TBI shelves THP ticket probe

Governor wanted incomplete investigation redone; Agency says no need, will send DA old report

By TRENT SEIBERT and SHEILA WISSNER
Staff Writers Tennessean.com
December 8, 2005

Tennessean Exclusive

Gov. Phil Bredesen last week expressed alarm at an inadequate and incomplete THP internal investigation of possible ticket fixing, and he ordered the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to step in.

"I've taken that file and asked that it be sent to the TBI," Bredesen said then. "I've just told them I want that investigated … You take it and follow it through to its conclusion."

What the governor didn't know, officials now say, was that the TBI already had had its chance to follow up on reports of widespread ticket fixing at the Tennessee Highway Patrol.

A Tennessean review of the case files indicates exactly what the governor saw — questions that weren't asked and leads that weren't followed.

TBI agents were heavily involved in a 2000-01 investigation in which witnesses indicated that THP officers dismissed tickets in return for ham from a Knoxville meatpacking plant, The Tennessean has learned.

Despite Bredesen's request last week, TBI has no plans for new interviews or research.

Mark Gwyn, who leads the TBI, said that the agents at the time were thorough. He said the agency only plans to take one action in response to Bredesen: hand over an Internal Affairs file to the prosecutor in East Tennessee for review.

"I'm the last person that should be Monday-morning quarterbacking this Internal Affairs, what they did," Gwyn said.

"But since the governor has asked us to look into it, I think the appropriate thing now is to take that to the DA, let him review it, let us sit down with him and say, 'Let's get on the same sheet here.' "

Bredesen last week had said that same file "really calls into question for me the effectiveness of the … Internal Affairs … that a file can exist with those kind of allegations in it that at the very least were not followed up on."

Bredesen's spokeswoman said the governor did not have time yesterday to answer questions, which included why he didn't know the TBI had already investigated the matter or whether he would call in other authorities.

Trooper Jerry Watson pleaded guilty in 2001 in a case that involved squelching a ticket for one employee of the meat company. The man whose ticket was fixed — Brandon Bright — told the TBI that it was not an isolated incident. Watson told an investigator that a THP supervisor went to the meat plant as well, according to a transcript.

Al Schmutzer, an East Tennessee district attorney, handled Watson's case, and TBI officials said they plan to send him the Internal Affairs file for review, the file that Bredesen asked TBI to investigate further.

Asked yesterday, Schmutzer was not sure why TBI would take that action.

"Well, it's fine if they want to," he said, "but I wouldn't have jurisdiction. It may be off base, because other than what he (Jerry Watson) did in my district, the other talks about hams and stuff like that … was Knox County. I don't know what they're thinking about."

The Internal Affairs report being handed off to Schmutzer raises more questions than it answers about troopers' relationship with Lay Packing Co., the Knoxville company which has since shut its doors.

Joe Lay, who was president of the firm, told The Tennessean yesterday that he was never interviewed by TBI or THP. He said he had no knowledge of ticket fixing for his employees. Aside from Watson, no one was ever prosecuted or disciplined.

Investigative threads

THP and TBI files reviewed by The Tennessean indicate that further investigation might have meant trouble for other troopers.

Bright, then a 23-year-old maintenance worker on the night shift at Lay, provided investigators with names and details alluding to a wider scheme, according to documents in the files.

"I had heard that if an employee at Lays got a ticket from a trooper, you could always get it taken care of," Bright told TBI Agent Chad Smith in 2001, according to a written statement both men signed.

"I assumed this was true because I often see troopers at Lays after hours in the alleyway, where I heard they are given meat. This happens once or twice a month.

"I understand that the troopers have the (Lay's) operator's pager number and would call him when they are coming down."

Smith declined comment through a TBI spokeswoman.

Smith's report, recounting his interview with Watson, stated that the trooper said he traded liquor and tomatoes in exchange for meat from Lay's.

The report gives no indication that Smith asked why that would be the case or where the liquor and tomatoes came from.

Watson also told Smith that other troopers went to get meat, but Smith's report does not indicate that Smith asked who they were.

Bright still lives in Knoxville, where he spoke to The Tennessean this week. He recalled being interviewed by the TBI at his home about a year after Watson pulled him over on I-40.

Bright says he told the TBI that it was "common knowledge" that people at the plant got tickets fixed.

"People around Lay's knew about it," and because everyone else was doing it, he thought he would give it a try, he said.

Exactly how the ticket was fixed, he said he doesn't know. He said he talked to a fellow employee, who offered to help him, and took it from there.

In an October 2001 interview conducted by Richard "Dickie" Pope, then-assistant director of Internal Affairs for THP, Watson was questioned for 30 minutes about his role in forging a judge's signature in order to dismiss a ticket.

Watson refers to a "bartering" system between the Lay employees and the troopers, who received meat from the plant. Pope did not pursue questioning that may have determined what troopers offered in "barter" for the meat.

Pope quizzed Watson about a lieutenant also stationed in Knoxville who was rumored to have pressured the trooper into the ticket fix.

Watson denied during the interview that he was under any pressure and said he knew of no other troopers fixing tickets — but there were no further Internal Affairs inquiries into the possibility or of the lieutenant who was rumored to have pressured Watson.

Pope said that Watson was his only interview because the trooper admitted to his own guilt to forgery and implicated no one else.

"I got from him, 'I did it,' " Pope, now retired, said in a recent interview. "I couldn't get any information on anyone else pressuring him and brought it back."

None of Pope's supervisors in the Department of Safety asked him to investigate further and the case was closed weeks later, soon after Watson resigned.

The TBI and secrecy

At least one state legislator is concerned that the facts about what happened with the meat company and the troopers may never come out.

Cases investigated by the TBI are exempt from the state's open records act — even for closed cases that are available to the public at other agencies. Although The Tennessean has been able to review some TBI files from the ticket-fixing case, others remain sealed.

That the results of any investigation might be "cloaked" behind secrecy rules is a concern to state Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Mark Norris, R-Collierville, who said he would add this line of inquiry to public hearings he is holding Tuesday on the Highway Patrol scandals.

"We don't want them putting this on some kind of shelf that keeps the public from looking at them," he said.