Eric C. Conn is a flamboyant figure out of a crime movie, and that’s exactly how he wanted to be seen, imagining himself as Eastern Kentucky’s very own version of James Bond. Even his name seems almost too good to be true, given that Conn eventually earned himself national notoriety for perpetrating the largest fraud in the history of the Social Security administration, to the tune of over $550 million. A man who stole a fortune of taxpayer funds for himself and his clients, harassed federal witnesses and destroyed evidence, got married 16 (or was it 17?) times to a variety of international women, owned a Halloween-themed Thailand brothel, and finally went on the lam from the law, Conn feels like a cartoonishly brash and greedy fictional creation, and his exploits proved to be a textbook example of how corruption destroys everyone involved.

Apple TV+’s The Big Conn (May 5) revisits Conn’s wild ride, although as with so many modern docuseries, it does so with a thoroughness that sometimes turns to bloat. Directors James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte’s four-part investigation leaves no stone unturned—and just about no principal figure ignored—in looking into Conn’s scheme, and the way in which it wreaked unexpected havoc for those intended to benefit from it. Yet for a tale that has as many wacko elements as this one, it often gets bogged down in mundane minutia rather than focusing on the outrageousness that made Conn so fascinating. Furthermore, it waits until its final installment to try to comprehend why its subject did what he did, only to come up with the usual mix of domineering parents and bald-faced avarice. Whereas it could have used the delirious verve of Billy Corben’s Cocaine Cowboys, it instead plays things a bit too straight.

Nonetheless, there’s still considerable craziness to be found in The Big Conn, if only because the particulars of its story are so absurd. At the height of his success, Conn was arguably the biggest name in Appalachia, courtesy of innumerable billboards and memorable TV commercials in which he danced with the Obama Girl (aka Amber Lee Ettinger), depicted physicians and Social Security Administration (SSA) officials as “monkeys” and—in his trademark move—threw his coat over his shoulder with the flair of a hillbilly 007. He wore a suit and had a law degree, but he was a byproduct of this backwoods coal-country region, and people eagerly took to his outsized personality and style. Also helping his popularity? He promised that he’d get clients decisions on their disability applications in thirty days— a blistering turnaround (the average time, nationwide, was 18 months) that almost always ended with a positive outcome.

Conn was your guy if you wanted disability checks. The problem, he found, was that he was too good at netting people what they sought, and things got messy for him when The Wall Street Journal reporter Damian Paletta began combing through SSA records and discovered a strange discrepancy: while most judges approve 50-60% of the disability-benefit claims that cross their desks, West Virginia judge David B. Daugherty signed off on 99.71% of his cases. There was obviously something up with Daugherty, who denied that he was doing anything wrong. After some more sleuthing, the answer became abundantly clear: along with crooked Dr. Alfred Bradley Adkins, who rubber-stamped the bogus medical documents, Daugherty and Conn were partnering on a plan to get as many disability clients as possible approved, because each one netted Conn a $6,000 kickback that they could all then divide accordingly.

It was a simple conspiracy that made Conn a mint, and he used it to live an insane lifestyle of monthly jet-setting travel, which facilitated his womanizing ways (hence all the quickie marriages) and led to the purchase of his prostitution-providing Thailand nightclub “Vampire Go-Go.” Once The Wall Street Journal went to print, it also made him the target of the SSA’s Office of the Inspector General and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, who with the help of whistleblowers Sarah Carver and Jennifer Griffith—both of whom worked in the Huntington Social Security office—mounted intertwined cases against Conn and Daugherty. Getting enough verifiable evidence to put the fraudsters away, however, was an arduous task, as The Big Conn exhaustively details, tracing every step of these outfits’ efforts to bring the duo to justice.

There’s a lot packed into Hernandez and Lazarte’s series, including Conn’s relationship to his domineering mother Pat, his efforts (along with Daugherty and that judge’s boss, Judge Charles Andrus) to have Carver followed in an attempt to get her fired, a suicide attempt on the part of one of the accused, and a flight from justice. There’s also condemnation levelled at the SSA itself, which failed to pick up on Conn’s ruse and then—once it was revealed—responded by cutting off all of his clients’ disability payments, even if they were legitimate (as many testify they were, in extended on-camera interviews). The Big Conn bites off plenty, and occasionally more than it should chew, distending its scope to the point that it loses sight of Conn, whose over-the-top brazenness is the most interesting aspect of this saga.

Formally speaking, The Big Conn benefits from new audio interviews with Conn (from his current behind-bars residence) and passages from his unpublished manuscript (read by Boyd Holbrook) that underscore his self-serving narcissism. On the negative side, though, its pop culture references are flat, and its dramatic recreations of Conn’s misadventures provide neither much insight nor a requisite jolt that might prevent momentum from flagging. In the end, Conn was a cocky crook who relished gaming the system, and his wrongdoing was important because it revealed deep flaws in the construction and administration of Social Security. Hernandez and Lazarte’s docuseries understands that, and yet never finds a way to grippingly balance its twin aims of reveling in Conn’s conduct, and damning the larger status quo for its shortcomings. As with so many likeminded efforts, one suspects that, episode count-wise, less might have been more.