Life after Byron
April 18, 2013Cleveland Browns 2013 Schedule Released
April 18, 2013The Plain Dealer’s John Caniglia is reporting that Jimmy Haslam’s Pilot Flying J travel centers has engaged in fraud for many years, according to an affidavit.
“Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam’s travel center company for “many years” engaged in a fraud scheme to keep money owed to customers as gas rebates, according to documents filed in federal court Thursday,” writes Caniglia. “Employees targeted unsophisticated trucking companies through a rebate program. Federal documents unsealed today also say he was present for discussions about the rebate fraud activities.”
Caniglia describes a 120-page affidavit to a search warrant that says Pilot Flying J sales employees withheld fuel price rebates and discounts in an attempt to boost company profitability as well as personal sales commissions. The most damning evidence may be in the report that Haslam, majority owner of the Cleveland Browns, was aware of the fraud.
The entire affadavit can be read within the original Caniglia report. This story is still developing. Neither the Browns nor Jimmy Haslam (who was in Berea today) have commented about the case.
[Related: Banner and Lombardi hold pre-draft press conference]
57 Comments
all I want to do is cheer for a friggin’ football team
JIMMMAAAAAAYYYYYY
Well, son, you’ve come to the wrong place.
same here
Amen.
We all knew this was coming, didn’t we? The FBI and IRS don’t join forces to storm and lock down a place just because an “insignificant number” of customers didn’t get their rebates.
Ah well, they can plug this into the upcoming Kevin Costner movie as a subplot.
Either way, this is all Art Modell’s fault for firing Paul Brown
Perhaps you could be granted a rebate for your troubles?
Plot needs more high ankle sprains and staph infection drama
Damn Steelers got over on us again!
Your in Texas for God’s sake pick a high school it’ll probably be better then the Browns!
Art got us from beyond the grave.
Anyone know what Randy Lerner is doing these days? lol
Wouldn’t it be great if the debt withheld was enough to force him to sell the team? I bet that wouldn’t make any headlines, or be coupled with the other Cleveland “events”
What this team needed was more criminal-types…
You can’t make this stuff up….. Gas rebate fraud! Couldn’t they at least ‘boost’ some trucks or something?
LOL! What a crook. Just another drop in the bucket for Browns fans.
He’s going to have to move the team to L.A. to save the company.
And more “#Progress”, but less “Progress”
Okay, boys, it’s time to pony up some dough. Let’s put together an ownership team. Who’s in?
The orange jumpsuit will go nicely with the orange ties.
Will the Browns’ war room be moved to cuyahoga county jail?
If I move some money over from my Fantasy Baseball, Bracket, and Super Bowl Squares budgets, I should be able to come up with a tidy four-figure sum. So I’ll be the lovable, hard-drinking partner who never attends any of the meetings but gets the loge on Sundays. I’m in.
You just described all of us!
You can’t make this stuff up..
As the large heavy door creaked open, the underling apprhensively entered the cavernous office. “Sir?” “Sir?” “Our agent in Tennesse has reported back, the operation was a complete succes!”, “Sir?”.
Mr. Rooney slowly raised a skeletal hand from the snifter of Louis XIII, he waved the man away and returned his bony digit to circling the rim of the glass causing a sound that made his decrepit cat wince, and scuttle under the fur bare bear skin rug, a prize from Theodore Roosevelt himself.
What passed for a smile slowly stretched across skin so dry and weathered it could have belonged on the heads of any of the many mounted creatures long since departed this earth as part of Mr. Rooney’s insatiable bloodlust. He stared at the CGI map of Northeast Ohio as it showed the Yellow and Black slowly but fully covering the last pockets of Orange and Brown. Haslam had been a patsy brought to the Steelers as part of an impossibly intricate plan to finally break the will of the few remaining Cleveland faithful.
Slowly he ambled to a window and opened it, surely even from here he could hear the last dying gasps of a once proud city. He cocked his head, and strained his near lifeless cold blooded body into the warming spring air.
(very faintly but clearly)
“Bernie, Bernie!, Woah Woah!
How could this be! The smile faded to a sneer, his few teeth not left in the corpses of puppies – the only food that made him feel whole – nashed together. The must be done! They have suffered the ultimate humiliation, they must capitulate! He listened again, the bloodless nub of an ear long since devoid of any resemblance to a human body part strained harder
(Louder)
Woof! WOOF!!! WOOOOF!!!
AUUGGGGGGH! Rooney reached into a small pen and snapped a rabbits neck, the pen existed only for this purpose. Disgusted he swallowed the last of his brandy and called someone hissing into the phone to close several orphanges immediately.
Im in, Ive got $14230 dollars its got some blood on it and you are going to have to find a way to exchange it from Costa
Rican currency but Im in
So simple in concept and yet so damnably difficult in execution. I wish I found humor in these types of ridiculous travails but I just feel sick.
Yea but will it have a logo?
we just can’t have nice things
At what point can we, as a city, collectively step up and pool funds together to purchase the team, a la Green Bay? This is beyond comical.
This is so skeevy – it’s not just that the guy looks like a fraud, but that the fraud itself is so damned low rent, for lack of a better word. And how the NFL didn’t know about this is a question that needs answering.
I have a feeling Hanslem will be one of the shortest-tenured owners in the history of the NFL. This cuts too close to the heart of NFL fans to let him keep owning.
Can Drew Carey buy the Browns?
no, just a number. he’s going to have to lobby to get stripes on the sleeves though.
So I assume “character” is not one of the criteria for next weeks draft class?
I want badly to make a “Dawg pound” prison joke, but alas, this is a family site
Why not push for the Green Bay public ownership model in Cleveland? I don’t think any fan base will ever have a more compelling argument to make after the Lerner/Haslam experience.
Somewhere, in some far away penitentiary, Jeremiah Pharms is slow-clapping…
More likely a federal penitentiary
Everyone gets angry when Jimmy tries to pass his gas!
Well played Pittsburgh. Well played.
What’s a Hanslem?
Except that Flying J and Jimmy Haslam funds are totally different things. The biggest issue for Haslam would at this point be criminal prosecution – he’s rich enough to weather fines. Assuming, of course, that he actually had knowledge of fraud. Someone saying he does and him actually knowing about it are, in fact, two different things.
I refuse to be down about this. This is THE BEST! The Cleveland sports narrative won’t die, nay, cannot die. Our cliche of sports doom, fed by new events, wilder and more unbelievable than the last. This one’s beauty is supermodel-like – the NFL, those prissies who yanked DeBartolo’s active ownership for failing to report someone else, deemed Haslam such a perfect candidate that they probably lost interest in a vetting update even if suspicions were in the air. He was a billionaire paying cash, baby, a hale fellow well met with that southern propecia personality, someone who would certainly kick it up a notch when he hosted owner gatherings.
Meanwhile, the national announcers will continue to call Cleveland the Comeback City during shots of the lakefront. No no, fellas. Every time it looks like we have a handhold out, ever more fantastic circumstances grab the foot and pull us back into the murk. Lebron’s phantom sore elbow was transparent, just biding time until something real. This time an affable billionaire has skeletons, big closets full (allegedly), spilling out before his first full season. This is slow-motion theater, played out over decades. The BEST.
Works for the Ravens
I thought about this, but if you think it’s a clownshow now, wait until the City is in charge of it. Also, IIRC the NFL “outlawed” it after Green Bay.
The NFL has since made a rule that teams cannot follow that ownership model. Green Bay is grandfathered in, but no other team can have public ownership. Sad.
Apparently the NFL used the same vetting process for Haslam that Butch Davis used when he drafted Jeremiah Pharms.
somewhere in Napa Valley, Carmen Policy froze as he caught wind of a familiar scent, a not unpleasant scent, one he had not smelled in many years. He stood as rigid as a pointer in the field. He didn’t even hear his wife asking if something was wrong as he wondered whether he still had a valid license to practice law anywhere.
lol “southern propecia personality”
Yeah, I know it is quixotic, and that is sad. But as Walter White said, “There is nothing in life that can’t be negotiated”