Former Fairmount Heights officer gets 5 years in federal prison for fraud scheme

A former Fairmount Heights police officer will spend 70 months in federal prison after a judge said Philip James Dupree used his law-enforcement status to help carry out a truck-burning insurance fraud and a later bank-fraud conspiracy. U.S. District Judge Lydia Griggsby also ordered Dupree, 42, to serve two years of supervised release and repay $65,049.14 to the affected insurance company and $3,521 to the affected credit union.

The sentence, imposed May 14, runs consecutively to an unrelated District of Columbia sentence, adding to the punishment for a case that prosecutors described as a direct assault on public trust. In Prince George’s County, where police legitimacy carries daily weight for residents, the case centered on two men who once wore badges, Dupree and Mark Ross Johnson Jr., a former Prince George’s County police officer.

Federal prosecutors said the insurance-fraud scheme began in November 2018 with Johnson’s Ford F-450 truck. The truck had been having mechanical and electrical problems, but investigators said Dupree and Johnson coordinated to burn it and then use the police paperwork to support an insurance claim. Dupree, while on duty, later “discovered” the burning vehicle and filed an impound report that Johnson used to seek a total-loss payout. The insurer ended up paying more than $68,000 to the lien holder.

The government said a fire investigator concluded the blaze was intentionally set and started in the passenger compartment. Prosecutors also said Johnson hid a 16-minute phone call with Dupree just before the truck was supposedly found, and that altered telephone records were used to support the false claim.

The case did not stop with the truck fire. Prosecutors said Dupree, Johnson and others conspired from May 2019 through June 2019 to withdraw money from their own accounts through ATMs and then falsely claim the cash had been stolen. That scheme expanded the fraud beyond insurance into banking and deepened the damage to institutions that rely on truthful reporting from the public.

Federal prosecutors said the broader case involved false police reports and falsified loss claims tied to one insurance company and three financial institutions. The announcement came alongside FBI Baltimore Field Office and Prince George’s County Police Department leadership, underscoring how seriously the government treated the misuse of law-enforcement credibility. In 2021, the Justice Department charged six Maryland law-enforcement officers in related fraud schemes, a sign that this was part of a wider corruption problem, not an isolated lapse.