Guild Missing More than Money
Yet another lawyer for Wayne Gertmenian claims that the checks the former Jockeys’ Guild president cashed the day he was fired were for money owed to him, reports Liz Mullen in the Sports Business Journal: “It was back pay and it was owed to him under his contract,” said attorney Mark Werksman. Guild lawyer Barry Broad alleges that not only did Gertmenian cash the checks without permission, but that he ran off with Guild memorabilia, including Bill Shoemaker’s boots and a bust of Eddie Arcaro. “We would like our money back,” Broad said. “We would also like Willie Shoemaker’s boots and Eddie Arcaro’s head back.”
The ongoing scandal is recapped in a lengthy LA Times article today. There’s not much new information (I’m assuming anyone landing on this site has a passing knowledge of the story), except for this bit:
Pepperdine, where Gertmenian, 66, is a longtime economics professor, is investigating questions about his resume. In an October hearing, U.S. representatives ridiculed his claim that he worked on U.S.-Soviet relations for the National Security Council during the Nixon and Ford administrations, while another organization told The Times that Gertmenian’s claim that he had served on its board of directors was false.
Looking for the link to Gertmenian’s resume (here), I came across this article from the Thoroughbred Times in 2001, when Gertmenian was brought into the Guild, which makes several familiar points about the fired president and his consulting company, Matrix Capital Associates:
Matrix is run out of Gertmenian’s Monrovia, California, home, Gaston said…. Matrix associates will not answer questions about its operation, Gaston said, and the company has been forced to put a “lockdown on the media” and others in the Thoroughbred industry because Gertmenian and Matrix employees and their families have been harassed….
Gertmenian’s resume on the Pepperdine Web site states that he held governmental positions during the Watergate era. In the 1975 Congressional Directory, he was listed as a special assistant to the secretary of Housing and Urban Development in ’74. President Richard M. Nixon’s former HUD Secretary, James T. Lynn, said that he did not remember Gertmenian. Nor did HUD Deputy Secretary James Mitchell or Northwestern University professor Donald Haider, a former White House fellow who worked closely with Lynn and Mitchell….
Gertmenian’s resume states that he functioned as chief detente negotiator in Moscow for the head of the National Security Council and as an emissary to Tehran for the secretary of commerce, but those duties could not be confirmed. John Stempel, Ph.D., director of the Patterson School of Diplomacy at the University of Kentucky, spent 24 years in the United States Foreign Service focusing on political and economic affairs in Africa, India, and Iran. From July 1975 through the summer of 1979, three months after the Iranian revolution, Stempel served in Tehran as the deputy chief of the political section for the State Department and was acting political consul.
Stempel said that most of the files for the U.S. Iranian embassy had been sealed and that seeking information that might be contained in those files would be “pretty hard.” He said, however, that if Gertmenian had been in Tehran during the years he served there he would have known him. “I can guarantee you he never showed up in Tehran as an emissary of anybody,” Stempel said….
Gertmenian’s statement that he serves on the board of directors of AmRus Life Insurance Co., a firm that is not listed with the California Department of Insurance, also could not be verified.
I am flabbergasted. How did this man manage to assume the Guild’s presidency and operate without much oversight for the past four years with this much stinking about his background from the start? Should there have been questions about Guild operations long before the October congressional hearings forced the matter?
Posted by JC in Jockeys' Insurance on 12/13/2005 @ 9:30 pm / Follow @railbird on Twitter
