RALEIGH – Former state lottery commission Kevin Geddings will continue testimony Tuesday in his federal fraud trial. Having read all of the coverage thus far and talked to a number of reporters present for his initial testimony, I’d have to say at this point that the defendant isn’t looking too good.
While some may doubt this statement, I was not predisposed to believe that a crime had been committed during the process that led to Geddings’ appointment, much less that he had committed it. Moreover, I saw as potentially plausible his defense: that the state’s conflict-of-interest form asked ambiguous questions, to which he provided flawed but not intentionally deceitful answers.
Obviously it is impossible to know how his testimony is playing to everyone else, but to me it sounds increasingly incredible. The federal prosecutors have done an effective job in raising questions about Geddings’ credibility by focusing on matters other than the Scientific Games contract in question in the indictment. For example, they got him to admit that he should have reported on his North Carolina form more than $70,000 worth of work in South Carolina for a company that provided services to prison inmates. “I clearly made a mistake and left them out,” he said.
And then there was the case of Geddings doing paid public-relations work for former Gov. Jim Hodges while at the same time urging his fellow lottery commissioners to hear from Hodges about the governor’s experience creating that state’s lottery.
Geddings also instructed a staff member via email, subsequent to his appointment to the lottery commission, not to confirm that his company had done hundreds of thousands of dollars in business with Scientific Games. This was not intended to deceive the state, Geddings said later, but only to protect the confidentiality of his clients.
The Feds are trying to establish a pattern – that of a P.R. man with a talent for embellishment or obfuscation – which will support their version of the events for which Geddings is being tried. He even agreed during his testimony, in response to a prosecutor’s question, that his line of business required him to be “creative.” Obviously, the government wants that description of Geddings to persist in our minds, and for “creativity” to shade into “mendacity.”
Still, there is the problem of how to understand what Geddings might have been trying to accomplish with such deceit. He and his attorney, Thomas Manning, have reiterated outside the courtroom that Geddings’ experience with the South Carolina Lottery was widely known in political circles, and indeed that it was the main reason he would have been selected for the North Carolina commission in the first place. Since there is only a couple of major U.S. players in the state-lottery business, it is hard to see how one could have substantial experience with it and not have “ties” to either Scientific Games or GTECH.
Geddings doesn’t have to prove that his answers on the state disclosure form were complete or informative. They weren’t. He doesn’t have to show that any reasonable person would have filled out the form the same way he did. That’s unlikely. What Geddings has to show is that he had no criminal intent to mislead state officials and the general public, that there was no conspiracy to deprive North Carolina government of his “honest services.” That is, he must show that a reasonable person could have read the form’s disclosure requirements as he says he did – as covering ongoing, but not recently concluded, business relationships with potential vendors – and thus that he is not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of fraud.
As it is, this defense seems to rest almost entirely on Geddings’ credibility. Perhaps it has weathered the storm so far, but the structure seems shaky, like that old abandoned barn I saw from the road in Guilford County the other day. It wouldn’t shock me if you said it was still standing today, but you also couldn’t pay me enough to venture inside it.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.