Former USOC Official Pleads Guilty to Fraud

Alfredo LaMont, a former U.S. Olympic Committee official, pleaded guilty Tuesday to two felony counts. The case reveals for the first time the Justice Department’s game plan for prosecuting crimes stemming from the Salt Lake City corruption scandal.

As part of a plea bargain, LaMont, 50, pleaded guilty in federal court in Salt Lake to one count of tax fraud and another of conspiring to obstruct the IRS.

LaMont had resigned in January 1999 as the USOC’s director of international relations. It was disclosed then that he’d had a secret side job in the early 1990s--providing insider information to the Salt Lake committee bidding for the 2002 Winter Games.

He is the first Olympic official charged in the scandal, which erupted in late 1998 amid revelations that Salt Lake bidders showered International Olympic Committee members or their relatives with more than $1 million in cash and inducements. The Justice Department has been investigating since.

Two others were charged last year in connection with the scandal. Salt Lake City businessman David Simmons pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count. John Kim, the son of influential South Korean IOC member Kim Un Yong, faces felony charges but has moved to Seoul.

Ten IOC members have either resigned or been expelled.

Senior members of the Salt Lake bid also have left their jobs, among them Tom Welch, who headed the bid, and Dave Johnson, his top lieutenant.

The case against LaMont reveals that federal agents and prosecutors have spent months ferreting out bank records in the United States and abroad in compiling an extensive paper trail against those they suspect of misconduct.

Documents filed Tuesday detail how LaMont used a Mexican company called Citius--as well as bank accounts in Colorado and in Brownsville, Texas--in an attempt to conceal $48,514 he received from 1990 to 1993 from the Salt Lake bid committee.

In court Tuesday, LaMont also admitted having received $40,000 in 1997 from the committee in Rome then bidding for the 2004 Summer Games but did not report the money on his tax return for that year. Athens, not Rome, ultimately was awarded the 2004 Games. Rome had not previously been linked to the Olympic scandal.

The court documents also signal that U.S. prosecutors are actively building a case against others, but no one else was named.