Though There's No Corpse, The Bid Rigging Trial Of Leonard Lawson And Bill Nighbert Could Feel Like A Funeral. Read More Below.

Trial of influential road contractor begins Monday
By Tom Loftus

LEXINGTON, Ky. — Leonard Lawson, the Bell County native who made a fortune in blacktop and whose campaign contributions gained him access to governors, will stand trial Monday on charges of bribing state officials for inside information that allowed him to pad his profits on state contracts.

Aside Lawson will be co-defendant Bill Nighbert, the former mayor of Williamsburg who became state Transportation Cabinet secretary for Gov. Ernie Fletcher.

Nighbert is accused of leaking the bid information to Lawson and being rewarded with a Toyota Avalon and a consulting job that paid him more than $10,000 a month.

The trial, expected to last at least three weeks, begins with jury selection at 9 a.m. in U.S. District Court in Lexington.
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Over three decades Lawson's companies have won more than a billion dollars in state highway contracts, most of it from contracts where his was the only bid.

During that time he became a major campaign contributor — between 2000 and 2007 alone he and his immediate family gave more than $410,000 in contributions, records show. His employees and associates gave much more.

Along the way he befriended powerful politicians of both parties, including Gov. Paul Patton, Senate President David Williams and House Speaker Greg Stumbo.

“Leonard Lawson's impact and influence in Frankfort goes back long before the matters of this case,” said Larry Forgy, who as the 1995 Republican nominee for governor accused Lawson of using undue influence to make excessive profits from state contracts. “He's been a political power since at least back to 1979.”

Lawson himself said, according tape recorded conversation gathered by the prosecution, “I've been investigated, investigated a million times.”

But while one of his companies pleaded guilty to bid rigging in 1983, Lawson had never been charged — until now.

Lawson's defense team has described their client as a hard-working, self-made man who shuns the limelight. He has contributed generously to charity, and he's built award-winning roads that brought badly needed economic development to rural Kentucky.

Both Lawson and Nighbert have maintained their innocence, waging an aggressive defense that has attacked every facet of the prosecution's case.

They insist Lawson never got inside information. And they say the only witness who will claim knowledge of any bribes —former state highway engineer Jim Rummage — is a liar.

While Rummage is the central witness, others expected to testify include Gov. Steve Beshear, Senate President Williams and Joe Prather, who succeeded Nighbert as Transportation secretary when Beshear became governor in December 2007.

The case has had a rocky history since the two Lawson and Nighbert were first indicted in September 2008.
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The indictment has been revised twice. The trial has been delayed three times.

Forester is the fourth judge to preside after three other judges disqualified themselves — two for past associations with defendants or their lawyers; the third gave no reason.

As of Friday, 613 motions, orders and other filings had been entered in the case.

One of the last documents filed was a list of 104 exhibits the prosecution intends to introduce at trial. The exhibits range from recordings of tape-recorded phone conversations Rummage made with Lawson to a photo of frozen fish that Rummage says Lawson gave him after he delivered a confidential cost estimate at Lawson's house.

The foundation of the prosecution's case is Rummage.

He has said at pretrial hearings that beginning in June of 2006 Nighbert asked him to get from his staff certain confidential cost estimates — known as the “engineer's estimates” — and that these estimates were given to Lawson.

The cabinet routinely makes this estimate for each contract that is bid to see if bids submitted by contractors are reasonable.

An unwritten guideline the cabinet has tried to follow is that in projects where only one bid is submitted and it is more than 7 percent over the estimate, the bid is rejected and the project is re-bid some time later.

A bidder who sees the confidential estimate, and has no one bidding against him, would have a good idea how high he could bid and still win the project.

State records show Lawson-affiliated companies won at least $412 million in state projects in 2006 and 2007. Of that, about $236 million was from contracts where the Lawson company was the lone bidder.

The trial will focus on about 10 contracts where prosecutors allege Nighbert and Rummage leaked cost estimates to Lawson.

Rummage said he personally delivered some of the estimates to Lawson. The first time he did so, he said Lawson gave him $5,000 in $100 bills. Rummage said that on three other occasions Lawson gave him $5,000.

Rummage has not been charged. Court records show federal authorities have not granted or promised him immunity, but told him at one point that “the sky is the limit” when he asked what kind of deal he could get for cooperating.
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The prosecution will also try to prove that as Gov. Ernie Fletcher's term drew to a close, Lawson rewarded Nighbert with a consulting job with Utility Management Group that prosecutors say required little, if any, work.

Utility Management Group is a private company that manages the Mountain Water District in Pike County.

Exhibits filed during a pretrial hearing show that Utility Management Group sent a $36,000 check to a Nighbert company — money he used to buy an Avalon. UMG also sent three monthly checks of $10, 417 each to Nighbert in early 2008.

One goal of the conspiracy, according to the indictment, was to maintain Lawson's influence in the cabinet during the Beshear administration. Beshear and Prather are expected to testify about that aspect.

A crucial part of the prosecution's case are recordings Rummage made of phone conversations with Lawson in March 2008, as well as other tape recordings — and one videotape — of Rummage and Lawson employee Brian Billings, who has been charged with obstruction of justice but will go to trial after this trial ends.

The defense attacked Rummage's credibility during an August hearing where Rummage acknowledged he initially insisted that estimates weren't leaked — but later admitted to investigators they were.

The defense stressed that Rummage would be an unlikely candidate for Nighbert to enlist in a conspiracy. They say Rummage's name appeared on an infamous 2005 “hit list” — a document that identified state workers to be fired or demoted that surfaced during the investigation of hiring practices within the Nighbert Transportation Cabinet.

Nighbert, as the official overseeing all cabinet activities, had legitimate reasons to see the estimates, the defense has said. But the defense insists he never directed Rummage to give them to Lawson, nor did Lawson ever get them.

And, the defense insists, Lawson had nothing to do with Utility Management Group's decision to hire Nighbert.

The defense is also expected to present expert witnesses who will say their analysis of bid results disprove the prosecution's theory that Lawson used the confidential estimates to inflate his bids.
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At the August hearing the defense has stated that Lawson's bids for the contracts that will be mentioned at trial were consistent with bids he made on other contracts.

The defense says that state records show that in most cases the bids were lower than what he — or any contractor — could have bid if he had knowledge of the confidential estimates.

Prosecutors, however, will present their own analysis and say the records shows bids on these contracts were higher than normal for Lawson companies — but not so high as to be rejected by the cabinet.

Reporter Tom Loftus can be reached at (502) 875-5136.