Tarnished Rings: The International Olympic Committee and the Salt Lake City Bid Scandal

7. Judgment Day(s)

125 7 Judgment Day(s) Closing the Book on the Salt Lake City Scandal The sensational and scandalous revelations surrounding Salt Lake City’s bid for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games resulted in wide public disbelief and embarrassed Olympic officials worldwide. When frantic finger-pointing subsided and investigations by several commissions and organizations were completed , the end results were a changing of the guard to lead SLOC, dishonored and discharged IOC members, federally indicted Salt Lake City Olympic bid leaders, and hesitant international corporate sponsors. In the end, however, two indelible exclamation points punctuated the Salt Lake City Olympic Winter Games record. First, the grandeur and quality of the Salt Lake City Olympic endeavor ranked it arguably as the best ever celebrated in the history of Olympic Winter Games. Second, what came to be called the “Great Olympic Bribery Trial,” brought to an end almost a year after the celebration of the Games, closed the book on the Salt Lake Olympic experience. The Aborted First Trial The judicial arm of the US government remained mute on the subject of the great Olympic scandal amid all the commotion.1 In time, after the hullabaloo ceased over the scandal, in part as a result of the IOC’s efforts to confront the issue and effect needed reform measures, but also owing to the world media’s fatigue in regard to the matter, the US Department of Justice lodged legal proceedings against Tom Welch and David Johnson, the tandem responsible for heading Salt Lake City’s bid. 126 | Tarnished Rings By the spring of 2000, almost on the eve of the opening of the Sydney Summer Olympic Games, the Department of Justice filed a fifteen-count felony indictment against Welch and Johnson, charging them with conspiring to bribe IOC members into awarding the 2002 Winter Games to Salt Lake City with approximately one million dollars in improper gifts, scholarships , health care benefits, and cash payments. Federal authorities charged Welch and Johnson with conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, and travel across state lines in aid of racketeering, under the felony provisions of the Travel Act. The bulk of the case, ten of the fifteen counts, accused Welch and Johnson of concealing the alleged bribes and defrauding bid and organizing committee trustees of the “right to control” bid expenses and the “right to honest services.”2 Suddenly, the words Olympic and scandal were once again linked in daily news reports. Defendants Welch and Johnson engaged legal counsel to answer the charges—in the case of Welch, the prestigious law firm Zuckerman Spaeder in Washington, DC, and for Johnson, the respected Salt Lake City law firm Snow, Christensen, and Martineau. Lead counsel for Zuckerman Spaeder was William Taylor; for Snow, Christensen, and Martineau, Max Wheeler. In June 2001, some seven months prior to the opening of the Salt Lake Winter Olympics, defense counsel asked for a dismissal of the racketeering charges, arguing that the federal Travel Act, which was cited in alleging the defendants engaged in interstate transportation in aid of racketeering, was defective and insufficient and consequently weakened the conspiracy charge. Defense counsel also maintained that the state’s commercial bribery law was improper and defective. Studying the appeal for dismissal in the spring of 2001, federal magistrate judge Ronald N. Boyce determined that federal prosecutors “provided sufficient information in the indictment to justify the charges under the Travel Act.” Punctuating his decision to proceed with court action, Boyce stated that the allegations “would be corrupting the site selection process and [were] contrary to the IOC’s integrity interests.” They also rested “directly within the terms of [commercial bribery] statutes.” As an exclamation point in his decision, Boyce proclaimed, “The Government will have to meet the requisite standard of proof and whether it can do so must await the evidence.”3 Judge Boyce’s final statement, as it turned out, had prophetic consequences for all involved. Judgment Day(s) | 127 The trial of Welch-Johnson v. the United States Government was scheduled to begin in Salt Lake City on July 16, 2001, some seven months prior to the opening of the Salt Lake City Olympic Winter Games. Not since the Addam Swapp–Vickie Singer trial in 1988 had there been such a high-profile federal case tried in Utah.4 Judge David Sam, a seventy-year-old veteran of the courts and a longtime resident of Salt Lake City, drew the assignment of...