Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2007 | 7:01 a.m.
The police affidavit used to obtain a search warrant for University Medical Center provides enough well-documented facts to warrant an investigation of the public hospital's ousted chief executive, Lacy Thomas.
But it also contains disputed facts and some of the slant and exaggeration more common in the first filings of a nasty divorce case.
Metro Police and those they interviewed present several allegations that, upon closer scrutiny, seem to lack the punch police claim.
That is not entirely surprising, given that the affidavit was designed to grab a judge's attention and convince him that a search of hospital records was warranted.
Still, the holes in the affidavit could be a problem for police trying to shore up a case against Thomas.
Those holes include:
Police raided UMC on Jan. 16 looking for evidence that Thomas gave do-nothing contracts to friends and associates from Chicago.
The raid came the same day that an independent auditor revealed to the Clark County Commission that the hospital had lost more than $34 million in the last fiscal year, not the $18.8 million that Thomas had told commissioners in recent months. The day's events ended with County Manager Virginia Valentine terminating Thomas' $255,000-a-year contract.
Assistant Sheriff Mike McClary said Monday that police hope to determine by week's end whether the documents recovered from UMC last week contain information that substantiates the allegations in the 21-page affidavit.
But some already are casting doubt on details in the affidavit.
Chris Caluya, vice president of Clark and Sullivan, the main construction contractor for UMC's Northeast Building and South Wing remodeling, said Monday that police misquoted him in the affidavit.
One of the contracts police are examining is a $70,000 deal in which Thomas allegedly arranged for TBL Construction to oversee part of the remodeling project.
According to the affidavit, Caluya said "that in effect TBL Construction was to oversee a qualified electrical company's normal course of duties and then get paid for doing basically nothing."
But Caluya has taken issue with that statement, saying that his comment was "cut off" in the published affidavit.
He said his statement should have read: "They were hired to do nothing we were not capable of doing."
McClary said he hadn't heard Caluya's complaint.
"That's the first time I've heard that," McClary said. "I'll have to check with our investigators."
The affidavit also relies on several statements from Blaine Claypool, a former chief operating officer at UMC who told police he resigned Jan. 6, 2006, because of Thomas' unethical behavior.
The affidavit said Claypool told police about a UMC contract with Superior Consulting, a company whose senior vice president, Bob Mills, was friends with Thomas and flew Thomas to the Virgin Islands in 2005 to see the company's work at a hospital there.
According to the affidavit, Claypool said that under UMC's contract with the firm, Superior "would receive money for basically doing nothing."
But county officials have said they believe Superior did do work, even though the contract was not favorable to UMC.
"My understanding is that they were doing work, but the question is whether it was beneficial to us," County Commission Chairman Rory Reid said.
Valentine said Superior performed work, but that the affidavit raised questions about whether the contract allowed the company - which was to get paid only when it met a certain baseline of revenue collections from patient billings - to count money collected by other firms or from the county's social services fund toward that target. In that sense, Superior might have been paid for work the company did not do itself.
Then there is Claypool's claim, according to the affidavit, that Thomas gave Frasier Systems Group a contract worth more than $673,000 to study how to speed up the hospital's business office. Police contend Claypool never saw a completed work product or an increase in the business office's performance.
What made that accusation especially eyebrow-raising was the claim in the affidavit that Frasier's president, Boone, was a former fraternity brother of Thomas, who attended Chicago State University. In short, it appeared that Thomas was hooking up a frat brother with a lucrative contract in exchange for little or no work.
But Boone told the Sun that's not true.
"We were not fraternity brothers and our friendship has been a professional friendship," he said.
Boone said he met Thomas in 1991 at Cook County Hospital, where Thomas became chief financial officer.
Finally, the affidavit says: "In addition, it was also alleged that many of these companies performed no actual work other than 'consulting' and that this was a means to get friends/family financial kickbacks at the county's expense."
Yet no family members of UMC administrators are named in the affidavit, McClary acknowledged.
"We are looking at all interactions and transactions," he said. "It could include first cousins, second cousins and people related by marriage."
McClary emphasized that the investigation remains wide open.
"We are investigating to either confirm or deny the allegations," he said. "It is totally possible at the end of the investigation that none of the allegations will be supported by fact. But there are questions that need to be answered."
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