Link To New York Times
(3/11/99)
NEW YORK (AP) _ A former organizer at the heart of the Salt Lake Olympic bribery scandal says the senior U.S. official of the games knew about the vote-buying scheme, a newspaper reported today.
Dave Johnson, who was senior vice president of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee and long involved in the city's Olympic campaign, told The New York Times that he discussed "everything" about the program with Anita DeFrantz, an International Olympic Committee member from Los Angeles.
DeFrantz denied Johnson's statement, which marked the first time that the current IOC vice president and highest-ranking woman in the Olympic community was said to have had direct knowledge of the cash-and-gifts plans.
"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 of 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."
Johnson, who resigned in January and has been identified as one of the operators of the inducement scheme, told the Times that if an IOC member had demanded favors, DeFrantz's response was, "'That's not good,' or something like that. She didn't say, 'Don't do it."'
DeFrantz said the discussions Johnson described "never happened."
"I was never asked if it was OK, or if they should do anything, or if it was a way to win the games," she told the newspaper.
Nine IOC members have resigned or been expelled in the scandal and 19 others remain under investigation. De Frantz has not been implicated in any of the half-dozen investigations made public so far.
The Times report also said that minutes of the bid committee's senior management meetings and the handwritten notes of the lawyer who was the committee's secretary for 1994-95 were shredded or otherwise destroyed in the offices of Ray Quinney & Nebeker, the bid committee's lawyer.
James S. Jardine, the firm's managing director who also served as the bid committee's lawyer, said the documents detailed the committee's actions over the final months of the bid process and were the only files destroyed. He could offer no reason for the action or say who might have carried it out.
