What did Bryant and his cohorts do? They "devised a scheme to deceive state regulators" in order to disguise "the true and complete reinsurance arragements" involving three companies--one of which was Alabama Re. What was the purpose of this arrangement? To make the companies look stronger than they really were--in other words, to "inflate their financial statements."
Executives from HealthSouth, Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and other rogue companies have gone to federal prison for their roles in such schemes. So how did Paul Bryant Jr. manage to escape scrutiny? We have addressed that question in a previous post:
Public documents show that Alabama Reassurance was implicated in a $15-million scheme that netted a 15-year prison sentence for a Pennsylvania man named Allen W. Stewart in the late 1990s. An investigation of Alabama Re was called off, apparently because Bryant had friends in the U.S. attorney's office for the Northern District of Alabama.
G. Douglas Jones, now a lawyer at the Birmingham firm of Haskell Slaughter, had just become U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama when the Alabama Re investigation was called off. Multiple sources tell Legal Schnauzer that Jones has ties to Bryant and has done legal work for him. I twice have asked Jones if he called off the Alabama Re investigation, and he has refused to answer the question. In fact, Jones has refused to answer any questions from me--including questions about his work with Rob Riley, son of former Governor Bob Riley, on a federal HealthSouth lawsuit that netted millions of dollars for plaintiffs' lawyers. Jones' refusal to answer questions from me is odd, given that he regularly is quoted in various media outlets. He becomes mute when the subjects of Paul Bryant Jr. and Rob Riley are raised.
How ugly could all of this get? If Doug Jones or someone else in the DOJ deliberately took steps to protect Paul Bryant and his company, they might have committed a crime under 18 U.S.C. 4 ("Misprision of Felony"). A companion statute can be found at 28 U.S.C. 1361 ("Action to Compel an Officer of the United States to Perform his Duty").
The Alabama scandal does not involve horrifying accounts of child rape. But it does involve an apparently systematic effort to cover up one man's ties to financial crimes--and then place that man in a preeminent position within the university power structure. If the cover-up involved deliberate acts of U.S. Justice Department officials . . . well, we are talking about crimes that go to the very heart of our legal system.
Outrage over the Penn State case certainly is understandable. Meanwhile, closer to home, a man with documented ties to massive insurance fraud is making decisions about millions of taxpayer dollars. Why is outrage missing in the story of Paul Bryant Jr. and the Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama?
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