The Harvest -Amy Hempel

The Harvest

Amy Hempel

The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.

The man was not hurt when the other car hit ours. The man I had known for one week held me in the street in a way that meant I couldn’t see my legs. I remember knowing that I shouldn’t look, and knowing that I would look if it wasn’t that I couldn’t.

My blood was on the front of this man’s clothes.

He said, “You’ll be okay, but this sweater is ruined.”

I screamed from the fear of pain. But I did not feel any pain. In the hospital, after injections, I knew there was pain in the room —“ I just didn’t know whose pain it was.

What happened to one of my legs required four hundred stitches, which, when I told it, became five hundred stitches, because nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.

The five days they didn’t know if they could save my leg or not I stretched to ten.

The lawyer was the one who used the word. But I won’t get around to that until a couple of paragraphs.

We were having the looks discussion —“ how important are they. Crucial is what I had said.

I think looks are crucial.

But this guy was a lawyer. He sat in an aqua vinyl chair drawn up to my bed. What he meant by looks was how much my loss of them was worth in a court of law.

I could tell that the lawyer liked to say court of law. He told me he had taken the bar three times before he had passed. He said that his friends had given him handsomely embossed business cards, but where these lovely cards were supposed to say Attorney-at-Law, his cards said Attorney-at-Last.

He had already covered loss of earnings, that I could not now become an airline stewardess. That I had never considered becoming one was immaterial, he said, legally.

“There’s another thing,” he said. “We have to talk here about marriageability.”

The tendency was to say marriage-a-what? although I knew what he meant the first time I heard it.

I was eighteen years old. I said, “First, don’t we talk about dateability?”

The man of a week was already gone, the accident driving him back to his wife.

“Do you think looks are important?” I asked the man before he left.

“Not at first,” he said.

In my neighborhood there is a fellow who was a chemistry teacher until an explosion took his face and left what was left behind. The rest of him is neatly dressed in dark suits and shined shoes. He carries a briefcase to the college campus. What a comfort —“ his family, people said —“ until his wife took the kids and moved out.

In the solarium, a woman showed me a snapshot. She said, “This is what my son used to look like.”

I spent my evenings in Dialysis. They didn’t mind when a lounger was free. They had wide-screen color TV, better than they had in Rehab. Wednesday nights we watched a show where women in expensive clothes appeared on lavish sets and promised to ruin one another.

On one side of me was a man who spoke only in phone numbers. You would ask them how he felt, he would say, “924-3130.” Or he would say, “757-1366.” We guessed what these numbers might be, but nobody spent the dime.

There was sometimes, on the other side of me, a twelve-year-old boy. His lashes were thick and dark from blood-pressure medication. He was next on the transplant list, as soon as —“ the word they used was harvest —“ as soon as a kidney was harvested.

The boy’s mother prayed for drunk drivers.

I prayed for men who were not discriminating.

Aren’t we all, I thought, somebody’s harvest?

The hour would end, and a floor nurse would wheel me back to my room. She would say, “Why watch that trash? Why not just ask me how my day went?”

I spent fifteen minutes before going to bed squeezing rubber grips. One of the medications was making my fingers stiffen. The doctor said he’d give it to me till I couldn’t button my blouse —“ a figure of speech to someone in a cotton gown.

The lawyer said, “Charitable works.”

He opened his shirt and showed me where an acupuncture person had dabbed at his chest with cola syrup, sunk four needles, and told him that the real cure was charitable works.

I said, “Cure for what?”

The lawyer said, “Immaterial.”

As soon as I knew that I would be all right, I was sure that I was dead and didn’t know it. I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence. I waited for the moment that would snap me out of my seeming life.

The accident happened at sunset, so that is when I felt this way the most. The man I had met the week before was driving me to dinner when it happened. The place was at the beach, a beach on a bay that you can look across and see the city lights, a place where you can see everything without having to listen to any of it.

A long time later I went to that beach myself. I drove the car. It was the first good beach day; I wore shorts.

At the edge of the sand I unwound the elastic bandage and waded into the surf. A boy in a wet suit looked at my leg. He asked me if a shark had done it; there were sightings of great whites along that part of the coast.

I said that, yes, a shark had done it.

“And you’re going back in?” the boy asked.

I said, “And I’m going back in.”

I leave a lot out when I tell the truth. The same when I write a story. I’m going to start now to tell you what I have left out of “The Harvest,” and maybe begin to wonder why I had to leave it out.

There was no other car. There was only the one car, the one that hit me when I was on the back of the man’s motorcycle. But think of the awkward syllables when you have to say motorcycle.

The driver of the car was a newspaper reporter. He worked for a local paper. He was young, a recent graduate, and he was on his way to a labor meeting to cover a threatened strike. When I say I was then a journalism student, it is something you might not have accepted in “The Harvest.”

In the years that followed, I watched for the reporter’s byline. He broke the People’s Temple story that resulted in Jim Jones’s flight to Guyana. Then he covered Jonestown. In the city room of the San Francisco Chronicle, as the death toll climbed to nine hundred, the numbers were posted like donations on pledge night. Somewhere in the hundreds, a sign was fixed to the wall that said JUAN CORONA, EAT YOUR HEART OUT.

In emergency room, what happened to one of my legs required not four hundred stitches but just over three hundred stitches. I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it’s true —“ nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.

My lawyer was no attorney-at-last. He was a partner in one of the city’s oldest law firms. He would never have opened his shirt to reveal the site of acupuncture, which is something that he never would have had.

“Marriageability” was the original title of ” The Harvest.”

The damage to my leg was considered cosmetic although I am still, 15 years later, unable to kneel. In an out-of-court settlement the night before the trial, I was awarded nearly $100,000. The reporter’s car insurance went up $12.43 per month.

It had been suggested that I rub my leg with ice, to bring up the scars, before I hiked my skirt three years later for the court. But there was no ice in the judge’s chambers, so I did not get a chance to pass or fail that moral test.

The man of a week, whose motorcycle it was, was not a married man. But when you thought he had a wife, wasn’t I liable to do anything? And didn’t I have it coming?

After the accident, the man got married. The girl he married was a fashion model. (“Do you think looks are important? I asked the man before he left. “Not at first,” he said.)

In addition to being a beauty, the girl was worth millions of dollars. Would you have accepted this in “The Harvest” —“ that the model was also an heiress?

It is true we were headed for dinner when it happened. But the place where you can see everything without having to listen to any of it was not a beach on a bay; it was the top of Mount Tamalpais. We had the dinner with us as we headed up the twisting mountain road. This is the version that has room for perfect irony, so you won’t mind when I say that for the next several months, from my hospital bed, I had a dead-on spectacular view of that very mountain.

I would have written this next part into the story if anybody would have believed it. But who would have? I was there and I didn’t believe it.

On the day of my third operation, there was an attempted breakout at the Maximum Security Adjustment Center, adjacent to Death Row, at San Quentin prison. “Soledad Brother” George Jackson, a twenty-nine-year-old black man, pulled out a smuggled-in .38-caliber pistol, yelled, “This is it!” and opened fire. Jackson was killed; so were three guards and two “tiertenders,” inmates who bring other prisoners their meals.

Three other guards were stabbed in the neck. The prison is a five-minute drive from Marin General, so that is where the injured guards were taken. The people who brought them were three kinds of police, including California Highway Patrol and Marin County sheriff’s deputies, heavily armed.

Police were stationed on the roof of the hospital with rifles; they were posted in the hallways, waving patients and visitors back into their rooms.

When I was wheeled out of Recovery later that day, bandaged waist to ankle, three officers and an armed sheriff frisked me.

On the news that night, there was footage of the riot. They showed my surgeon talking to reporters, indicating, with a finger to his throat, how he had saved one of the guards by sewing up a slice from ear to ear.

I watched this on television, and because it was my doctor, and because hospital patients are self-absorbed, and because I was drugged, I thought the surgeon was talking about me. I thought that he was saying, “Well, she’s dead. I’m announcing it to her in bed.”

The psychiatrist I saw at the surgeon’s referral said that the feeling was a common one. She said that victims of trauma who have not yet assimilated the trauma often believe they are dead and do not know it.

The great white sharks in the waters near my home attack one to seven people a year. Their primary victim is the abalone diver. With abalone stakes at thirty-five dollars a pound and going up, the Department of Fish and Game expects the shark attacks to show no slackening.

A story about how pickles demonstrate Wal-Mart's dominating business principals

The Wal-Mart You Don't Know
BY: CHARLES FISHMAN
December 1, 2003

A gallon-sized jar of whole pickles is something to behold. The jar is the size of a small aquarium. The fat green pickles, floating in swampy juice, look reptilian, their shapes exaggerated by the glass. It weighs 12 pounds, too big to carry with one hand. The gallon jar of pickles is a display of abundance and excess; it is entrancing, and also vaguely unsettling. This is the product that Wal-Mart fell in love with: Vlasic’s gallon jar of pickles.

Wal-Mart priced it at $2.97—a year’s supply of pickles for less than $3! “They were using it as a ‘statement’ item,” says Pat Hunn, who calls himself the “mad scientist” of Vlasic’s gallon jar. “Wal-Mart was putting it before consumers, saying, This represents what Wal-Mart’s about. You can buy a stinkin’ gallon of pickles for $2.97. And it’s the nation’s number-one brand.”

Therein lies the basic conundrum of doing business with the world’s largest retailer. By selling a gallon of kosher dills for less than most grocers sell a quart, Wal-Mart may have provided a ser-vice for its customers. But what did it do for Vlasic? The pickle maker had spent decades convincing customers that they should pay a premium for its brand. Now Wal-Mart was practically giving them away. And the fevered buying spree that resulted distorted every aspect of Vlasic’s operations, from farm field to factory to financial statement.

Indeed, as Vlasic discovered, the real story of Wal-Mart, the story that never gets told, is the story of the pressure the biggest retailer relentlessly applies to its suppliers in the name of bringing us “every day low prices.” It’s the story of what that pressure does to the companies Wal-Mart does business with, to U.S. manufacturing, and to the economy as a whole. That story can be found floating in a gallon jar of pickles at Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart is not just the world’s largest retailer. It’s the world’s largest company—bigger than ExxonMobil, General Motors, and General Electric. The scale can be hard to absorb. Wal-Mart sold $244.5 billion worth of goods last year. It sells in three months what

number-two retailer Home Depot sells in a year. And in its own category of general merchandise and groceries, Wal-Mart no longer has any real rivals. It does more business than Target, Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney, Safeway, and Kroger combined. “Clearly,” says Edward Fox, head of Southern Methodist University’s J.C. Penney Center for Retailing Excellence, “Wal-Mart is more powerful than any retailer has ever been.” It is, in fact, so big and so furtively powerful as to have become an entirely different order of corporate being.

Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible prices to its customers. At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don’t change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.

Of course, U.S. companies have been moving jobs offshore for decades, long before Wal-Mart was a retailing power. But there is no question that the chain is helping accelerate the loss of American jobs to low-wage countries such as China. Wal-Mart, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s trumpeted its claim to “Buy American,” has doubled its imports from China in the past five years alone, buying some $12 billion in merchandise in 2002. That’s nearly 10% of all Chinese exports to the United States.

One way to think of Wal-Mart is as a vast pipeline that gives non-U.S. companies direct access to the American market. “One of the things that limits or slows the growth of imports is the cost of establishing connections and networks,” says Paul Krugman, the Princeton University economist. “Wal-Mart is so big and so centralized that it can all at once hook Chinese and other suppliers into its digital system. So—wham!—you have a large switch to overseas sourcing in a period quicker than under the old rules of retailing.”

Steve Dobbins has been bearing the brunt of that switch. He’s president and CEO of Carolina Mills, a 75-year-old North Carolina company that supplies thread, yarn, and textile finishing to apparel makers—half of which supply Wal-Mart. Carolina Mills grew steadily until 2000. But in the past three years, as its customers have gone either overseas or out of business, it has shrunk from 17 factories to 7, and from 2,600 employees to 1,200. Dobbins’s customers have begun to face imported clothing sold so cheaply to Wal-Mart that they could not compete even if they paid their workers nothing.

“People ask, ‘How can it be bad for things to come into the U.S. cheaply? How can it be bad to have a bargain at Wal-Mart?’ Sure, it’s held inflation down, and it’s great to have bargains,” says Dobbins. “But you can’t buy anything if you’re not employed. We are shopping ourselves out of jobs.”

There is no question that Wal-Mart’s relentless drive to squeeze out costs has benefited consumers. The giant retailer is at least partly responsible for the low rate of U.S. inflation, and a McKinsey & Co. study concluded that about 12% of the economy’s productivity gains in the second half of the 1990s could be traced to Wal-Mart alone.

There is also no question that doing business with Wal-Mart can give a supplier a fast, heady jolt of sales and market share. But that fix can come with long-term consequences for the health of a brand and a business. Vlasic, for example, wasn’t looking to build its brand on a gallon of whole pickles. Pickle companies make money on “the cut,” slicing cucumbers into spears and hamburger chips. “Cucumbers in the jar, you don’t make a whole lot of money there,” says Steve Young, a former vice president of grocery marketing for pickles at Vlasic, who has since left the company.

At some point in the late 1990s, a Wal-Mart buyer saw Vlasic’s gallon jar and started talking to Pat Hunn about it. Hunn, who has also since left Vlasic, was then head of Vlasic’s Wal-Mart sales team, based in Dallas. The gallon intrigued the buyer. In sales tests, priced somewhere over $3, “the gallon sold like crazy,” says Hunn, “surprising us all.” The Wal-Mart buyer had a brainstorm: What would happen to the gallon if they offered it nationwide and got it below $3? Hunn was skeptical, but his job was to look for ways to sell pickles at Wal-Mart. Why not?

And so Vlasic’s gallon jar of pickles went into every Wal-Mart, some 3,000 stores, at $2.97, a price so low that Vlasic and Wal-Mart were making only a penny or two on a jar, if that. It was showcased on big pallets near the front of stores. It was an abundance of abundance. “It was selling 80 jars a week, on average, in every store,” says Young. Doesn’t sound like much, until you do the math: That’s 240,000 gallons of pickles, just in gallon jars, just at Wal-Mart, every week. Whole fields of cucumbers were heading out the door.

For Vlasic, the gallon jar of pickles became what might be called a devastating success. “Quickly, it started cannibalizing our non-Wal-Mart business,” says Young. “We saw consumers who used to buy the spears and the chips in supermarkets buying the Wal-Mart gallons. They’d eat a quarter of a jar and throw the thing away when they got moldy. A family can’t eat them fast enough.”

The gallon jar reshaped Vlasic’s pickle business: It chewed up the profit margin of the business with Wal-Mart, and of pickles generally. Procurement had to scramble to find enough pickles to fill the gallons, but the volume gave Vlasic strong sales numbers, strong growth numbers, and a powerful place in the world of pickles at Wal-Mart. Which accounted for 30% of Vlasic’s business. But the company’s profits from pickles had shriveled 25% or more, Young says—millions of dollars.

The gallon was hoisting Vlasic and hurting it at the same time.

Young remembers begging Wal-Mart for relief. “They said, ‘No way,’ ” says Young. “We said we’ll increase the price”—even $3.49 would have helped tremendously—“and they said, ‘If you do that, all the other products of yours we buy, we’ll stop buying.’ It was a clear threat.” Hunn recalls things a little differently, if just as ominously: “They said, ‘We want the $2.97 gallon of pickles. If you don’t do it, we’ll see if someone else might.’ I knew our competitors were saying to Wal-Mart, ‘We’ll do the $2.97 gallons if you give us your other business.’ ” Wal-Mart’s business was so indispensable to Vlasic, and the gallon so central to the Wal-Mart relationship, that decisions about the future of the gallon were made at the CEO level.

Finally, Wal-Mart let Vlasic up for air. “The Wal-Mart guy’s response was classic,” Young recalls. “He said, ‘Well, we’ve done to pickles what we did to orange juice. We’ve killed it. We can back off.’ ” Vlasic got to take it down to just over half a gallon of pickles, for $2.79. Not long after that, in January 2001, Vlasic filed for bankruptcy—although the gallon jar of pickles, everyone agrees, wasn’t a critical factor.

By now, it is accepted wisdom that Wal-Mart makes the companies it does business with more efficient and focused, leaner and faster. Wal-Mart itself is known for continuous improvement in its ability to handle, move, and track merchandise. It expects the same of its suppliers. But the ability to operate at peak efficiency only gets you in the door at Wal-Mart. Then the real demands start. The public image Wal-Mart projects may be as cheery as its yellow smiley-face mascot, but there is nothing genial about the process by which Wal-Mart gets its suppliers to provide tires and contact lenses, guns and underarm deodorant at every day low prices. Wal-Mart is legendary for forcing its suppliers to redesign everything from their packaging to their computer systems. It is also legendary for quite straightforwardly telling them what it will pay for their goods.

John Fitzgerald, a former vice president of Nabisco, remembers Wal-Mart’s reaction to his company’s plan to offer a 25-cent newspaper coupon for a large bag of Lifesavers in advance of Halloween. Wal-Mart told Nabisco to add up what it would spend on the promotion—for the newspaper ads, the coupons, and handling—and then just take that amount off the price instead. “That isn’t necessarily good for the manufacturer,” Fitzgerald says. “They need things that draw attention.”

It also is not unheard of for Wal-Mart to demand to examine the private financial records of a supplier, and to insist that its margins are too high and must be cut. And the smaller the supplier, one academic study shows, the greater the likelihood that it will be forced into damaging concessions. Melissa Berryhill, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, disagrees: “The fact is Wal-Mart, perhaps like no other retailer, seeks to establish collaborative and mutually beneficial relationships with our suppliers.”

For many suppliers, though, the only thing worse than doing business with Wal-Mart may be not doing business with Wal-Mart. Last year, 7.5 cents of every dollar spent in any store in the United States (other than auto-parts stores) went to the retailer. That means a contract with Wal-Mart can be critical even for the largest consumer-goods companies. Dial Corp., for example, does 28% of its business with Wal-Mart. If Dial lost that one account, it would have to double its sales to its next nine customers just to stay even. “Wal-Mart is the essential retailer, in a way no other retailer is,” says Gib Carey, a partner at Bain & Co., who is leading a yearlong study of how to do business with Wal-Mart. “Our clients cannot grow without finding a way to be successful with Wal-Mart.”

Many companies and their executives frankly admit that supplying Wal-Mart is like getting into the company version of basic training with an implacable Army drill sergeant. The process may be unpleasant. But there can be some positive results.

“Everyone from the forklift driver on up to me, the CEO, knew we had to deliver [to Wal-Mart] on time. Not 10 minutes late. And not 45 minutes early, either,” says Robin Prever, who was CEO of Saratoga Beverage Group from 1992 to 2000, and made private-label water sold at Wal-Mart. “The message came through clearly: You have this 30-second delivery window. Either you’re there, or you’re out. With a customer like that, it changes your organization. For the better. It wakes everybody up. And all our customers benefited. We changed our whole approach to doing business.”

But you won’t hear evenhanded stories like that from Wal-Mart, or from its current suppliers. Despite being a publicly traded company, Wal-Mart is intensely private. It declined to talk in detail about its relationships with its suppliers for this story. More strikingly, dozens of companies contacted declined to talk about even the basics of their business with Wal-Mart.

Here, for example, is an executive at Dial: “We are one of Wal-Mart’s biggest suppliers, and they are our biggest customer by far. We have a great relationship. That’s all I can say. Are we done now?” Goaded a bit, the executive responds with an almost hysterical edge: “Are you meshuga? Why in the world would we talk about Wal-Mart? Ask me about anything else, we’ll talk. But not Wal-Mart.”

No one wants to end up in what is known among Wal-Mart vendors as the “penalty box”—punished, or even excluded from the store shelves, for saying something that makes Wal-Mart unhappy. (The penalty box is normally reserved for vendors who don’t meet performance benchmarks, not for those who talk to the press.)

“You won’t hear anything negative from most people,” says Paul Kelly, founder of Silvermine Consulting Group, a company that helps businesses work more effectively with retailers. “It would be committing suicide. If Wal-Mart takes something the wrong way, it’s like Saddam Hussein. You just don’t want to piss them off.”

As a result, this story was reported in an unusual way: by speaking with dozens of people who have spent years selling to Wal-Mart, or consulting to companies that sell to Wal-Mart, but who no longer work for companies that do business with Wal-Mart. Unless otherwise noted, the companies involved in the events they described refused even to confirm or deny the basics of the events.

To a person, all those interviewed credit Wal-Mart with a fundamental integrity in its dealings that’s unusual in the world of consumer goods, retailing, and groceries. Wal-Mart does not cheat suppliers, it keeps its word, it pays its bills briskly. “They are tough people but very honest; they treat you honestly,” says Peter Campanella, who ran the business that sold Corning kitchenware products, both at Corning and then at World Kitchen. “It was a joke to do business with most of their competitors. A fiasco.”

But Wal-Mart also clearly does not hesitate to use its power, magnifying the Darwinian forces already at work in modern global capitalism.

What does the squeeze look like at Wal-Mart? It is usually thoroughly rational, sometimes devastatingly so.

John Mariotti is a veteran of the consumer-products world—he spent nine years as president of Huffy Bicycle Co., a division of Huffy Corp., and is now chairman of World Kitchen, the company that sells Oxo, Revere, Corning, and Ekco brand housewares.

He could not be clearer on his opinion about Wal-Mart: It’s a great company, and a great company to do business with. “Wal-Mart has done more good for America by several thousand orders of magnitude than they’ve done bad,” Mariotti says. “They have raised the bar, and raised the bar for everybody.”

Mariotti describes one episode from Huffy’s relationship with Wal-Mart. It’s a tale he tells to illustrate an admiring point he makes about the retailer. “They demand you do what you say you are going to do.” But it’s also a classic example of the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t Wal-Mart squeeze. When Mariotti was at Huffy throughout the 1980s, the company sold a range of bikes to Wal-Mart, 20 or so models, in a spread of prices and profitability. It was a leading manufacturer of bikes in the United States, in places like Ponca City, Oklahoma; Celina, Ohio; and Farmington, Missouri.

One year, Huffy had committed to supply Wal-Mart with an entry-level, thin-margin bike—as many as Wal-Mart needed. Sales of the low-end bike took off. “I woke up May 1”—the heart of the bike production cycle for the summer—“and I needed 900,000 bikes,” he says. “My factories could only run 450,000.” As it happened, that same year, Huffy’s fancier, more-profitable bikes were doing well, too, at Wal-Mart and other places. Huffy found itself in a bind.

With other retailers, perhaps, Mariotti might have sat down, renegotiated, tried to talk his way out of the corner. Not with Wal-Mart. “I made the deal up front with them,” he says. “I knew how high was up. I was duty-bound to supply my customer.” So he did something extraordinary. To free up production in order to make Wal-Mart’s cheap bikes, he gave the designs for four of his higher-end, higher-margin products to rival manufacturers. “I conceded business to my competitors, because I just ran out of capacity,” he says. Huffy didn’t just relinquish profits to keep Wal-Mart happy—it handed those profits to its competition. “Wal-Mart didn’t tell me what to do,” Mariotti says. “They didn’t have to.” The retailer, he adds, “is tough as nails. But they give you a chance to compete. If you can’t compete, that’s your problem.”

In the years since Mariotti left Huffy, the bike maker’s relationship with Wal-Mart has been vital (though Huffy Corp. has lost money in three out of the last five years). It is the number-three seller of bikes in the United States. And Wal-Mart is the number-one retailer of bikes. But here’s one last statistic about bicycles: Roughly 98% are now imported from places such as China, Mexico, and Taiwan. Huffy made its last bike in the United States in 1999.

As Mariotti says, Wal-Mart is tough as nails. But not every supplier agrees that the toughness is always accompanied by fairness. The Lovable Company was founded in 1926 by the grandfather of Frank Garson II, who was Lovable’s last president. It did business with Wal-Mart, Garson says, from the earliest days of founder Sam Walton’s first store in Bentonville, Arkansas. Lovable made bras and lingerie, supplying retailers that also included Sears and Victoria’s Secret. At one point, it was the sixth-largest maker of intimate apparel in the United States, with 700 employees in this country and another 2,000 at eight factories in Central America.

Eventually Wal-Mart became Lovable’s biggest customer. “Wal-Mart has a big pencil,” says Garson. “They have such awesome purchasing power that they write their own ticket. If they don’t like your prices, they’ll go vertical and do it themselves—or they’ll find someone that will meet their terms.”

In the summer of 1995, Garson asserts, Wal-Mart did just that. “They had awarded us a contract, and in their wisdom, they changed the terms so dramatically that they really reneged.” Garson, still worried about litigation, won’t provide details. “But when you lose a customer that size, they are irreplaceable.”

Lovable was already feeling intense cost pressure. Less than three years after Wal-Mart pulled its business, in its 72nd year, Lovable closed. “They leave a lot to be desired in the way they treat people,” says Garson. “Their actions to pulverize people are unnecessary. Wal-Mart chewed us up and spit us out.”

Believe it or not, American business has been through this before. The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., the grocery-store chain, stood astride the U.S. market in the 1920s and 1930s with a dominance that has likely never been duplicated. At its peak, A&P had five times the number of stores Wal-Mart has now (although much smaller ones), and at one point, it owned 80% of the supermarket business. Some of the antipredatory-pricing laws in use today were inspired by A&P’s attempts to muscle its suppliers.

There is very little academic and statistical study of Wal-Mart’s impact on the health of its suppliers and virtually nothing in the last decade, when Wal-Mart’s size has increased by a factor of five. This while the retail industry has become much more concentrated. In large part, that’s because it’s nearly impossible to get meaningful data that would allow researchers to track the influence of Wal-Mart’s business on companies over time. You’d need cooperation from the vendor companies or Wal-Mart or both—and neither Wal-Mart nor its suppliers are interested in sharing such intimate detail.

Bain & Co., the global management consulting firm, is in the midst of a project that asks, How does a company have a healthy relationship with Wal-Mart? How do you avoid being sucked into the vortex? How do you maintain some standing, some leverage of your own?

Bain’s first insights are obvious, if not easy. “Year after year,” Carey, a partner at Bain & Co., says, “for any product that is the same as what you sold them last year, Wal-Mart will say, ‘Here’s the price you gave me last year. Here’s what I can get a competitor’s product for. Here’s what I can get a private-label version for. I want to see a better value that I can bring to my shopper this year. Or else I’m going to use that shelf space differently.’ “

Carey has a friend in the umbrella business who learned that. One year, because of costs, he went to Wal-Mart and asked for a 5% price increase. “Wal-Mart said, ‘We were expecting a 5% decrease. We’re off by 10%. Go back and sharpen your pencil.’ ” The umbrella man scrimped and came back with a 2% increase. “They said, ‘We’ll go with a Chinese manufacturer’—and he was out entirely.”

The Wal-Mart squeeze means vendors have to be as relentless and as microscopic as Wal-Mart is at managing their own costs. They need, in fact, to turn themselves into shadow versions of Wal-Mart itself. “Wal-Mart won’t necessarily say you have to reconfigure your distribution system,” says Carey. “But companies recognize they are not going to maintain margins with growth in their Wal-Mart business without doing it.”

The way to avoid being trapped in a spiral of growing business and shrinking profits, says Carey, is to innovate. “You need to bring Wal-Mart new products—products consumers need. Because with those, Wal-Mart doesn’t have benchmarks to drive you down in price. They don’t have historical data, you don’t have competitors, they haven’t bid the products out to private-label makers. That’s how you can have higher prices and higher margins.”

Reasonable advice, but not universally useful. There has been an explosion of “innovation” in toothbrushes and toothpastes in the past five years, for instance; but a pickle is a pickle is a pickle.

Bain’s other critical discovery is that consumers are often more loyal to product companies than to Wal-Mart. With strongly branded items people develop a preference for—things like toothpaste or laundry detergent—Wal-Mart rarely forces shoppers to switch to a second choice. It would simply punish itself by seeing sales fall, and it won’t put up with that for long.

But as Wal-Mart has grown in market reach and clout, even manufacturers known for nurturing premium brands may find themselves overpowered. This July, in a mating that had the relieved air of lovers who had too long resisted embracing, Levi Strauss rolled blue jeans into every Wal-Mart doorway in the United States: 2,864 stores. Wal-Mart, seeking to expand its clothing business with more fashionable brands, promoted the clothes on its in-store TV network and with banners slipped over the security-tag detectors at exit doors.

Levi’s launch into Wal-Mart came the same summer the clothes maker celebrated its 150th birthday. For a century and a half, one of the most recognizable names in American commerce had survived without Wal-Mart. But in October 2002, when Levi Strauss and Wal-Mart announced their engagement, Levi was shrinking rapidly. The pressure on Levi goes back 25 years—well before Wal-Mart was an influence. Between 1981 and 1990, Levi closed 58 U.S. manufacturing plants, sending 25% of its sewing overseas.

Sales for Levi peaked in 1996 at $7.1 billion. By last year, they had spiraled down six years in a row, to $4.1 billion; through the first six months of 2003, sales dropped another 3%. This one account—selling jeans to Wal-Mart—could almost instantly revive Levi.

Last year, Wal-Mart sold more clothing than any other retailer in the country. It also sold more pairs of jeans than any other store. Wal-Mart’s own inexpensive house brand of jeans, Faded Glory, is estimated to do $3 billion in sales a year, a house brand nearly the size of Levi Strauss. Perhaps most revealing in terms of Levi’s strategic blunders: In 2002, half the jeans sold in the United States cost less than $20 a pair. That same year, Levi didn’t offer jeans for less than $30.

For much of the last decade, Levi couldn’t have qualified to sell to Wal-Mart. Its computer systems were antiquated, and it was notorious for delivering clothes late to retailers. Levi admitted its on-time delivery rate was 65%. When it announced the deal with Wal-Mart last year, one fashion-industry analyst bluntly predicted Levi would simply fail to deliver the jeans.

But Levi Strauss has taken to the Wal-Mart Way with the intensity of a near-death religious conversion—and Levi’s executives were happy to talk about their experience getting ready to sell at Wal-Mart. One hundred people at Levi’s headquarters are devoted to the new business; another 12 have set up in an office in Bentonville, near Wal-Mart’s headquarters, where the company has hired a respected veteran Wal-Mart sales account manager.

Getting ready for Wal-Mart has been like putting Levi on the Atkins diet. It has helped everything—customer focus, inventory management, speed to market. It has even helped other retailers that buy Levis, because Wal-Mart has forced the company to replenish stores within two days instead of Levi’s previous five-day cycle.

And so, Wal-Mart might rescue Levi Strauss. Except for one thing.

Levi didn’t actually have any clothes it could sell at Wal-Mart. Everything was too expensive. It had to develop a fresh line for mass retailers: the Levi Strauss Signature brand, featuring Levi Strauss’s name on the back of the jeans.

Two months after the launch, Levi basked in the honeymoon glow. Overall sales, after falling for the first six months of 2003, rose 6% in the third quarter; profits in the summer quarter nearly doubled. All, Levi’s CEO said, because of Signature.

But the low-end business isn’t a business Levi is known for, or one it had been particularly interested in. It’s also a business in which Levi will find itself competing with lean, experienced players such as VF and Faded Glory. Levi’s makeover might so improve its performance with its non-Wal-Mart suppliers that its established business will thrive, too. It is just as likely that any gains will be offset by the competitive pressures already dissolving Levi’s premium brands, and by the cannibalization of its own sales. “It’s hard to see how this relationship will boost Levi’s higher-end business,” says Paul Farris, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business Administration. “It’s easy to see how this will hurt the higher-end business.”

If Levi clothing is a runaway hit at Wal-Mart, that may indeed rescue Levi as a business. But what will have been rescued? The Signature line—it includes clothing for girls, boys, men, and women—is an odd departure for a company whose brand has long been an American icon. Some of the jeans have the look, the fingertip feel, of pricier Levis. But much of the clothing has the look and feel it must have, given its price (around $23 for adult pants): cheap. Cheap and disappointing to find labeled with Levi Strauss’s name. And just five days before the cheery profit news, Levi had another announcement: It is closing its last two U.S. factories, both in San Antonio, and laying off more than 2,500 workers, or 21% of its workforce. A company that 22 years ago had 60 clothing plants in the United States—and that was known as one of the most socially reponsible corporations on the planet—will, by 2004, not make any clothes at all. It will just import them.

In the end, of course, it is we as shoppers who have the power, and who have given that power to Wal-Mart. Part of Wal-Mart’s dominance, part of its insight, and part of its arrogance, is that it presumes to speak for American shoppers.

If Wal-Mart doesn’t like the pricing on something, says Andrew Whitman, who helped service Wal-Mart for years when he worked at General Foods and Kraft, they simply say, “At that price we no longer think it’s a good value to our shopper. Therefore, we don’t think we should carry it.”

Wal-Mart has also lulled shoppers into ignoring the difference between the price of something and the cost. Its unending focus on price underscores something that Americans are only starting to realize about globalization: Ever-cheaper prices have consequences. Says Steve Dobbins, president of thread maker Carolina Mills: “We want clean air, clear water, good living conditions, the best health care in the world—yet we aren’t willing to pay for anything manufactured under those restrictions.”

Randall Larrimore, a former CEO of MasterBrand Industries, the parent company of Master Lock, understands that contradiction too well. For years, he says, as manufacturing costs in the United States rose, Master Lock was able to pass them along. But at some point in the 1990s, Asian manufacturers started producing locks for much less. “When the difference is $1, retailers like Wal-Mart would prefer to have the brand-name padlock or faucet or hammer,” Larrimore says. “But as the spread becomes greater, when our padlock was $9, and the import was $6, then they can offer the consumer a real discount by carrying two lines. Ultimately, they may only carry one line.”

In January 1997, Master Lock announced that, after 75 years making locks in Milwaukee, it would begin importing more products from Asia. Not too long after, Master Lock opened a factory of its own in Nogales, Mexico. Today, it makes just 10% to 15% of its locks in Milwaukee—its 300 employees there mostly make parts that are sent to Nogales, where there are now 800 factory workers.

Larrimore did the first manufacturing layoffs at Master Lock. He negotiated with Master Lock’s unions himself. He went to Bentonville. “I loved dealing with Wal-Mart, with Home Depot,” he says. “They are all very rational people. There wasn’t a whole lot of room for negotiation. And they had a good point. Everyone was willing to pay more for a Master Lock. But how much more can they justify? If they can buy a lock that has arguably similar qual-ity, at a cheaper price, well, they can get their consumers a deal.”

It’s Wal-Mart in the role of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. And the Milwaukee employees of Master Lock who shopped at Wal-Mart to save money helped that hand shove their own jobs right to Nogales. Not consciously, not directly, but inevitably. “Do we as consumers appreciate what we’re doing?” Larrimore asks. “I don’t think so. But even if we do, I think we say, Here’s a Master Lock for $9, here’s another lock for $6—let the other guy pay $9.”

Originally published at: http://goo.gl/yKt3f

As The Plains Burn..

Attribution for the information contained herein can be found at the bottom of this post. I took someone else's information and condensed it into prose suitable for publishing.

AS THE PLAINS BURN...
New Meaning to the term “All In” at Auburn University
The athletic program at Auburn University has come under scrutiny for an alleged “Pay to Play” incident, but recent events involving the Federal Bureau of Investigation are beginning to shed light on an atmosphere of corruption that may have dismal consequences for the institution.
This is a brief compilation of Bobby Lowderʼs alleged involvement and manipulation of the Auburn University System as it relates to the Athletic Dept., the Board of trustees, and The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS).
DISCLAIMER:
I PREFACE ALL OF THIS BY SAYING THIS IS MERELY A COMPILATION OF THREADS AND DISCUSSIONS REGARDING CAM NEWTON, AUBURN UNIVERSITY’S ATHLETIC DIRECTOR, AND AU’S BOARD OF TRUSTEES. IT IS OFFERED AS SPECULATION, NOT PRESENTED AS FACT .
TERRY BOWDEN
Back in 1992-93, rumors and allegations surrounding AU's football program are swirling around Pat Dye, Asst. Coach Wayne Hall (the "Bookkeeper"), and Bobby Lowder claiming lump sum as well as monthly payments to highly touted recruits were being made by the Coaching Staff and BoT members. Supposedly, 50-60 boosters would each contribute $5,000 to facilitate the payments. Hall collected the money from the boosters, as well as making the payments to the players. Hall and Dye
also allegedly pay an Atlanta attorney $30,000 to forward to Gene Jelks to ensure his silence about “Pay for Play” (PFP) programs at The University of Alabama.
The same year, Eric Ramsey uses a concealed tape recorder and
documents booster "Corky" Frost's conversations with Dye and other
coaches describing AU's PFP program and how it worked.
!
PAGE 1
Before the firewind gets totally out of control with NCAA Investigations, Bobby Lowder “ram-rods" Terry Bowden into Dye's position as coach, with the understanding Bowden keeps Wayne Hall (Paymaster and Bookkeeper) on staff, against the wishes of assoc. AD Mike Lude, because Lude knew Hall was the money man.
On August 18, 1993, Auburn was hit with some of the most severe penalties in the history of the NCAA (at that time). These included a two-year bowl ban, a one-year television ban (for the 1993 season), and the loss of 13 scholarships spread out over a four-year period.
Dye was also banned from any appearance at an Auburn function until August 1995. The probation period, while enforced at the beginning of the 1993 season, did not actually start until the 1991 probations of the basketball and tennis teams ended. The probation therefore extended until Thanksgiving 1995.
Although Bowden admits to allowing Hall to honor payment agreements reached with existing players, Bowden begins the "termination" of the PFP program involving any new recruits, even though the sanctions were severely limiting the talent pool in the University’s football program. This greatly upsets Lowder, who, beginning to panic, has his daughter hired as Bowden's Admin. Asst. to keep tabs, and implements a "coup" of the Athletic Administration. He has Muse replace Lude with David Housel, someone to act more as a puppet controlled by Lowder. He
also orchestrates BoT Members Jimmy Rane, Paul Spina, and John C. McWhorter as the BoT Football Advisory Committee, which devises the end of Bowden.
According to Bowden, Danny Rane, a walk-on player, is secretly sending AU practice tapes to Miss. St. to further the failure of Bowden and Staff. Bill Oliver (Bowden's Def. Coord.) brings a concealed tape recorder to coaches meeting and prods Bowden into lying about supposed "votes of confidence" assured for Bowden and Staff by Lowder. Meanwhile, Tommy Tuberville is promised AU's head coaching job, while still in the middle of the season coaching at Ole Miss.
Bowden gets wind of all this, and resigns mid-season before the BoT and Lowder can orchestrate his formal termination. By doing so, Bowden secures a severance package of a ranch, a lump sum payment of cash, and deferred installment disbursements. A package that in all valued over $1.8Million. Also included in the package is a confidentiality agreement sealing ANY discussion of Lowder, the Board of Trustees, or the Athletic and Recruiting Dept.
TOMMY TUBERVILLE
From 1999 to 2003, Tommy Tuberville wins between 7-9 games per season, placing 1st in the SEC West twice. On more than one occasion, Bobby Lowder and Tuberville butt heads during this period, disenchanting Lowder.
Lowder, then President William Walker, Then AD Housel, and BoT members Franklin and McWhorter fly to Louisville to
meet Bobby Petrino about replacing Tuberville, starting the fiasco later known as JetGate.
Tuberville gets understandably upset, and threatens to go to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (which is in the midst of it's own review of BoT problems caused by Lowder), and causes the whole thing blows up in Lowder's face.
In an effort to appease Tuberville, his contract is renegotiated to include a disclosure provision that Tuberville is to be notified before any contact with a potential coach or search is made. Auburn’s football program goes 13-0, but is snubbed for the 2004 BSC game or title.
In 2007, The University of Alabama hires Nick Saban as its new Head Football Coach. Lowder and Co. are scared about Bama's hire and want Tuberville out,allegedly because Tubs won't "actively" participate in PFP schemes, which Lowder and Co. feel is necessary to compete with Bama's new hire. Also, the hire of Franklin as OC was a compete failure. Jimmy Rane (Still BoT Member) contacts Huston Nutt to gauge his possible interest were the position at Auburn availible. Nutt tells Sexton (his Agent), which in turn tells Tuberville who is also a Sexton Client.
!
PAGE 2
AS THE PLAINS BURN...
Tuberville threatens litigation for breach of the Search Notification clause of his renegotiated contract, ultimately resigning while The University and Boosters shell out millions of dollars as a settlement in agreement that Tuberville keep quiet. Auburn is now coachless.
THE SOUTHERN ASSOCIATION OF COLLEGES AND SCHOOLS (SACS)
Meanwhile, in April 1999. Budget Cuts orchestrated by Lowder as head of BoT Finance Chair eliminate the PhD. program in Economics, inflicting the wrath of a large portion of the Faculty, including then Pres. William Muse.
By Feb, 2001 (orchestrated behind the scenes by Lowder) Muse, fed up, gets forced out and takes a similar position with East Carolina.
In March, 2001, Muse along with several Faculty and Dept Chairs, initiate a formal complaint to the SACS that BoT has severely infringed upon the authority of the University President, specifically the “Micromanagement" of Lowder in both Academics and the Athletic Dept. They site the Termination/
Resignation of Tommy Bowden as record.
SACS records 9 votes of no confidence and was in the process of initiating and investigation when AU sues the SACS for lack of due process. In August, 2002 a Federal Judge appoints an independent examiner, Richard Bradley, to look into allegations, as well as to examine the financial ties between various BoT members. Bradley issues a report on December 13th, but the Judge, at the insistence of SACS, deems the report inadequate; thus Bradley does another investigation, the results of which are curiously sealed by a separate court order. An order which remains intact to this day.
As a result of the report, SACS places AU on a one year probation, the most severe sanction possible without pulling the accreditation entirely. Although hampered by a Federal Judge's restrictions, they were still able to substantiate Micromanagement issues. Specifically, it found that the business relationships between Lowder's Bank, Atty Jack Miller (BoT member and lead Counsel for Colonial Bank), Jimmy Rane (BoT Member whose Lumber Company's primary commercial banking relationship is with Colonial Bank, and who also owns Colonial Bank Stock worth over $2.4Million), would allow Lowder and his "Minority" vote to influence, and even overpower the "Majority". They also noted Lowder & Co.'s involvement in both the Dye-PFP and Bowden termination as Micromanagement.
GENE CHIZIK
Bobby Lowder and AU continue their coaching search, which ultimately leads to the hiring of Gene Chizik, a former Sexton client, which with a 5-19 record, would knowingly jump at any opportunity to enhance his resume. Chizik also was familiar with Lowder, Dye, and Co., as he previously acted as defensive coordinator under Tuberville, making him a perfect "puppet" for Lowder and crew to manipulate. Chizik's Recruiting Coordinator is
Trooper Taylor.
THE CORRUPTION, TIES TO GAMBLING, CORRUPT POLITICIANS, AND LOBBYISTS
Before the actual events and behind the scene motivations of ‘CamGate’ can be fully understood, one needs to comprehend the inner workings
!
PAGE 3
AS THE PLAINS BURN...
of Alabama’s political system and the players pulling the strings. The course of events leading up to the wire taps, investigations, and ultimate indictments are starting to surface and are becoming very interesting....
First is an Article in the Tuskegee News dated October 21st. In short, the writer suggests a lobbying/consulting group has been used by the Auburn Athletic Foundation to launder cash ultimately ending up in the hands of players/player families. Robert Geddie was a partner in the firm Fine-Geddie until his indictment and arrest in October. According to the Department of Justice, (Geddie) was nailed for allegedly “working with the state’s major gambling interests to influence and/or buy votes favoring proposed gambling houses.” The indictment was based primarily on intercepts (wire taps) of cell phone and land-line conversations with those now rumored to have facilitated the Pay for Play scheme.
Adding fuel to the fire are the ties between former Colonial Bank Chairman Bobby Lowder (Bank of $25Billion failed earlier this year), Milton McGregor (Dog Track, Bingo, and Casino Owner), and Pat Dye (former AU Football Coach). These were the three largest shareholders of the now defunct Colonial BancGroup, a mortgage brokerage, commercial banking, and mortgage warehousing firm based in Montgomery, Al.
McGregor was indicted about the same time as Geddie. Wire- taps were the backbone behind the indictments, but it has been
speculated by most that the FBI overheard conversations between McGergor, Rane, Dye, and coaches talking about possible PFP schemes at Auburn. The consensus is that the FBI just stumbled into the PFP planning while gathering the voter fraud and political corruption evidence.
The initial person questioned by the FBI regarding Cam and his Father was John Bond. Next, came Kenny Rodgers. It appears that the Feds are gathering the bits and pieces from the Mississippi State University involvement which can then be substantiated with the wire tap tapes they have between these AU Boosters. Then, they’ll presumably go to the AU side for answers, or, if the evidence is sufficient, to name suspects for either perjured testimony, or extortion charges relating to the unintended evidence.
Once they are able to turn the smaller players, the FBI will turn the pleas against the real targets, in the same fashion as the Edwin Edwards and William Jefferson Cases.
The FBI could care less about college football, until it involves organized gambling or extortion. They are primarily after evidence of Voter Influence, mis- appropriation of Bank Funds, or extortion, embezzlement, etc.
Their ultimate goal is seemingly to gain as many assets as possible to offset the FDIC losses incurred from the Colonial failure, while punishing those behind the schemes.
Bear in mind TMZ’s report of why the FBI was involved in the first place. They implied that the FBI is more interested in efforts to shop players around, not just a single player (extortion). This was again confirmed Friday, November 12th when John Bond stated the reason for the FBI’s questioning was that "They don't want people selling kids to colleges." This ties into the AgentGate BS all of the governing bodies came unglued about earlier this summer.
One editorial out of Mobile included this little gem the week of Nov 8th: “ With Milton McGregor involved in this as an Auburn booster watch out. The FBI has listened to every phone conversation from his office in the past year. He is the dirtiest multi- millionaire in Alabama.”
On Thursday, November 11th. The NCAA meets with Auburn officials supposedly to discuss the previous two weeks news reports. Upon conclusion of that meeting, the party line “We’ve done absolutely nothing wrong, Cam is Innocent, this is a Witch Hunt” from both the University and the Athletic Department suddenly changed to “No Comment.” Auburn quickly lawyered up with an experienced NCAA Compliance Firm. They also hired a longtime NCAA investigator which acted as a consultant when Albert Means and Alabama went down in 2001-2002.
Of particular interest to note
!
PAGE 4
AS THE PLAINS BURN...
here is the relationship between McGregor, Geddie (Lobbyist), and an election for State Supreme Court Judge. From comments posted on BamaOnLine one can glean information about the relationships between some parties involved:
Paul Finebaum participated two years ago in a Roast to benefit an organization called "The Children's First Trust Fund.” Many sports celebrities and powerful people attended. The organization’s top donor was Quincy's 777, which is McGregors Casino. This organization was incorporated by the Chief Justice of our Supreme Court in Alabama, Justice Sue Bell Cobb. The money from the tobacco lawsuits (approx. $50-60 million a year) goes into this trust fund. More than enough to make a layman, much less the FBI take an interest.
Sue Bell Cobb ran a campaign for Chief Justice that, with a cost in the neighborhood of $13 million, was almost the most expensive state run campaign for a supreme court seat in the history of the US, second only to one in Texas. However Alabama’s more meager population of only 4 million begs the question of why is controlling our supreme court so important?
Remember now, why Milton McGregor was indicted. (He is accused of buying legislative votes on the gambling bill). The accusations that Bob Riley, Alabama’s governor, has a political agenda against Milton and that his indictment was just about bingo gambling are fallacious at best and
borderline paranoid delusion at worst.
The Law Firm Auburn hired, Lightfoot, Franklin, & White is listed as a bronze donor for the Children’s First Trust Fund roast, and may have a vested interest in the outcome of the investigation itself amid allegations that AU boosters used this Children’s Fund Foundation to fund the transportation of Players, their families, and boosters to games and various University functions.
McGregor, Geddie, and the rest were arrested on October 4th, 2010. Cam Newton signed with Auburn December 31st, 2009. If the wiretaps were the basis for their arrests and Cam was one of the PFP players noted, the dots will inevitably become connected.
The indictment filed by the US Attorney contains details about the dates of the calls, and the substance of those conversations relative to the case against the defendants.
It appears that this now goes way beyond PFP schemes, and it appears the government’s goal is ultimately to build a case against Bobby Lowder. Sources have speculated about Lowder’s ties that this goes way beyond Cam, and that evidence exists that the FBI, while monitoring the Bingo mess in Montgomery and also investigating the misappropriation of TARP funds by Colonial Bank, uncovered many things. Among these, guaranteed winning slot machines for AU players at McGregor’s (Colonial Board member, AU Booster) Casino, unmarked ATM cards issued to AU players from Colonial Bank (Bobby Lowder-AU
Board Member and Booster; Pat Dye-Colonial Board member, AU employee and Booster), forgiven loans to families, friends, donors, etc.
If this is all corroborated, it could mean jail time for the parties involved, but that would just be the tip of the iceberg. The implications for Auburn could be cataclysmic, and could include loss of SACS accreditation which means expulsion from the SEC, huge financial implications for AU, removal of Dye’s name from the field and so on, all before AU feels the full wrath of the NCAA.
This also explains why the AU President wanted to sit Cam against Georgia, but was overridden by Lowder, Dye, Jacobs, Rane and McGregor.
The FBI must have overheard discussions about players on tape while the FBI was building their case against those arrested. It was reported the Department of Justice in July began notifying various politicians, reporters, lobbyists and others that their conversations may have been picked up during wire-taps. The phone taps occurred during a 13 Month period starting mid-2009, just about the same time as the total collapse of Colonial BancGroup was taking place. Late 2009 – early 2010 would have been when recruiting was at it’s height, and money and deals (if this pay for play scheme was in fact in full operation) had to have been discussed every day. This was also just before the Legislative Session would have beenin discussions of (Res 44), the states gambling and casino bill.
!
PAGE 5
AS THE PLAINS BURN...
As a point of reference, here’s a partial list of Auburn University’s Board of Trustees when all of this was occuring:
Bobby Lowder John CH Miller, Jr Earlon C. McWHorter Jimmy Rane Paul Spina
Now , have a look at the Colonial BancGroup Board of Directors the last full year of Operation December 31, 2007:
Bobby Lowder
John HC Miller
Jimmy Rane
Paul Spina - Montgomery, Al. Bank Chairman
Milton McGregor Pat Dye
This makes it instantly apparent why the Tuskegee News took such and interest in the relationship between Lowder and the other Auburn Board members.
2010 SEASON; TROOPER TAYLOR, AND “CAMGATE”
Coach Chizik was hired December 13th, 2008. Auburn’s Class consisted of 28 players being signed. The class ranked 25th in the Country (LSU #1, Bama #2, Fla. #5, UGA #6, USCe #12, UTenn, #15, ARKY. #20, Ole Miss #22, Miss. St. #23). AU’s top rated player that year was DeAngelo Benton, a highly sought after, but academically troubling player from La. that had originally
committed to LSU. Production thus far in his career is mediocre at best (just 7 receptions for only 103 yards.)
The 2010 Class, built primarily on the efforts of Trooper Taylor (as per AU Football Media Propaganda), miraculously lands the #1 players from Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, as well as the #1 Junior College Signee in Cam Newton. Why the turnaround, when their previous season only netted a 7-5 regular season record (3-5 SEC), along with an overtime win against Northwestern on New Years Day?
Enter CamGate, Lowder & Co., and Trooper Taylor.
The timeline of events encompassing Rodgers/Bodn/ Mullen/Cecil/SEC/NCAA/FBI
•Before 2009 Egg Bowl, Ken Rodgers talked with Cecil, who said "It's not gonna be free this time."
•Nov 27th, 2009 Ken Rodgers meets Cam and Dan, for the first time.
•Nov 27th, 2009 Ken, Cecil, and two coaches meet at Hilton Garden Inn, where Cecil says "Anywhere between $100,000 and $180,000." coaches respond ‘No, no, I don’t want to hear that,’
•Nov 29th, 2009 Ken leaves Bill Bell a voicemail asking if the deal is going to get done
•Bell was contacted by Cecil Newton asking for money
•Bell calls Bond and urges Bond to tell MSU officials.
•Bond calls Byrne
•Dec 14th, 2009 Cam pushes committing back to Dec 22nd, 2009
•Dec 20th, 2009 Cam visits Auburn, Dad was not there
•Cam commits Dec 31st
Trevon Reed is a solid to Strong LSU verbal commitment, until very late in the process when he abruptly changes his decision to Auburn, against the better judgment of his high school coach. Similar waffling is also experienced with Dyer, Coleman, and Others. There apparently exists a recorded conversation between Trooper Taylor and McGregor discussing the progress in wrapping up this class. To paraphrase, ”...just one more deal to cut and it’s all done,” Then there’s a mention of needing “$200K to close it out.”
HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF
An unbelievable thing to note is that even though there have been sanctions levied against all of Lowder’s “bag-men” and puppets, they still are allowed to wander freely about the University carrying on like nothing has ever happened. The Field is named after the notorious Pat Dye, even though he was recorded and caught coordinating a $9,000 loan from Colonial Bank. Let us not forget that Dye was both AD and head coach. Jump Forward to 2010, when Cecil Newton’s Church suddenly “Rises from the Dead” (no pun intended) and is no longer involved in condemnation proceedings with local authorities. Chris Low, Pat Forde, and Others at ESPN, comment on how Newton’s church and home are
!
PAGE 6
AS THE PLAINS BURN...
meager, yet he drives up for the interview in a $60,000 truck less than a year old.
TIMELINE
•January, 2010 Byrne (MSU) reports to SEC
•SEC responds wanting more information, into allegations
•MSU waits because they are working on eligibility’s issues relating to their Basketball program, currently in season
•SEC contacts NCAA
•NCAA-SEC get with MSU
•During this time, the Church managed by Newton was in financial trouble and facing eviction but suddenly had enough cash to do extensive renovations to meet building codes.
•Newton's father owned a small trucking company with two drivers. After Newton signed they were flushed with so many contracts that a dozen drivers were hired.
•OCTOBER 4TH, 2010. McGregor, Geddie, and others with political ties Lowder and Co. are indicted and arrested, based on taped conversations held during the previous 13 months.
•10/21/2010 Dan Mullen goes on Rivals radio ASKED... how close were you to getting Cam at MSU ...Dan Mullen: "thats a long long story...that’ll be in the book."
•Nov 4th, Bond releases statement “During the 2009 football season, I was contacted by a former football teammate, who represented to me that he was speaking for the Newton camp. He told me that Cam Newton wanted to play at
•Nov 9th, Auburn AD called cheating allegations "sad". "Cam is by all accounts a great kid."
•Nov 9th, ESPN.com’s Joe Schad reported that “two sources who recruit for Mississippi State” said in separate phone conversations that Cam Newton’s decision to commit to a school “would be part of a pay-for-play” plan.
•FBI gets involved in the MSU portion of the investigation, as they are already well trenched in the Auburn/Lowder/McGregor and friends side.
•Nov 10th, Once the NCAA enforcement staff became involved, Mississippi State University cooperated fully with its investigation. MSU is confident the SEC office has managed this process consistent with its established procedures and the university is committed to the conference’s ongoing efforts to ensure compliance with SEC and NCAA rules.
•Nov 11th, “The SEC never received information from MSU about phone calls with the Newtons about pay for play,” SEC spokesman Charles Bloom said in an e-mail Thursday.
•Nov 11th, Bond releases a statement. “My story hasn’t changed. I absolutely talked with Kenny Rogers, and there are phone records that will show that.” Bond said he’s scheduled to meet with the FBI on Tuesday and plans to turn over his phone records and anything else they ask for at that point. He said the FBI reached out to his attorney earlier this week wanting to talk with him about the Newton situation, in particular if kids were being
!
PAGE 7
AS THE PLAINS BURN...
Mississippi State, but that a specified payment would have to be made. I reported the conversation to the Mississippi State Athletic Department. I was told by the Athletic Department that Mississippi State would not respond to the overture that was made to me, and that Mississippi State would continue to recruit Cam Newton as it does any other football recruit.”
•MSU: "We are comfortable that representatives of Mississippi State University's interests conducted themselves appropriately and in compliance with all NCAA by-laws. Mississippi State is committed to operating our athletics programs within the rules of the NCAA and Southeastern Conference, and we expect those affiliated with our program to continue to do the same."
•Cecil Newton, the quarterback's father, denied the allegations to ESPN.com. "If Rogers tried to solicit money from Mississippi State, he did it on his own, without our knowledge," he told the website.
•Chizik: "I'm standing up here on a very important week trying to defend something that quite frankly is garbage," Chizik told reporters. "Is there a wizard behind the curtain? I don't know. Is there one, is there two, are there 10? I don't know and I don't care. But what I do care about is coming to the defense of not only a great football player but a great human being who comes from a great family."
•Nov 8th, Foxsports.com reports that Newton was caught cheating three times at Florida.
shopped out to colleges. That meeting was originally scheduled for Wednesday, but was postponed by the FBI until next Tuesday. “Until I speak with the FBI, I’d prefer not to say much more,”
•Nov 11th Rogers admits, after previously denying, that in fact Cecil Newton had asked for money to recruit his son to play at MSU.
•Nov 11th Bill Bell says he was contacted and asked for payment by Cecil Newton and he has been interviewed by the NCAA
•Nov 12th Jay Jacobs says "We aren't commenting on it"
•Bond to meet FBI on November 16th, later said "This has nothing to do with Auburn, Absolutely nothing to do with Auburn. The FBI does not want anyone selling the rights to players"
•Rodgers to meet with NCAA around November 16th
•Nov 12th, Cecil Newton admits to asking for money from MSU in exchange for Cam to play there.
•Nov 12th, ESPN reports that a source stated that he was contacted by an emotional Cam Newton stating his regret that he would not be playing for MSU, as his father had chosen Auburn because "the money was too much".
•Nov 13th, Despite all of the above evidence, Auburn Still Plays Newton
EVERYONE has now lawyered up, and remember the change of heart from "He’s clean!" to the “No Comment” response.
Here’s what is being said by those in the “know"......... Auburn did not suspend Cam because the NCAA didn’t tell them to. They let Auburn make the decision and then after the fact will hammer them for doing something "they should not have done" Right now All Auburn cares about is beating Bama, winning the SEC, getting Cam the Heisman, playing and perhaps winning the BCS Champ. Game, and marketing the hell out of their success..and deal with the NCAA later. And for those wondering why people thought Cam wouldn't play... it's because the president, the compliance dept and a couple of coaches all wanted to sit Cam. THAT is why so many people were sure Cam would sit. They knew what these guys were saying. HOWEVER, the AD, boosters and the rest of the coaches wanted to play him. It's clear the president and the compliance dept weren't being listened to. All of this is an exact repetition of what the SACS complained about in 2001-2004. It was only placated after strong urging from the Governor stressing to the accreditation board they were fixing the problem.
Now, take into account the similarities of the BoT and Colonial, and the ability to launder money through the various foundations becomes mind- boggling. Also don’t forget that McGregor is a major player in gambling, betting houses, casino business, and is reportedly now the main money-man between the Boosters and Newton. Bearing this in mind, its easy to see what is so disturbing to both the FBI and the NCAA. In short, Major Gambling
tied into illegal activities in College Athletics. Also don’t forget Saturday’s game with Georgia had the line pulled not once, but twice. Think inside information was being passed? This is not going to end well, and that’s why so many are speculating Auburn’s dismissal from the SEC and ultimately the Athletic Death Penalty from the NCAA. This is also the speculation as to why Mike Slive tried to drag his feet regarding the investigation hoping it would just go away. In the words of the New York Times: “...what could happen in the next few weeks is a nightmare script for the N.C.A.A., the SEC and college football. From the involvement of the Federal Bureau of
nvestigation to the gluttonous news media attention, the story is one of the most explosive in the history of college football."
The reason the FBI waited to give this information to the NCAA until sometime after the indictments were handed down is because they had to wait for 6 months until the grand jury indicted the men and women in the gambling deal. All of the wiretap information was sealed and that is why the delay in investigating. The NCAA had to go to Miss St to see if Cecil had solicited money from them as well. That is why Miss St is involved. They are basically connecting all of the dots. Miss St may be cleared because they told Cecil no. He then went to Auburn. The offer was on the table from McGregor but Cam wanted to play at Miss St and not Auburn.
!
PAGE 8
AS THE PLAINS BURN...
When Miss St declined to pay him, he went to where the money was... hence Cam Newton’s comment, "The money was too much." The FBI met with the Miss St coaches, John Bond and Bill Bell today to get their official statements.
Later in the day, ESPN reported Bill Bell received text from someone purported to represent the Newton Family outlining the payment schedule the family wanted in order to have his son play at MSU. Bell also handed over tape recordings of Cecil saying “'Dan Mullen is going to have to put a smile on my face if he thinks he's going to get my son” – substantiating the “Make Me Smile” comments rumored shortly after MSU went public.
The Face remains that the FBI has been investigating Colonial Bank and Louder for a number of possible violations in the financial market crash which are unrelated to AU. Part of the investigation involved gambling fraud between McGregor and Colonial Bank.
The RICO statute allowed the justice department to set up wiretaps on Colonial Bank, and on the wiretaps the FBI found major AU recruiting infractions involving Louder, McGregor, Dye, Trooper, boosters and others.
An anonymous source alleges this is what the FBI has on tape and can prove AU did:
• Louder, McGregor, Dye and unnamed boosters are on tape explaining who they paid and how they did it.
• It involves many AU players
• Providing unmarked Colonial Bank ATM cards to players to withdraw money from secret accounts.
• Giving “slot machine cards” to the players, (the Alabama Gaming Commission is also investigating)
• Provided improper loans to some of the families in our last and current recruiting class.
• The NCAA “strongly” recommended that AU sit Cam for GA. game because of the mounting evidence.
• President Grogue wanted to sit Cam but was overruled by Louder and the Board of Trustees.
• Coach Chizik knows none of this and has been lied to by Jacobs.
• The puppeteers have decided d “we’re going down” so lets win the title even if they take it away later.
• Slive knew about this early and sat on the information and is also in the “crosshairs” of the FBI..
• The corruption is so deep at the highest level (trustees) that AU may well lose accredidation from SACS. If this happens, AU will be evicted from the SEC.
!
PAGE 9
AS THE PLAINS BURN...
CAST OF CHARACTERS
!
PAGE 10
AS THE PLAINS BURN...
John Bond - Former MSU QB now living in Madison, Miss. Director of business development for Eutaw Construction. His company specializes in heavy construction, although they branched off in the last few years and built some game-day condos near the Mississippi State stadium. Supposedly had 1st contact with Kenny Rodgers and his alleged representation of Cam Newton
Greg Bryne - MSU AD which John Bond asserts he immediately told once he learned about the Newton PFP Scheme. Was responsible for providing PFP information to the SEC. Resigned his post Spring, 2010 taking a similar position at Arizona. Was replaced with the National Search
find of Scott Stricklin – Named Mississippi State’s associate athletics director for external affairs in May, 2010. Scott, who has spent the previous five seasons at Kentucky as associate AD for media relations overseeing men’s basketball, is a Jackson native and graduated from KSU in 1992
Mike Slive – Replaced Roy Kramer as Commissioner of the SEC on July 1, 2002. He previously was the first commissioner of Conference USA from 1995 to 2002, and the first commissioner of the Great Midwest Conference upon its founding in 1991. Practiced law in New Hampshire; Served as judge of the Hanover District Court from 1972 to 1977, and
was a partner in a Chicago law firm. He was assistant director of athletics at Dartmouth College, assistant executive director of the Pacific-10 Conference, and director of athletics at Cornell University from 1981 to 1983. In 1990, he became senior partner and founder of the Mike Slive-Mike Glazier Sports Group, a legal practice specializing in representing colleges and universities in athletics-related matters.
Bill Bell – Former MSU Player, president of Bel-Mac Roofing Co. in Santa Rosa Beach, Fla. Was the man Kenny Rogers left a voice message with stating Cecil Newman wanted to speak with him. Also rumored to have taped conversations between Himself and Newton where Newton Shops Son’s Commitment.
!
PAGE 11
AS THE PLAINS BURN...
Cecil Newton – Pastor of Holy Zion Center of Deliverance in the Atlanta suburb of Newnan, Georgia, and father of Cam Newton, The Auburn player this epic story surrounds. Also purported to own RM Trucking, a small local carrier based in Jacksonville, Ga.
Verification of such could not be found by the time of publication.
Kenny Rodgers – The so-called “handler” requested by Cecil Newman to make introductions at MSU. Operates Elite Football Preparation, a company that places prospective athletes in football camps throughout Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Illinois. Also has direct links to
Ian Greengross, a certified Agent by the NFLPA, acting often as a “Runner” for Greengross.
Dan Mullen – Head Football Coach MSU. Was offensive Coordinator at Univ. of Florida prior to be coming MSU’s Head Coach. Both Mullen and his wife Megan built Relationship with Cam Newton as a Freshman. Mullen is credited with the development of several notable
quarterbacks including Alex Smith (Utah), Josh Harris (Bowling Green), Chris Leak (Florida) and Heisman Trophy-winner Tim Tebow (Florida). Mullen, along with LSU Offensive Coordinator Gary Crowton and University of Oregon Head Coach Chip Kelly, are part of the so-called "New Hampshire mafia" as they all have strong connections to New Hampshire.
Jody Wright – Asst. coach at MSU in 2009, now on staff at UA in the same capacity - was the one who recruited Cam Newton for Mississippi State. It's believed that Wright was the (legal) middle-man between the Newton's and MSU. Was interviewed by the NCAA on November 15th. Upon completion of that Interview, NCAA headed immediately to Auburn.
Gene Chizik – Named Head Coach of AU on Dec. 13, 2008. Prior to Auburn, Was head coach at Iowa State, compiling a 5-19 record in two seasons. Chizik was also at AU during the 2002-2004 seasons acting as DC under Tuberville.
!
PAGE 12
AS THE PLAINS BURN...
Jay Jacobs – Named AU’s AD on Dec. 22, 2004, after working in almost every area of the Dept. for the previous 20 years. Played Football for AU as a Walk-on offensive tackle in 1982 and 1983. After College, Held various positions in AD while working under then Coach and AD Pat Dye. Was Sr. Assoc. AD in charge of Tigers Unlimited from 2001-04, the lead Fundraising arm of the AU AD. Also spearheaded a $90 million capital campaign for Athletics, the largest AU history.
Pat Dye - Head coach and AD at AU from 1981 until 1992. Dye was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2005. Served as Defensive Coach at UA from 1965 to 1973 under Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant. Ranked 3rd in AU Football wins with a record of 99-39-4. Reign on the Plains ended abruptly after the 1992 season, the result of a NCAA probe relating to illegal loans, payments, and gifts made by boosters and assistant coaches to then player Eric Ramsey. At the
time, the most severe penalty handed down by the NCAA Committee.
Eric Ramsey - The defensive back AU in the early 1990s who used a tape recorder to secretly record conversations between his football coaches and Booster "Corky" Frost regarding an illicit player payment scheme. Ramsey's allegations also included racist practices at Auburn,
including disapproval of inter-racial dating in the community and segregation of black and white players in the resident athletic dorm. After his tapes were revealed, Auburn received strict penalties and probation for the sixth time in the schools history
Terry Bowden – Became AU head coach in 1992. During his first year at Auburn, Bowden led the Tigers to a perfect 11–0 season, becoming the first coach to go undefeated in his debut season at a Division I school. In 1994, Auburn finished 9–1–1. While still suffering from the
sanctions rendered for Dye & Co’s transgressions, in 1998 Bowden's fate at AU changed as he faced criticism for recruiting woes and off-the-field player discipline issues. Compound these problems with a string of injuries at center and in the backfield and you have to a disastrous start of the 1998 season. After starting with a 1–5 record, Bowden resigned as head coach the night before Auburn played against Louisiana Tech, replaced with Bill Oliver.
!
PAGE 13
AS THE PLAINS BURN...
Bill Oliver – He is best known as a DC at both UA under Gene Stallings and at AU under Terry Bowden, the latter where he also served as interim head coach in 1998. Was at the center of Bowden controversy, allegedly working with Longtime Booster and then BoT member Bobby Lowder conspiring to have Bowden Fired.
Wayne Hall – Longtime asst. and DC under both Dye and Bowden. Was the supposed “Bookkeeper and Bag Man” for payments to touted recruits under Dye, which continued under Bowden. Started Coach’s Construction of Auburn, has been recognized as a premier business leader in the AU community.
Gene Jelks – UA defensive Back and prize recruit which received $2,100 as a "signing bonus" when he committed to Alabama in 1985 and received money from coaches and boosters during his playing career, which ended with the 1989 season. He, along with Antonio Langham and his role in NapkinGate, led to the departure of Gene Stallings and Staff, along
with most of the Athletic Dept.
Tommy Tuberville – AU Head Coach from 1999 to 2008. During his tenure Tubs guided AU to the top of the SEC, Winning both the SEC Championship and the Western Division title in 2004. Made 8 straight bowl appearances and 5 New Year's Day bowls. Was a perfect 13–0 in
2004; In 2005, finished 9–3 with victories over UGA and UA. Had a winning record against UA (7–3) including 6 straight, more than any other Auburn coach. Also broke even with Georgia and LSU (5–5). Tony Franklin – Much Maligned OC hired by Tubs to install the Spread Offense. Never really had the proper personnel at skilled positions,
and was later fired for lack of performance. Was most noted for his quote in the AJC sometime after his termination – “People would be shocked at the stuff that goes on at Auburn - it would make headlines for the National Enquirer”
Paul Davis – Editor for the Opelika-Auburn News and the Tuskegee News Press., broke the piece on October 21st regarding the ties between Geddie, Auburn, and the Vote buying indictments. Also authored the interview with Bowden in 2001 on his ranch regarding Lowder, Dye, and the BoT.
!
PAGE 14
AS THE PLAINS BURN...
Trooper Taylor – Current assistant head coach, wide receivers coach, and Recruiting Coordinator at AU. Instrumental in Auburn signing a consensus top-five recruiting class in 2010. Named by Rivals.com to its list of the top 25 recruiters for the 3rd time, having previously earned the recognition in 2005 and 2007. Served in a similar capacity at OK. State, landing prize 5* players Dez Bryant and Kendall Hunter. Has held similar positions at both UT and Tulane. Although never formally sanctioned, rumors and innuendo have always followed Taylor with respect to PFP controversies and inappropriate gifts to prospective players, especially while at Tulane.
Rich McGlynn – Current AU AD Compliance Officer. Prior to AU, was employed by the NCAA from 2001 to 2006, most recently serving as Associate Director of Membership Services. Prior to that, was an Assistant Director of Membership Services and a Student-Athletes Reinstatement Representative within the Enforcement Services arm of the NCAA. Was Commissioner of the Central Atlantic Collegiate Conference from 2000-01 and was a legal specialist for the New Jersey General Assembly Majority Office (2000-01). Served as a legal specialist to the Office of Counsel to the Governor to the State of New Jersey (1999-00).
Robert Geddie – Lobbyist for Wise–Geddie. According to the Department of Justice, (Geddie) was nailed for allegedly working with the state’s major gambling interests to influence and/or buying votes favoring proposed gambling houses. The indictment was based primarily on intercepts (wire taps) of cell phone and land line conversations with
those now rumored in the alleged pay-for-play scheme
Bobby Lowder – AU BoT member since 1988, and Chairman of AU Finance Committee. Also the largest booster with AU Athletics. Current Trustee position expires Late 2011. Was chairman and CEO of Colonial BancGroup, a $25Billion Nat’l. Bank headquartered in Montgomery Al. until it’s failure inMid-Late August, 2009. Lowder is often thought of
as the Wizard behind the Curtain, manipulating the Ala. Political Machine as well as the AU BoT and AD as he feels.Up until Colonial’s failure and takeover and liquidation by the Feds, Lowder was labeled as the most powerful man in Alabama.
!
PAGE 15
AS THE PLAINS BURN...
Milton McGregor – Large AU Athletics Booster, and Owner of Victoryland, an area located in Shorter, Alabama that consists of a greyhound racing track, casino, and a 5-star hotel. It was dubbed as a racino. Ala. Govenor, Atty General, and approx 100 Ala State Troopers tried to seize bingo machines on Jan. 29th, but were blocked by a temporary restraining order blocking State Access. Since August 12, 2010, Victoryland has closed its casino, restaurant and hotel operations. McGregor was arrested on October 4th, along with several of his Legislative Cronies as part of a Vote Buying Scam. This was the same casino operator that led to the lawsuits against former Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford.
Larry Langford – Former Birmingham Al. mayor in jail for taking $235,000 in cash and gifts from associates profiting from Jefferson County bond deals. Was also sued by several individuals claiming he received ill-gotten winnings from rigged Bingo Machines at VictoryLand, in exchange for receiving political favor and to promote approval of business dealings for affiliates of the Macon County Greyhound Park, mainly McGregor.
Jimmy Rane – Another Long Time AU Booster, Rane is the CEO and founder of Great Southern Wood Preserving, which makes YellaWood, a rot resistant pressure treated lumber used in a multitude of construction and landscaping applications. He is also the founder of the Jimmy Rane Foundation, which promotes Higher Ed through Scholarships for lesser-advantaged students with low incomes or unsuccessful
surroundings. Rane’s involvement in AU Boosters goes all the way back to the Bowden Era. In Fact, Bowden referred to him, in his 2001 interview with Paul Davis “...as a wannabe, a jock sniffer, a loose cannon. He wants to be involved in everything. He is High Maintenance.”
Paul Spina and John C. McWhorter – of Spina Enterprises, and McWhorter & Co., are the two BoT members along with
Rane that Bowden accused of making direct payments to players during both Dye’s and Bowden’s tenure. Spina still sits on the BoT, while McWhorter’s At-large term expired in 2008.
!
PAGE 16
AS THE PLAINS BURN...
ORGANIZATIONS – TERMS – ACRONYMS
Colonial BancGroup - $25Billion Financial Institution controlled by Lowder headquartered in Montgomery, Al. August of 2009, failed and was seized by the FDIC, and simultaneously sold to BB&T for $1Million. Currently under federal investigation for fraud, embezzlement, misappropriation of funds, and money laundering (to name a few) in conjunction with the financial instability of both Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. As late as 2007, board members included in addition to Lowder, John Miller, AU BoT and lead partner of Miller, Hamilton, Snyder, and Odom – Mobile, Jimmy Rane (BoT), Pat Dye, and Milton McGregor Paul Spina (BoT) was Chairman of Colonial Bank Group, Montgomery, a subsidiary of the Colonial Parent Holding Company.
Victoryland/Quincey’s 777 -An area located in Shorter, Alabama that consists of a greyhound racing track, casino, and a 5-star hotel. It was dubbed as a racino. Operations closed in late summer 2010, just before McGregor was indicted.
SACS-Southern Association of Colleges and Schools - The Commission on Colleges that is the regional body for the accreditation of degree-granting for higher education institutions in the Southern states.
PFP – Play-For-Play
BoT – Auburn University’s Board of Trustees

-All of the proceeding from blueTunaTiger, with mild editing by DBD Original text and timeline, as well as references can be found online at http://goo.gl/Ty8C7