other good things that Ms. Brady and Ms. George did,” the judge said. “But there does have to be accountability for a decade of stealing.”

Attorneys for both women asked for compassion, with Brady’s counsel, Hank Coxe, seeking 31 months of probation with 18 months of home detention for his client. Brady has already paid back $1,328,695 she received for non-existent vacation time. But she and George are both held responsible for repaying the full $2.6 million the union lost, so Coxe suggested Brady could pay $1,000 a month to chip away at the balance.

“It is not an overstatement to say that Terrie Brady devoted her life to the welfare of Duval County Public School (DCPS) teachers and employees,” Coxe wrote in a sentencing memo that called her sentencing for cheating DTU “tragically sad and ironic.”

The man who prosecuted Brady and George described no tragedy, just wrongdoing in his narrative of the crime, arguing the women “stole at will ― treating DTU’s treasury like their own piggy bank.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Coolican quoted a Latin adage about corruption of the best being worst to argue that Brady needed to be put behind bars.

“While holding positions of great influence and trust, despite having loving friends and families, and despite wanting for nothing, Teresa Brady and Ruby George stole,” Coolican told Howard in his own sentencing memo. “They stole for years. They stole millions. They covered it up and would not have stopped if they had not been caught. They need to be punished.”

Charges against the pair were filed more than a year after a 2023 raid of DTU’s San Marco offices by federal agents who carried off boxes of records and computers.

In his memo, Coolican referred to Brady as a “corrupt union boss” and George as her “chief lieutenant.” Brady pleaded guilty in October 2025 to single counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, mail fraud and money laundering, the four charges detailed in a 14-count indictment from December 2024.

George pleaded guilty in August 2025 to conspiring to commit wire and mail fraud and single counts on aiding and abetting wire fraud and aiding and abetting mail fraud.

Those crimes carried potential sentences of up to 70 years behind bars for Brady and up to 60 years for George.

A summary from an interview prosecutors and FBI agents had with George in June 2025 said George claimed “it was an open joke in the [DTU] office that Brady did not really have any leave days to sell.”

Because George’s job included keeping track of union employees’ (not members’) leave balances, “when Brady needed money she would say something along the lines of I need to sell some days,” said the summary, which Coolican attached to his sentencing memo. “Brady would tell George how much money she needed after taxes and then George would initiate a payment for the equivalent value of leave days. Brady directed George to do the same for herself.”

For example, the summary said that Brady sold $20,000 worth of leave time when she needed roof repairs, and George assumed the two facts were connected.

“George said it was easier to go along with Brady,” the summary said.

This article was originally published by the Florida Times-Union.