Didn’t do it. Wasn’t there.
“It was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” former Adelphia chairman John Rigas told USA Today in a report published this week. “If this had happened a year before, there wouldn’t have been any headlines. … There was no fraud.”
Starting Sunday, he can tell it to his cellmates. Rigas, 82, begins a 15-year prison sentence. His son Timothy, 51, goes in for 20. His other son, Michael, 53, received 10 months of home confinement.
Their beloved cable company was moved from Coudersport, Pa., to Greenwood Village after the Rigases looted it into bankruptcy. It was then sold in pieces to Time Warner and Comcast.
The Rigases complain they were unfairly lumped in with executives at Enron, WorldCom and Tyco. The funny thing is, top executives of those companies swear they didn’t do it either.
“I wasn’t there,” former Enron chief executive Jeff Skilling said at his October sentencing. Skilling abruptly resigned from Enron in August 2001. He said the “severe liquidity crisis” that came in 2002 wasn’t his fault. “I am innocent of every one of these charges.”
He’s now doing 24 years in Minnesota.
Same story from former Enron chairman Ken Lay.
“I firmly believe I am innocent of the charges against me as I’ve said from Day One,” he said, walking out of a Houston courthouse last year.
Lay said he was “shocked” by the jury’s verdict. He died of a heart attack a few months later while vacationing in Aspen. His conviction was thrown out on the technicality that dead men can’t appeal. Maybe Lay can crow about this mixed victory over a Ouija board, but I doubt anybody is channeling him now.
Bernie Ebbers, convicted in 2005 for his role in an $11 billion accounting fraud at WorldCom, argued that he’d been denied a fair trial and that his 25-year prison sentence is unreasonable.
During his trial, Ebbers put forth an “I don’t know … I don’t recall … I don’t remember” defense, blaming subordinates for the company’s accounting problems.
Ebbers was still a Sunday- school teacher in the summer of 2002 at Easthaven Baptist Church in Brookhaven, Miss.
“No one will find me to have knowingly committed fraud,” he promised fellow church members, who then gave him a standing ovation.
A federal appeals court upheld his conviction last month, and he remains in custody at an Oakdale, La., prison.
Then there’s Dennis Kozlow ski, former CEO of Tyco International, also convicted for looting his company. In March, he granted a jailhouse interview to “60 Minutes” in which he claimed a jury sent him to prison for being rich.
All that fuss over Tyco’s $19 million Manhattan apartment and its $6,000 shower curtain – the average Joe on the jury just didn’t understand.
“I was a guy sitting in a courtroom making $100 million a year,” Kozlowski said. “And I think a juror sitting there just would have to say, ‘All that money? He must have done something wrong.”‘
He’s now doing 8 1/3 to 25 years beside murderers, drug dealers and pedophiles – many of whom I’m sure would say that they didn’t do it either.
Like Kozlowski, the Rigas family got a lot of press for extravagances they enjoyed at their shareholders’ expense.
This included plans for a $15 million private golf course on John Rigas’ land and a $6,000 Christmas tree shipped to Rigas’ daughter, Ellen, in New York.
Rigas told USA Today the golf course was never built and would have been eventually donated. It was an economic-development plan meant to benefit the tiny town of Coudersport, he said.
And the tree? Prosecutors alleged that Rigas flew a tree to his daughter, Ellen, in New York City. She didn’t like it, so he flew her another one.
The flying trees, they claim, cost Adelphia shareholders $6,000. Michael Rigas said the trees were loaded onto a plane that was taking Adelphia executives to New York on business anyway. “That was pretty much it,” he said.
Funny how the littlest things can be so misunderstood once you are accused and then convicted of a crime.
Maybe next Christmas, the Rigas family won’t be so picky.
Al Lewis’ column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Respond to him at , 303-954-1967 or alewis@denverpost.com.
