Change of Venue Requested in Pilot Flying J Retrial
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Former Pilot Flying J President Mark Hazelwood and two former company executives have asked a federal judge for a change of venue in their upcoming retrial early next year on federal charges of cheating truckers out of diesel fuel rebates.
“With their earlier convictions now vacated, the defendants seek the fair trial to which they are entitled,” said the change-of-venue motion filed earlier this month. “The high-decibel press coverage from the east Tennessee media has poisoned the jury pool to the point that a fair trial in east Tennessee is impossible.”
In their request, Hazelwood, former Pilot Vice President Scott Wombold and former Pilot account representative Heather Jones ask Senior U.S. District Court Judge Curtis Collier to move their new trial from Chattanooga, Tenn., to federal courts in Arkansas, Missouri or North Carolina.
Former Pilot Flying J President Mark Hazelwood shown with his wife, Joanne, in September 2018. (Caitie McMekin/Knoxville News Sentinel)
“Not only has the east Tennessee media long assumed — and promoted — the defendants’ guilt, but it has also consistently published false, biased and inflammatory content, and exponentially amplified audio recordings that were so prejudicial as to warrant reversal,” the motion said.
From 2013 to present, 2,663 media stories were published in Tennessee regarding the case, the motion said.
They were convicted by a Chattanooga jury Feb. 15, 2018, in connection with a multimillion-dollar fraud scheme to siphon fuel rebates from thousands of truckers. However, they are scheduled to be retried Feb. 1, 2022, after an appeals court in October reversed their convictions due to Collier, of Chattanooga, allowing “inappropriate secret tape-recorded conversations among the executives to be heard by the jury.”
In its Oct. 14 decision, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the federal district court wrongly admitted recordings of Hazelwood using “deeply offensive racist and misogynistic language” on the theory that if Hazelwood was “reckless enough to use language that could risk public outrage against the company, he was a ‘bad businessman,’ and as a bad businessman, he was also reckless enough to commit fraud.”
wwitv.com
In a related affidavit also filed earlier this month, Hazelwood asked Collier to recuse himself from the retrial, saying his actions during the trial were biased, and that allowing the recordings to be heard by the jury showed that “a reasonable person, if aware of all the relevant circumstances, might question the court’s impartiality.”
Hazelwood wrote that the recordings “had no place in this fraud prosecution: They were irrelevant, they tainted Mr. Hazelwood in the minds of the jurors and any other person exposed to them, and they increased the likelihood that someone passing on Mr. Hazelwood’s fate would be swayed less by the facts and more by revulsion at the recordings’ content.”
The case began with a raid on Pilot’s headquarters in Knoxville, Tenn. More than 50 FBI and IRS agents poured into the company’s three-story offices on the afternoon of April 15, 2013.
Prior to Hazelwood’s trial, 14 former Pilot sales executives had been charged, pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with the government while awaiting sentencing. Hazelwood originally was sentenced to 12½ years in prison for his leadership role and fined $750,000.
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