© 2014 The Texas Lawbook.
By Michael Lindenberger, JD – WASHINGTON (July 27) — Bill Moore’s wife of 52 years still wasn’t speaking to him. Two days before, a federal jury had unanimously sided against Moore, proving that getting what you want — even after spending $2 million and 25 years to get it — can be a miserable experience.
Moore, a former Dallas CEO who was indicted in 1988 on federal fraud charges — only to be acquitted when the government’s case collapsed spectacularly the following year — filed suit in 1991 against five former postal inspectors. He said they sought to have him indicted to serve their Postal Service superiors’ vendetta against Moore and his company, Irving-based Recognition Equipment Inc.
Photo by Dallas Morning News
But over the course of the five-week trial, the nine-member jury hadn’t bought it — any of it — and Chelen Moore was having a hard time accepting that, Moore said over morning coffee last Wednesday in the dingy hotel he’s called home for the past two months.
“She’s mad at the Postal Service and the inspectors,” he said, adding that she’s been mad at them for a long time. “She won’t even use the mailbox.”
Moore himself looked remarkably composed Wednesday, in a crisp shirt, straight back and an easy, confident smile that together made him look a good 10 years younger than his 75.
When Moore and his wife arrived in Dallas with their three kids in 1982, it was their 17th stop since the two were married in 1962. The city surprised them.
“We loved Dallas. It was the friendliest place we had ever lived,” Moore recalled. “I would be at the grocery store and people would stop me to ask if I needed help. These were just other customers. As someone who had moved a lot, I immediately had my back up. What did they want?
But they really were actually just asking to help. We decided we’d stay.”
Meanwhile, Moore and his family weren’t just taking to Dallas; Dallas was taking to him, too.
He was named a businessman of the year by the Dallas Business Journal and was appointed to a number of task forces and other civic campaigns by Mayor Starke Taylor.
Roger Staubach was introduced to Moore soon after Moore’s arrival in Dallas, and the two found they shared a lot in common. Both were devout Catholics, heavily involved in Ursuline Academy and Jesuit College Prep high schools. Last month, Staubach told the jury that Moore was devoted to his business and to Dallas, just as he was.
“That was my life in the 1980s,” Staubach said. “And Bill was, as the CEO of the company, becoming a major leader in our community. He was extremely generous with his time, his involvement in the community, and his reputation was fantastic.”
Postal contract
REI made optical scanning machines that post offices around the world used to sort mail and the Federal Reserve Bank used to sort money.
One contract REI had been aiming for since the 1970s was with the U.S. Postal Service, which employed scanners to read and sort mail. But while the service had awarded REI development contracts worth about $60 million, the real prize — a deal to supply the machines themselves — remained out of reach.
In the mid-’80s, Moore began courting Rep. Martin Frost, D-Dallas, and other members of Congress to pressure the Postal Service to reconsider its long-standing contracts with a German manufacturer of scanning equipment that Moore argued was costing taxpayers money.
“He ended up taking me around Congress and introducing me to other lawmakers,” Moore said of Frost. “They were very receptive.”
Frost said in an interview last week that he never got to know Moore well. But helping his business was a routine decision, he said.
“The machines they made worked pretty well, and seemed to do what he said they would do,” he said, recalling a trip to the plant. “I tried to help him just like I would any of the businesses in my district. His company employed a lot of people in my district.
REI had another ally in Washington. Postal Service board member Peter Voss, who would become vice chairman, publicly encouraged REI in its bid for work with the Postal Service.
Moore said he saw Voss as nothing more than an ally who understood the benefit of REI’s technology.
“If he walked in here right now, looking like he did back then, you’d immediately think he was somebody — he looked like he might as well be the vice president of the United States,” Moore recalled. “He fooled us, like he fooled a lot of other people.”
Voss persuaded REI to pay John Gnau Associates, a Detroit-area consulting firm, up to $30,000 a month to press REI’s bid for a new $234 million contract with the Postal Service.
Moore insists he didn’t know that Voss had a kickback arrangement with the firm’s president, William Spartan. Voss would be convicted and sent to prison in 1986, with Spartan following a few months later.
The government didn’t believe Moore, and in late 1988, Moore, the company and another executive were each indicted on a slew of theft- and fraud-related charges.
‘A real catastrophe’
News of the indictment detonated among the Dallas business elite.
“We were totally in shock,” Staubach testified. “It was a major deal in Dallas because Bill was not only active in the community, he was CEO of a major company. … It was a real catastrophe for him.”
Facing a possible sentence of 33 years, Moore was left in a kind of limbo during the year it took for the trial to begin. The REI board rented him a small office across town from REI headquarters and paid his legal expenses. But he was suspended, with pay, from running the company.
Every afternoon around 4, he’d leave the rented office and go to Twin Wells golf course in Irving.
“It wasn’t in great shape then, and still isn’t — but I’d play golf by myself,” Moore said. “Every day for a year. The thing about golf is you can’t play it and think about other things. It was the best therapy I could have gotten.”
The trial began and for weeks the government put on its case — example after example of what their lawyers would call “indicia of guilt.” There were missing notebook pages, phone calls between Voss and Moore and what prosecutors claimed was a penchant for secrets.
But no evidence of a crime. After six weeks, U.S. District Judge George Revercomb stopped the trial and ordered an acquittal. The defense hadn’t called a single witness.
The judge’s opinion dismissing the charges was unequivocal — and, Moore said, he ordered the press and others to remain in the courtroom as he read it from the bench.
“After a full and hard review of the government’s evidence presented over a six-week period, there is no legitimate or reasonable inference that the defendants knew beyond a reasonable doubt of any conspiracy to defraud the United States government,” Revercomb wrote.
“Much of what the government characterizes as incriminatory evidence is not persuasive of guilt when viewed in its full context. In fact, some of [it] is exculpatory and points toward innocent conduct of the defendants.”
Acquittal not cure-all
The acquittal meant sweet vindication for Moore and his friends.
Staubach said his family and the Moores attended Thanksgiving Day Mass that year to celebrate the acquittal, and have done so together every year since.
But while Moore was free, he couldn’t get back what he had lost. REI had changed ownership, and “there was no job to return to,” he said Wednesday.
And what was worse — he slowly came to understand there never would be another job for him running a publicly traded corporation. The indictment carried a taint in the business world that couldn’t be washed away.
Moore said it took a year, but finally he realized he never would have the career he had once expected.
“I eventually had to see myself as permanently damaged goods. I didn’t want to accept this, but I had to,” he said.
Another thought occurred to him much more readily. The day he walked out of the Washington, D.C., courtroom a free man, he began thinking about how to stand up to the postal agents he felt had tried to ruin his life out of a vendetta their bosses had carried against him and REI.
He knew a lawyer from Pittsburgh, a Jones Day partner named Paul “Mickey” Pohl, who like Staubach shared both military experience and a strong Catholic faith with Moore.
In 1991, they filed suit seeking millions in damages from the postal inspectors and others. They had no idea they’d be working together on the case for nearly 25 years.
“That’s what you get when you are a lawyer,” Pohl said. “When you agree to help a client, you don’t agree to help as long as it doesn’t take too long. It’s like a roller coaster; you sign on and you take the whole ride.”
The government immediately asserted immunity for the investigators and the prosecutors and kept making that argument in various forms for the next 20 years, blocking time and again prospects for a trial.
Finally, a trial
The delays grew so long that in 2011, Circuit Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson wrote an opinion to lament the delaying tactics. “To say this has not been the government’s finest hour is a colossal and lamentable understatement,” she wrote.
The government appealed that ruling, too, but in January 2013, it had finally exhausted its appeals. A trial date was set, and after new delays, began last month.
Some witnesses — even one of the defendants — had died. The prosecutor who pursued the original case came to court in a wheelchair.
And then, last week, the verdict came down. Moore lost badly, on every count.
The loss sent Moore’s wife into a grieving kind of silence, Moore said, though he added that by Wednesday she had begun to come out of it.
Pohl and Moore still have one more chance to prevail. The judge will consider on her own a final charge that the government itself is liable for the prosecution. But it’s a tough case to win, even though Pohl said some of the evidence admitted this time will be stronger than what the jury was able to see.
Moore said he’s not especially confident. If he had it to do over again, knowing he’d lose, he’d like to have his $2 million back.
On the other hand, he’s satisfied knowing he stood up to the government.
“If we can’t hold the police accountable, with all our advantages and legal resources, and bring them into court, then nobody can. We felt we had to do this,” he said.
Besides, Moore said life has offered plenty of compensations — including a blizzard of messages of love from friends in Dallas since news of the jury verdict spread last week.
“I’ve been married to a woman I love for 52 years. My three children live close by with their families — one is in Houston and the other two are within two blocks of us. I have no real regrets.”
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