Richard Scrushy
Richard Marin Scrushy (born August 1952) is an American businessman who founded HealthSouth, a large health care company based in Birmingham, Alabama. He built the company from a small start in the 1980s into a national network of outpatient surgery, rehabilitation, and diagnostic centers.
HealthSouth grew quickly and Scrushy became one of the nation’s highest-paid CEOs. But the company’s finances came under heavy scrutiny in the early 2000s. In 2003–2004, the FBI and the SEC investigated HealthSouth for accounting problems. In 2005 a Birmingham jury acquitted Scrushy on 36 charges.
Four months later, Scrushy and former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman were indicted in Montgomery on new charges including money laundering, extortion, obstruction of justice, racketeering, and bribery. Scrushy was convicted in 2006 on bribery, conspiracy, and mail fraud charges. He was sentenced in 2007 to about six years and ten months in federal prison, plus restitution, a fine, and probation.
In 2009 a separate civil case brought by HealthSouth investors ordered Scrushy to pay about $2.87 billion for damages related to the fraud. He appealed, but the convictions stood.
Scrushy was released from federal custody in July 2012 after moving to home confinement. His early life included dropping out of high school, earning a GED, studying respiratory therapy, and building HealthSouth with partners and investors. He has been married three times and has several children.
Today, Scrushy is known for both building a major health care company and for the major criminal and civil cases that followed the accounting scandal.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 00:15 (CET).