Chapter
3
Parking
tickets; tutor Jennifer Wiley
Evidence of more wrongdoings had continued to surface in
the late summer of 2010, and as a result local North Carolina media entities
approached UNC with numerous public records requests. Instead of being forthright and releasing
much of the information, however, the school chose to stonewall behind a team
of lawyers and delay the release of key records and documents – a practice that
actually continues to stretch into 2014.
One set of records was finally released in June of 2011 after the State
Court of Appeals denied the school’s request to delay the release pending an
appeal. According to a June 16, 2011,
article from the Raleigh News and
Observer, this was brought about following a lawsuit by a consortium of
media outlets that had requested – and been denied by UNC – those numerous
public records.
A key release dealt with on-campus parking tickets
received by fewer than twelve football players.
The players had been specifically named/requested by the media
consortium due to the fact that they were some of the key pieces involved in
the ongoing NCAA investigation. According
to that same News and Observer
article, those players tallied 395 parking violations from early 2007 through
August 2010. The latter month and year
was when several of the news entities had made their documents request, meaning
the school had fought their release for almost a full year. This was a stark contrast to the comments
made in the previous chapter by people such as Dick Baddour, Erskine Bowles,
and Bob Winston who pledged to do whatever it took to get to the bottom of the
school’s scandalous issues.
The 395 tickets led to fines totaling $13,125. Some of the specific details behind those
various numbers revealed much more, however, and would eventually lead to the
discovery of deeper problems. According
to the News and Observer, Greg Little,
a former wide receiver who was ruled permanently ineligible the previous season
due to NCAA agent violations, was responsible for 93 of the tickets. Even more shocking was the fact that Little
was ticketed in five different vehicles, and that those vehicles had nine
different license plates on them, apparently in part from the use of dealer
tags. According to a wralsportsfan.com article, by law
dealers cannot issue temporary tags to the same vehicle for consecutive
months. However, the parking records
showed that one of Little’s vehicles bore temporary tags for the months of
March and April of 2008. Both of those
30-day tags traced back to a company in Durham named 919 Imports. That auto dealer had closed by the time the
parking records were finally released, and the business owner, Shawn E. Brown,
was serving a federal sentence for money laundering. Interestingly, a somewhat related series of
events would unfold two years later during the summer of 2013 when UNC star
basketball player PJ Hairston would be connected to vehicles supplied by
another convicted felon from Durham.
Those events will be covered in full detail in a later chapter.
*
* *
It would eventually be revealed that Jennifer Wiley, the
UNC tutor noted in the previous chapter, paid $1,789 in August 2010 for some of
Greg Little’s aforementioned parking tickets.
As more information about Wiley was uncovered, her role – and that of
the academic support system at UNC – would become more prominent. According to a timeline provided by espn.go.com, Wiley began her employment
with UNC’s academic support center in August of 2007 during her junior year as
a student at the university. During the
subsequent three years she provided a number of impermissible educational
benefits to athletes, mainly in the manner of making substantive changes to
papers, and also composing entire sections in some cases. There was also the payment of Little’s
parking tickets, and at the time that summarized the basic extent of her
impermissible assistance. Despite these
impermissible transgressions that were still unknown at the time, Wiley was seen
fit to receive an institutional award for tutoring excellence by the university
upon her graduation in May of 2009. The
fall of 2013 would shed much more light on her true role, however, and would
later paint many of the comments made by those who had defended her in a very
hypocritical light.
*
* *
Beginning in October of 2013, the NC Secretary of State
would begin issuing indictments based on its investigation into sports
agents. Jennifer Wiley (now with the
married last name of Thompson) was the first to be indicted, and the
information that was revealed showed that much of her illegal involvement was
never uncovered during the initial NCAA investigation of the scandal. Secretary of State documents showed that she
received thousands of dollars in cash (through the mail) from sports agents,
and would then pass that money on to football (and one-time basketball) player
Greg Little. Again, the documents
associated with the indictment would counter many of the supporting claims made
by her defenders several years earlier.
Those indictments will be covered in greater detail in a later chapter.
In March of 2012, Joseph B. Cheshire V, a Raleigh lawyer
who was representing Wiley at the time, gave an interview with the Raleigh News and Observer in support of his
client. In the coinciding news article
Cheshire indicated that Wiley’s father had sought his counsel shortly after her
role in the scandal became public back in 2010.
Cheshire, a well-known defense lawyer, said he agreed to advise Wiley at
no charge because he believed in her and was sickened by “the extent people
would go to destroy her life for their own sakes.” As a predictable side note, Cheshire is a
graduate of the University of North Carolina.
Up to that point in time Wiley had never talked with NCAA
investigators, and it was later revealed that she stonewalled those from the
Secretary of State as well. Cheshire
stated that she was a “deeply religious” and “big-hearted” young woman, but conceded that the academic assistance that she
had given UNC’s players was “sometimes out of bounds without even knowing she
was, but yes, occasionally just out of bounds.”
He went on to say that she broke “convoluted and arcane” NCAA rules,
apparently referring to assistance on papers, but her efforts to help were no
different from what “thousands of friends, family, fraternity members, suite
mates, girl or boyfriend students” routinely do for students not affiliated
with an athletics program. Cheshire said
Wiley’s motivation was simple: She wanted
to help people who needed help.
The obvious question that is raised regarding Wiley
(Thompson), especially with the fall 2013 Secretary of State indictments, deals
with the illegal acts of accepting cash payments via the US Postal Service
across state lines, and then funneling that money to collegiate athletes. Greg Little has since admitted to receiving
more than $20,000 during his time at UNC.
None of that was mentioned by her lawyer in the March 2012 article; he
simply decried her as a victim who only wished to help athletes with their
school work. So it begs the question:
did Cheshire know that Wiley had accepted cash payments and was giving it to
players? If so, did he deliberately omit
that information when verbally defending his client? Or did Wiley simply lie to her lawyer, in
essence continuing the lack of clarity and communication that she had shown the
NCAA – and would later show the Secretary of State?
Other troubling facets of the Wiley situation were
connected to her post-UNC employment.
According to the same News and
Observer article that is quoted in the previous paragraphs, rumors
circulated in the summer of 2009 that she had become “too friendly” with
student athletes, and her employment contract was not renewed as a result. According to an ESPN timeline, this decision
was reached in August 2009 by the director of the Academic Support Center and
the Assistant AD for Certification.
However, she was soon thereafter hired directly by head football coach
Butch Davis to help tutor his son, a high school student at the time. Wiley would continue to provide impermissible
academic assistance to UNC players even after she was no longer employed by the
university, and despite being sent a letter by the university that it was not
okay to continue providing tutoring services to student athletes. She also continued to provide impermissible
monetary gifts to players – again, during a timeframe that seemingly overlapped
with her personal employment with head football coach Butch Davis.
Wiley, an Education major while at UNC, went on to teach
for a short time in elementary schools in both Durham and Raleigh. Her employment stints were brief, however,
due in part to her reputation and past involvement in the scandal. According to her lawyer, in September 2011
she resigned from Jeffreys Grove Elementary School in Raleigh after a little
more than a month on the job. Cheshire
said she quit because parents complained she was “the UNC tutor.”
*
* *
The essential (and unanswered)
questions:
-- Why did the
university fight and delay the release of so many public records (a practice
that continues well into 2014), despite the continued insistence by its leaders
that they want to fix the problems within their athletic programs?
-- What did Jennifer Wiley’s
lawyer know (in 2012) regarding her illegal funneling of money to UNC players?
-- Why would a head
coach hire a former university tutor – a tutor whose prior university
employment had been discontinued by the school due to her becoming “too close”
to players (on his very own team)?
-- Were/are there
deeper connections between UNC athletes and Durham felons regarding the use of
vehicles?