“Defendant Strickland took part in a multi-year conspiracy to fix prices, rig bids, and distribute jobs for ready-mix concrete sales, the declaration said. He was president and owner of Evans Concrete. He had the final say in the company’s pricing decisions.”
Says prosecutors: “He aimed that authority at arranging jobs and pricing with competing companies.”, they charged.
Those actions were hardly “victimless,” the prosecutors note. The owner of a firm, for instance, who bought concrete from companies participating in the scheme testified at the trial of the Melton brothers that, “every increase of merely one dollar in the price ready-mix would affect his company.”
The prosecutors also argued that Strickland, as Evan Concrete owner and president, had “ultimate authority” in deciding its prices and employed this power to synchronize business and prices with competitors, holding ‘that is part of economic life.’ They said that in 2018, he also gave answers under oath to cover his tracks, lying to investigators and saying at the time that concrete pricing or particular jobs in Statesboro never entered his conversations with Greg Melton.
