Romney Saved Salt Lake Olympics From Scandal, But at What Price?

(this article was posted back in April, but is worth a second read. The "friends" Romney had who helped him be able to say, “I led an Olympics out of the shadows of scandal” are a lot more questionable than those "friends" of then Senator Obama's who were so roundly scrutinized during the 2008 election.)

"The connections here are more than a decade old now, but they are as fresh as the latest political contributions, some of which came into the Romney kitty as recently as his anniversary visit to Salt Lake. The ethical indifference these ties reveal are at least as important an insight about the candidate’s character—and his executive moral compass—as the deficit-to-profit games were a measure of his managerial skill."

Wayne Barrett - The Dailey Beast

In mid-February, shortly after losing the GOP presidential primaries in Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri, Mitt Romney returned to the scene of perhaps his greatest managerial success. It was the 10th anniversary celebration of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, and Romney—battered by a bruising nomination battle and persistently low approval ratings—was likely eager to bask in the glow of the Games he is widely credited with rescuing from a disastrous bribery scandal.

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It would not be an exaggeration to say that Romney considers his salvaging of the scandal-plagued Games as the turnaround point in his career—Turnaround was the name of his 2004 memoir detailing those years. Having lost badly in his 1994 Senate race against Ted Kennedy, Romney’s acclaimed management of the Salt Lake Games—on the world stage, no less—lifted him back into public prominence and propelled his successful campaign for governor of Massachusetts, which began just weeks after the Olympics ended. “I led an Olympics out of the shadows of scandal” has been Romney’s frequent mantra on the campaign trail for the 2012 election.

But while Romney’s gold-medal acumen in managing the Salt Lake City Olympics has been widely covered, there has been virtually no examination, in this or the 2008 presidential campaign, of how he navigated the ethical swamp he landed in. As he comes closer to wrapping up the GOP nomination, even less has been written about the alliances he made with some of the key figures of the Salt Lake scandal--alliances that have been paying dividends ever since, and helping to finance his presidential ambitions.

Prominent among these is Sead Dizdarevic, a New Jersey travel-company executive who is near the top of Romney’s pyramid of super PAC and campaign benefactors. If all family, corporate, and business-associate donations are included, people connected to Dizdarevic have contributed more than a million dollars to Romney. Dizdarevic, his company, and his family together have given $221,800

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...the conflicted Romney also said that he hoped Welch and Johnson would be cleared. “I’m pulling for them on a personal basis,” he announced. Romney decided soon thereafter to pay Welch and Johnson’s fees, suing the SLOC’s insurer to ultimately cover nearly $12 million in fees. And that was the last anyone ever heard from Romney about the “red flag” Dizdarevic. According to The Real Romney, by Boston Globe reporters Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, Romney tried to cajole the two former directors to take a plea before they were indicted, but that was just a sign of how desperately he seemed to want the case to disappear. In the end, the assumption of the legal bills seemed to do the job, muting the cantankerous former executives—as did Bullock’s decision in 2002 to pay them $1.2 million in withheld compensation.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/12/romney-saved-salt-lake-olympics-from-scandal-but-at-what-price.html