Three former Flying J officials want a change of venue in their pending retrial on federal charges of cheating truckers out of diesel fuel rebates.
This, according to an article that the website Transport Topics published late last week. The website reported that “the high-decibel press coverage from the east Tennessee media has poisoned the jury pool to the point that a fair trial in east Tennessee is impossible.”
The truck stop giant is a family business connected to former Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam.
The article specifically cited former Pilot Flying J President Mark Hazelwood, former Pilot Vice President Scott Wombold, and former Pilot account representative Heather Jones. They asked Senior U.S. District Court Judge Curtis Collier to move their new trial out of Tennessee to federal courts in nearby states such as Arkansas, Missouri or North Carolina, Transport Topics reported.
“From 2013 to present, 2,663 media stories were published in Tennessee regarding the case, the motion said. They were convicted by a Chattanooga jury Feb. 15, 2018, in connection with a multimillion-dollar fraud scheme to siphon fuel rebates from thousands of truckers. However, they are scheduled to be retried Feb. 1, 2022, after an appeals court in October reversed their convictions due to Collier, of Chattanooga, allowing inappropriate secret tape-recorded conversations among the executives to be heard by the jury,’” the website noted.
“In its Oct. 14 decision, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the federal district court wrongly admitted recordings of Hazelwood using ‘deeply offensive racist and misogynistic language’ on the theory that if Hazelwood was reckless enough to use language that could risk public outrage against the company, he was a ‘bad businessman,’ and as a bad businessman, he was also reckless enough to commit fraud.”
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Oh boy, paying off a whole new bunch of people is gonna cost the Haslams a few bucks! How much do you wanna bet that after next year, 2022, and the Governor’s race, we citizens get to pitch in and help the Haslams out with another gas tax hike? Then Governor Haslam never has answered the question, how does millions of dollars of tax money flowing through a business benefit that business?
What could you do if you had 40 million (tax) dollars each and every month deposited in your checking account for 60 to 90 days? Something tells me that a good accountant could turn that into a sizeable revenue stream!