The Housing Authority Fraud

2015–2026

The largest public-corruption case in the city's modern record was not made in City Hall but in the Housing Authority of South Bend, the federally funded agency that owns and runs more than 800 public housing homes. Its executive director, Tonya Robinson — first interim, then director, from about 2014 to 2019 — and its asset manager director, Albert Smith, who reported to her, were convicted of running a kickback scheme through the authority's own contracting: work was steered outside the bidding process, the authority issued payment checks for contracting work that had never been performed, the outside contractors cashed the checks and hand-delivered cash back to co-conspirators at the authority's main office, and Smith created hundreds of fraudulent documents to conceal it. That is the scheme as the jury found it and as the court of appeals later summarized it; it ran from about 2015 to 2019.

The investigation surfaced slowly. By the Seventh Circuit's account, information from a Four Winds Casino employee in 2016 set a quiet federal inquiry in motion. In July 2019 the FBI executed search warrants at the authority's offices and at a home the agency owned. That September the authority's board briefly suspended Robinson and then let her contract lapse. In July 2021 a federal grand jury returned an eleven-count indictment — conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, six counts of bank fraud, two counts of wire fraud, and, for Robinson, Smith, and Robinson's daughter Tyreisha Robinson, an authority employee, federal program theft (United States v. Robinson, No. 3:21-cr-64, N.D. Ind.). Six defendants stood in the case in all: the three authority employees and three outside contractors, Douglas Donley, Archie Robinson III, and Ronald Taylor Jr.

The dispositions are complete at the trial level and specific. Tyreisha Robinson, Archie Robinson III, and Ronald Taylor Jr. pleaded guilty. Tonya Robinson, Smith, and Donley contested the charges and were convicted by a jury on November 1, 2023, after an eight-day trial before Senior Judge Jon E. DeGuilio. The sentences, all with two years of supervised release to follow: Smith, 135 months in prison and $3,030,940 in restitution — the last defendant sentenced, on July 25, 2024; Tonya Robinson, 108 months and $3,236,949.97; Taylor, 44 months and $1,714,956.87; Donley, 27 months and $303,920 — the jury had before it evidence that 29 fraudulent checks were issued to him between October 2017 and March 2019; Archie Robinson III, six months and $1,152,636; Tyreisha Robinson, time served and $363,122.

The appellate chapter is still open. Robinson and Smith appealed, and on December 15, 2025 — in an opinion as amended on rehearing on January 28, 2026 — the Seventh Circuit affirmed their wire-fraud convictions but reversed the bank-fraud convictions, holding that the government had failed to identify a false statement that went to a bank, as the bank-fraud statute requires, and returned the case to the district court. The civic aftermath is also in the record: HUD had designated the authority a "troubled" agency; an analysis prepared for the Tribune found that every one of South Bend's public housing properties failed its HUD inspection in March 2020, the highest failure rate in Indiana, after three-quarters of the properties had failed in 2017 and 2018. The board hired a new executive director, Catherine Lamberg, in December 2020. Mayor James Mueller agreed in public that management failures, and not only inadequate federal funding, accounted for the condition of the properties, and the authority set about rebuilding its controls and its stock under federal supervision.

Sources:

1. U.S. Attorney's Office, Northern District of Indiana, releases: indictment (July 2021) and the sentencing releases for Tonya Robinson, Douglas Donley, and Albert Smith (2024), listing every defendant's sentence and restitution
2. IRS Criminal Investigation, release of July 25, 2024 (Smith sentencing; co-defendant sentences)
3. United States v. Robinson and Smith, Nos. 24-1910 & 24-2310 (7th Cir., decided December 15, 2025, as amended January 28, 2026) — scheme narrative, casino-employee tip, affirmance in part and reversal in part
4. South Bend Tribune, "South Bend Housing Authority fails HUD inspections; most in Indiana," July 12, 2021 (analysis by Notre Dame's Gallivan Program)