SALT LAKE CITY -- David R. Johnson and Thomas K. Welch were lionized in 1995 when, after three decades of trying, they delivered to this city the right to stage the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. But after that came a long, hard fall.
An independent ethics panel investigating how the Salt Lake City bid committee used cash payments and college scholarships to influence Olympic officials has identified Johnson and Welch -- two of the committee's senior officers -- as the central culprits. Federal prosecutors are exploring criminal charges against them. Their reputations are in jeopardy. And yet they have remained surprisingly steadfast in their positions: they don't regret a thing.Johnson, the bid committee's former vice president, said that if he had one misgiving about how Salt Lake City won the Olympics, it was that its officials were not more public and open about the tactics.
"They should have said, 'of course we have scholarships,' " he said. "It was a way of winning the bid, to increase our ways to communicate."
And Welch, the former head of the Salt Lake City effort, said his lack of regret in looking back matches exactly the lack of guilt he felt when he was waging the campaign in the early 1990s.
"The whole atmosphere was, hey, you're paying homage to these people," Welch said of the lavishments he and others bestowed on the 114 members of the International Olympic Committee who decide where to hold the Games. "We don't like that, but that's the game. That's the rush, if you want to join the fraternity."
Tom Welch and Dave Johnson were clearly not the only ones to know.
In fact, many Salt Lake Bid Committee officials had fully accepted the coarse financial facts of what had to be done to become an Olympic city, documents and interviews by the New York Times strongly suggest.
Salt Lake City's long effort to join the Olympic fraternity and secure the bid for the 2002 Winter Games -- sometimes brazen, sometimes comic, and all the while relying on inside information provided by other Olympic cities -- comes to detailed life in hundreds of pages of internal bid committee documents obtained by The New York Times and in interviews with numerous committee staff workers and volunteers.
The documents, as well as the first extensive interviews with Welch and Johnson, also strongly suggest that many Salt Lake Organizing Committee officials beyond the two former committee officers -- and within the Olympic family in general -- knew what was going on.
Other issues regarding what happened here and who knew about it are still unfolding. There are conflicting accounts by various participants, witnesses who have yet to be questioned and assertions of innocence or culpability that will not be resolved until the various federal and state investigators complete their work -- if then.
Other knew about 'everything'
Johnson said he told Anita DeFrantz, the senior IOC member from the United States, "everything," about scholarships and cash payments; she said that is not true at all.
An internal work paper from the accounting firm of Ernst & Young asserts that senior bid committee officials, including some leaders of major Utah corporations, were fully briefed in 1995 about questionable payments; they say no.
Staff workers and volunteers who toiled in the bid committee's dingy downtown offices say that everyone knew which IOC children were on scholarship, who was coming in for their checks and when, and who among the regular IOC visitors was the greediest or most gracious; most of their bosses, excepting Welch and Johnson, say they didn't know a thing.
Last May, about six months before the scandal broke, minutes and handwritten notes taken during bid committee meetings in 1994 and 1995, including detailed discussions about the status of the campaign in its final climactic months, were destroyed by the committee's law firm. Officials with the firm have no explanation, and characterize the destruction as "strange."
And it all, in the end, may have been unnecessary. Salt Lake City, which had pursued the Olympics for 30 years as part of a broad economic development plan to build a winter tourism industry, had actually pulled together a legitimate proposal that Olympic officials across the globe concede was, on its merits, unmatched.
Former Sen. George Mitchell, D-Maine, who led one of the inquiries into Salt Lake City's effort, last week summed up what he called the tragedy of the episode succinctly:
Salt Lake City officials, he said, "did not need to stoop to the level of this improper and inappropriate conduct."
From unsophisticated to educated
In 1966, when Salt Lake City was making its first run at the Winter Games, for 1972, the bid committee commissioned a translation into French of its promotional materials, including a geographical description: Utah, the text said, is located in the "Great Basin of the West." The translator hired by the committee took the language a bit too literally, however, and used the phrase, "Grand Basin," which in French meant that Utah was in the "Toilet of the West."
The mistake was caught just in time when a professor at the University of Utah was asked to look over the proofs.
"It shows you how unsophisticated we were," said Walker Wallace, a retired businessman and former ski racer who was on the committee.
Wallace said the city's longshot chances at landing the Games were further made clear at a stuffy cocktail reception later in 1966, in Rome, when a salesman from Salt Lake City suddenly got it into his head to approach one of the haughtier Olympic committee members in the room, a European royalty figure. The salesman walked up, put his arm around the IOC official and started talking up the virtues of Wasatch Mountain powder snow.
Wallace still recalls the rebuke that ended their conversation: "Remove your arm from my shoulder."
Salt Lake's 1966 effort was more than unpolished; it was cheap. The organizers scraped together $24,000 by selling Olympic pins for $1 each, raised $5,000 more in donations, and created an organization called Olympics for Utah Inc. that was designed to appeal to French-tinged IOC with its acronym, OUI. The committee even had $10,305 left over at the end, according to the two-page audit that Wallace saved in his files.
Over the next three decades, Salt Lake City became much more serious about its Olympic ambitions. Once an isolated outpost in the scenic West, the city was beginning to feel the need to make a name for itself, local historians and civic experts say, and to shed a bit of its insular history as the central city in the Mormon religion.
But there was also a powerful momentum from within the state driving the Olympic efforts: economic development. The organizers of the first bid in 1966 did more than simply start the Olympic machine, economists and public policy experts say. They forged a kind of symbiotic relationship that fed on itself. Going after the Olympics created publicity for Utah tourism, and the growth of tourism over the years in turn reinforced the rationale for going after the Olympics and further enhanced the city's chances.
Former Salt Lake City Mayor Palmer DePaulis said that people who question the value of the Olympics now have forgotten how tough things were -- the mining industry was sinking, while agriculture and ranching were also struggling.
"The Olympics was looked at as something that would jump-start the economy and help bring jobs and investment," DePaulis said.
Throughout the three decades of trying, though, Salt Lake City never quite shook the sense that it had some inadequacy or provincialism to overcome, residents and former bid committee officials say.
Welch recalled that as late as 1989, for example, Salt Lake City bid officials showed up empty-handed at an IOC meeting in Puerto Rico.
"When we arrived there, the Greeks were entertaining on their yacht, with gorgeous hostesses," he said. "Atlanta had rented a mansion, shipped in furniture from Atlanta and called it the Atlanta House. Toronto had set up a whole wing out by the pool and were serving breakfasts, lunches and dinners to the IOC.
"Everyone was giving wonderful gifts -- I think there were crystal vases and jewelry," Welch said. "Bid cities each had limousines. We showed up with nothing -- on a bus. We called home and they went and got some letter openers for us and brought them to us so we'd have something."
That insecurity was deepened by uncertainty over just how the competitions were being conducted. In 1991, with a solid bid package in place for the 1998 Games, Salt Lake City officials received a letter from Patrick Hickey, the president of Ireland's Olympic committee, who let drop that some IOC members had contracted to sell their votes for a flat fee of $100,000 to the city of Nagano, Japan.
And on the eve of the vote for the 1998 Games, Welch said, he was approached by Jean-Jacques Ganga, the son of the IOC member from the Republic of Congo, who said he could help secure a handful of votes for $35,000. Welch and others refused, in part because they didn't have the money. Nagano won by four votes.
Later, in 1993, despite being the leading candidate for the 2002 Games, Salt Lake City officials were reminded that nothing was a certainty. According to the minutes of a bid committee meeting, for example, Ms. DeFrantz, the senior IOC representative in the United States, cautioned against complacency.
So the Salt Lake City rules evolved: Do no harm, take no chances and say yes to just about anything.
"Everything we had was about getting the bid," Johnson said. "All our money was to get votes."
Get the African vote
Given how aggressively, and even excessively, Salt Lake City came to pursue the 2002 Games, it is almost quaint to examine their earlier records.
In March 1991, for example, during the campaign for the 1998 Winter Games -- later won by Nagano -- Prince Albert of Monaco, a bobsled racer and IOC member, arrived in Utah in jeans and flannel shirt and with a disdain for protocol and limousines, former staffers said. But committee records show that officials did manage to buy him at least something. Johnson's reimbursement slip for the visit records only a single stop, at a 7-11, for "juice for Prince Albert." Cost: $2.73.
Others, it turned out in the years to come, demanded more. They were not denied.
Salt Lake City, working from 1991 to 1995 to at last secure the Games, gave and gave -- at least $1.2 million to IOC members and their families and much beyond that in time and attention and personal favors.
Dame Mary Alison Glen-Haig, a committee member from England, got to play cards late into the night at the house of Salt Lake City Mayor Deedee Corradini. The children of IOC members from Mali and Cameroon wound up receiving more than $100,000 each in scholarships and payments.
It could all be quite matter of fact.
According to staffers at the committee, Sibo Sibandze, the son of the IOC member from Swaziland, would with regularity turn up at the second-floor offices at the corner of 200 East and 200 South, open the door and ask, "Where's my check?" And the checks would be cut: $250 one week, $590 the next.
"You knew these guys, they came in weekly," said Jason Christensen, a volunteer staffer. "You saw them pick up their checks. You took them places. You didn't have to be a brain surgeon to know what was going on. It was always whispered, 'Whose son is he? How much of a scholarship is he getting? How does that work? People freaked out the first time they heard about it. Then it became second nature."
It could occasionally feel reckless, too.
By the spring of 1995, according to a list of bid committee payments, money often was being spent with no support documentation, including a $30,000 check for cash at First Security bank for unknown purposes. Gifts to beneficiaries designated as "various IOC members" reached more than $150,000.
From February 1993 to February 1996, the bid committee paid installments of $500 that totaled $14,500 to a Raouf Scally, who was thought to be the relative of an IOC member. To this day, local Olympic officials have no certain idea who Scally is or what North African country he came from.
But for the most part, the operation run out of the charmless downtown offices -- mismatched furniture, empty pizza boxes -- was targeted and relentless.
The bid's strategy, Johnson said, dictated that African committee members be pursued, not necessarily because those members had their hands out, but because they were the swing votes. Salt Lake City's analysis showed that no city had ever been chosen to host the Games without African member support.
"We had to get the African vote," he said. "We had to get them early, get it done, maintain contact and maintain momentum."
But there was more than just a plan. Bid committee officials also had detailed personal information on their IOC targets, from the dossiers prepared by previous bid cities such as Sydney, Australia.
Of David Sibandze, the IOC member from Swaziland who resigned under threat of expulsion in February, one dossier said, "Always made reference that he has a big mortgage to pay during visits to 1996 candidate cities. Bad reputation. Insincere."
Other files offered more innocent insights for gaining favor: of Anton Geesink of the Netherlands, one dossier said, "Loves to get the opportunity for group sing-alongs."
Most, though, cut to the chase. "Doesn't speak much English," a scouting report said of Sergio Santander Fantani of Chile, another committee member who since has been expelled. "But managed to understand him to say, 'Salt Lake must win."'
And Salt Lake City bid committee officials say they were just as straightforward about their campaign when talking to people in the Olympic family. Johnson, for instance, insists he kept Ms. DeFrantz, the senior American IOC member, updated in detail. He said she would frequently ask him which way the members were leaning and what it had taken to gain their allegiance.
"From 1992 to 1995, every time we had an IOC member visit Salt Lake, she either flew to Salt Lake or during their visit would talk to them on the telephone," Johnson said, referring to Ms. DeFrantz. "She would call me and ask, 'Was he good or was he bad?' She wanted to know if someone had asked us to do something that would put us in a difficult position," he said.
If an IOC member had asked or demanded favors, Johnson said that Ms. DeFrantz's response was, "That's not good,' or something like that. She didn't say, 'Don't do it.' "
Johnson's charge is explosive. If Ms. DeFrantz knew of the misconduct in Salt Lake City and did nothing to report or correct it, her reputation as one of the most powerful and upright figures in international sport could be damaged.
In a series of interviews, Ms. DeFrantz emphatically denied Johnson's claims. She stated that Johnson was lying. She said she did know that one or more children of IOC members were attending schools in Utah on scholarship, but assumed they had been earned on their merits and were not being underwritten by the bid committee.
"I was never asked if it was okay, or if they should do anything, or if it was a way to win the games," she said. "Those discussions never happened."
Ties that bind
It is easy to imagine a world where a scrappy, effusive attorney from Ogden, Utah, named Tom Welch would live an entire life and never meet a mercurial politician from the Congo Republic named Jean-Claude Ganga. But given the logic and machinery of the Olympic site selection process that existed in the 1990s, it may be hard to imagine anything else.
For the Salt Lake City bid committee, Welch was the preeminent giver of gifts and cash, Ganga the preeminent taker. Of the $15 million that the bid committee spent in winning the 2002 Winter Games, Ganga got more than anyone -- at least $250,000, according to the board of ethics report in February.
But Welch and Ganga -- and the relationship that bound them -- were also far more complex than the dry text of ledger sheets and investigative reports have suggested. Indeed, they were much alike: both men of large gestures and appetites, both capable, it seems, of the grand impulse one moment and an outright improper one the next.
Ganga, 64, made his reputation in Africa as a fighter against the apartheid system. He once stood on a makeshift athletic field, watching with tears streaming down his face as a group of barefoot boys tried to play soccer with a homemade ball of weeds and duct tape, according to Welch, who was there.
Within the bid committee, however, Ganga was known by staff members as "the human vacuum cleaner," for his ability to take in whatever crossed his path. When he came to town, staffers, with an effort at comic cynicism, called it "Ganga time." He took thousands of dollars of free medical care, from hepatitis treatment for himself to a knee replacement for his mother-in-law. He was put up in an apartment in Salt Lake City, and after the family departed, the Gangas' appliances were handed out. One staff member got a toaster, another a blender.
Welch, a 54-year-old former corporate lawyer who resigned from the organizing committee in 1997, after a charge of spousal abuse, was singled out by the Salt Lake City ethics panel for unethical and improper behavior that ranged from handing out cash for IOC votes to setting up an investment fund in which he and Ganga were to share the benefit. Welch admits he was free with other people's money. He once spent $30,000 on the street in a single night on Utah Jazz playoff tickets for 30 guests, charging the committee for "marketing."
But like Ganga, he had another side, too: He spent 10 obsessive years attempting to bring the Games to Salt Lake City, five of them without taking any pay. And the same ethics report that condemned his actions also conceded that he never attempted to enrich himself through the Olympic process; the investment fund with Ganga existed in name only.
In the strange theater of the Olympics, each man had a role to play. In the letters and faxes that Welch and Ganga exchanged, they circle one another, sometimes like adversaries or hagglers, sometimes like real friends.
In one 1994 letter to Welch from his home in Brazzaville, for example, Ganga wrote of the war that was tearing his country apart. The city was blockaded. Food and medicines were in short supply and Ganga asked only that Welch try to pressure the U.S. government into a formal condemnation of the killings. Money was not mentioned.
Another exchange of letters, in April 1992, was all about money. Ganga complained that he couldn't afford to fly to Montreal to attend a wedding, and then, after a $4,700 check was sent, wrote back with effusive thanks. "As the saying goes, a friend in need is a friend indeed," Ganga wrote.
But even if the relationships that formed here were simply a cover for the buying and selling of the Olympic Games, real lives were touched, a very human fact that has got buried under the avalanche of embarrassment and anger.
In the mid-1990s, for example, Bob Hunter, the director of community affairs for the bid committee, took in the son of an IOC member from Libya, Suhel Attarabulsi, who had come to the United States to attend college at the Salt Lake City bid committee's expense. Hunter said he made speeches all over the state talking about Suhel and his life.
"It fell to me to look after him," Hunter said. "Our family became acquainted with him and fell in love with him. He became like our adopted son. He spent Christmas and summer vacations -- we've got his baby picture sitting on the piano in our living room. That's the story I've told all across the state of Utah. That's why it shocks me for people to say we didn't know."
Both Welch and Ganga have defended themselves. Ganga said through a spokesman, Ibrahim Soumare, that he received cash because the banking system in Congo Republic was unreliable, and that the money was sent to various Olympic committees in Africa. Welch says he was trying to win the bid in the way he had been told it had to be done, but that he was also trying to make a real contribution to poorer countries.
Through the filter of money and hindsight, however, it's hard tell what's real. Welch, who described Ganga as a man with "a heart as big as all outdoors," also admits he was thrilled when the IOC courtship was over.
"You can't imagine the exhilaration I felt when the last member from the last visit was put on the plane," he said. "I subjected myself to more people's pompous outlooks."
Notes are destroyed
The knowledge of what the bid committee was doing in chasing its Olympic bid flowed like a river with no predetermined course -- full of switchbacks and dry washes and dead ends. Information would bubble up from the ground, only to sink again without a trace.
In late July 1995, for example, one month after Salt Lake City had won the Games, even as people here were still basking in the euphoria of their victory, auditors from Ernst & Young, who were working on their annual report to close the bid committee's books, came across some puzzling and poorly documented accounting entries. They consequently drew up a list of those expenditures, which totaled $271,000.
The Ernst & Young auditors had pinpointed the very names and amounts that have since become the heart of the Olympic scandal: The so-called National Olympic Committee program. There on their worksheet were cash recipients, including Ganga and all the IOC scholarship students.
The work papers that the auditors produced as they explored the disbursements also included their handwritten notes, which apparently reflected the information that they were gathering as they attempted to determine what the payments had been about. Those notes, which have been given to federal investigators in the case, indicate that members of both the bid committee's audit committee as well as at least one of its three-member executive committee leaders were informed of the payments and approved them.
"We discussed the NOC program with management, the audit committee, and certain members of the executive committee," one of the auditors wrote. "Each individual disbursement is reviewed and approved by the management of the committee," the auditor concluded.
The people mentioned in the auditors' papers as having been specifically told about the scholarship program in 1995 say they received no such warnings. G. Frank Joklik, the former chairman of the board of trustees, has maintained he was not aware of wrongdoing; James Beardall, the chairman of the bid committee's audit committee, said he was never notified of any questionable expenditures of money.
"I have no recollection whatsoever of any details of this kind being brought to my attention," Joklik said of the auditor's report.
Johnson said that that cannot be.
"Even though it's being denied, we had a powerful committee," he said of his superiors. "They have run major corporations. They are good managers. They required information and justifications about everything we did."
What the work papers clearly reveal, however, is that auditors were satisfied at the time that those people knew, and thus, at least from an accounting standpoint, no one was cutting unauthorized checks.
But still the story stayed locked within bid committee walls.
Ken Bullock, a member of the board of trustees, was the next one to try and break it free. On several occasions beginning in 1995 through last year, he said he told the board of trustees and Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt of his concerns about the bogus scholarship program. Bullock said he also complained to the governor's top aide, Vicki Varela, in 1998 about the scholarships.
"She thought I was a little 'out there,' chasing ghosts," he said.
Sydney Fonnesbeck, a former City Council member who worked with Bullock, recalled his distress at not being listened to, and how he often returned from meetings with the board emotionally "bruised and bloodied."
The governor, who often participated in public functions with the very people receiving the improper scholarships and other inducements, has said no one came to him with suspicions, and that he would have done something immediately if he had had any idea.
And so there the story appeared to stall again, until June 3, 1997, when a Salt Lake City Councilwoman Deeda Seed asked a local television reporter to meet for breakfast at Lamb's, a downtown landmark restaurant. There she told the reporter, Rod Decker of KUTV Channel 2, that she'd been told -- by Bullock among others -- that children and grandchildren of IOC members were getting college educations paid for by the bid committee.
Decker, a newsman in Salt Lake City for 27 years, said he would follow up. He said he went to the committee's spokesman, Mike Korologos, and asked if the story was true. Korologos said he would check it out. When he called back, Decker said Korologos told him that Johnson, the committee vice president, had said there were no scholarships. He said he was told that some young people, including some related to IOC members, had taken a tour of the University of Utah -- that was all.
Decker decided there was no story and let it drop.
Johnson said this week that he has no memory of the conversation with Korologos, and Korologos has declined repeated requests for an interview or comment.
But Decker's call was a knock at the door. The world was beginning to ask questions, and, in retrospect, Korologos' answer was a tacit acknowledgement that someone within the committee's leadership felt there was something to hide.
Eleven months later, something strange happened in the offices of Ray Quinney & Nebeker, a prominent law firm in Salt Lake City that was the bid committee's legal counsel. Pages and pages of documents -- the minutes of the bid committee's senior management meetings and the handwritten notes of the lawyer who was the committee's secretary for 1994 and 1995 -- were shredded or otherwise destroyed.
The law firm's computer records do not indicate who gave the order to destroy the documents, who carried out the destruction or even how it was done, according to James Jardine, the managing director at the firm and the man who had for years served as the bid committee's chief lawyer. But the set of documents -- detailing the committee's actions over the final months of Salt Lake City's quest for the Olympics -- are the only files in that office to have been so destroyed.
"We've interviewed everyone who has worked on it, and their secretaries -- nobody has any knowledge," Jardine said. "It's strange. It doesn't make sense to us."
Jardine said the destroyed notes would not have added much to the record of what happened here. But others believe strongly that the notes might have helped make sense of one critical question that has hung over this city and the multiple investigations into the acquisition of the 2002 Games: who among senior management, including some of the city's most prominent and powerful businessmen, knew of the illicit campaign to buy votes?
An anonymous source
Someone with access to the committee's files still wanted to get the story out. In late November 1998, a different local television station, KTVX Channel 4, received a copy of a letter from an anonymous sender. The letter, stamped "draft" on its face, was from Johnson to an IOC member's daughter, Sonia Essomba, informing her that her next tuition payment would be the last. On Nov. 24, 1998, Channel 4 broke the story, and local newspapers followed up with their own stories about the letter.
Committee officials, in response, portrayed the scholarships as humanitarian gestures, and raised questions about whether the letter might be a forgery. And so with the letter's authenticity uncertain, the story appeared to fizzle again.
But then about a week later, in Lausanne, Switzerland, the No. 2 official in the IOC, Marc Hodler, said in an apparently offhand remark at a news conference on another subject that he believed Salt Lake City might have paid bribes in winning the 2002 Winter Games. In an interview with National Public Radio a few days later on Dec. 10, Hodler used the word "bribes" again in front of an American audience.
"From that moment, instead of being perceived as an aberration, it turned into a crisis," Ms. Seed said.
Since then, the story, and the list of questions it has raised, has continued to expand.
Federal prosecutors are trying to determine if anyone broke any laws.
The Salt Lake Organizing Committee has brought in an outsider with Utah roots, W. Mitt Romney, a Boston-based venture capitalist, to head up the Olympic committee with new pledge of full disclosure.
An independent board of ethics created by Leavitt has determined that knowledge was strictly limited to Welch, Johnson, and a third man, Craig Peterson, who the ethics board said acted secretly and alone.
And a lengthening list of people -- from Welch and Johnson to other staffers on the committee to officials with the national accounting firm that reviewed the committee's books to the people who served on a panel set up by the U.S. Olympic Committee -- have said they are not satisfied that the full truth has come out.
Jason Christensen, the volunteer, said he found it almost inconceivable that Joklik, who took over for Welch in 1997 to run the daily operations of the committee, did not know of the various mechanisms in place to influence votes.
"I can't imagine him claiming he had zero knowledge of what was going on," Christensen said. He added, "It was such commonplace knowledge among the staff."
George Mitchell, the chairman of a special investigation into the Salt Lake City scandal, said he also believes many of statements of ignorance "strain credulity."
"The actions of the principal individuals were not a secret," Mitchell said. "They didn't maintain two sets of books. Everything was available to anyone who inquired."
Still, bid committee officials, and perhaps the most senior members of the IOC, apparently thought they might be able to control the extent of the damage even as it billowed around them.
In December, for example, Johnson, who was called to Switzerland after Hodler's remarks, said he discussed the trouble with a small handful of IOC executive committee members. He then met with IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch.
Of Samaranch, Johnson said: "He told me, 'You have a problem; we have a problem; we will get through this.' "
And perhaps they will, but they haven't yet. And as for the leaked letter that sparked the maelstrom, an ethics panel report last month concluded that it was genuine, but the source still has not been revealed.