Posted on Sat, Aug. 12, 2006

email this

print this

Geddings tries to move on

Ex-chief of staff for Hodges still fighting fraud charges in N.C. lottery case

By JIM MORRILL

jmorrill@charlotteobserver.com

As host of WFOY-AM’s “St. Augustine Morning News,” Kevin Leslie helps wake up his coastal Florida listeners with updates on news, weather and traffic.

What they don’t hear are updates on the legal problems of the host — aka Kevin Geddings — a former Charlottean trying to rebuild his life in the shadow of state and federal criminal charges.

Geddings, 41, and his wife, Kris Phillips, moved to St. Augustine this summer. In July, they bought WFOY and sister station WAOC-AM for $1 million, having sold two Charlotte-area stations for twice that much. They live a few blocks from the beach, hoping for a fresh start.

“It’s fair to say we didn’t have any future left in North Carolina,” Phillips said.

A year ago, it appeared they did.

Along with their stations, they ran a successful political consulting business. Geddings, chief of staff to Jim Hodges when he was S.C. governor, talked of running for mayor of Charlotte. Last fall, he became one of the first members of North Carolina’s new lottery commission.

Then things fell apart.

‘CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE’

Five weeks after his lottery appointment, Geddings abruptly resigned. Hours later, a lottery vendor reported that it paid him fees of $24,500 last year.

Though Geddings acknowledged a long-standing friendship with a company official, he’d disclosed no financial relationship in a statement filed with the state ethics board.

In May, a federal grand jury charged him with nine counts of fraud for failing to disclose even more — nearly $229,000 in payments from the vendor, Scientific Games. A day later, state prosecutors charged him with violating lobbying laws, a misdemeanor.

If convicted on the federal charges, Geddings faces a maximum 45-year sentence and a $2.2 million fine.

Acting U.S. Attorney George Holding of Raleigh said Geddings asked for, and received, permission to move to Florida, as is required by federal authorities.

His indictment was the first from a months-long federal probe that also resulted in last week’s guilty plea by former Rep. Mike Decker, who admitted taking $50,000 from an unidentified Democrat to support Democratic Rep. Jim Black of Matthews for House speaker in 2003.

Geddings’ trial is set for mid-September in federal court in Raleigh.

He did not return calls. But in an e-mail to the Observer, he called himself the victim of a “very political prosecution.”

“I have been caught in the crossfire between a powerful Republican U.S. Attorney’s Office and a powerful Democratic Speaker of the House,” he wrote. “Although I did disclose my relationship with Scientific Games on the final Ethics form submitted, I made a stupid political and media relations mistake by not offering more detail about my past business relationship with Scientific Games, but I did not break the law.”

Geddings could face scrutiny in South Carolina. Some lawmakers have asked the state’s Legislative Auditor Council to look into his ties to Scientific Games there.

In 2000, Geddings, a Rhodes scholar semi-finalist out of Wofford College, led the campaign for a lottery, a campaign that Scientific Games and other vendors helped fund. S.C. voters approved the lottery that fall.

‘REBUILDING MY LIFE’

Geddings, Phillips and their two children appear to have found a comfortable life.

Records show they paid $940,000 for a house in a private country club community not far from St. Augustine Beach. They sold their southeast Charlotte house for $700,000; they’d bought it 18 months earlier for $445,000.

On the WFOY Web site, Geddings and Phillips tout their “new and improved” talk format. The former Democratic consultants air conservative Rush Limbaugh and dumped Dr. Laura Schlessinger for Fox TV’s Bill O’Reilly.

But Geddings doesn’t appear eager to advertise himself.

When the weekly Ponte Vedra Recorder talked to him this week for an article about the station purchase, he asked the reporter to refer to him by his on-air name, Kevin Leslie. (Leslie is Geddings’ middle name.)

“He is using a different name on the air, I guess, so people will leave us alone,” said Phillips, who owns the stations through her company, Phillips Broadcasting.

Phillips sounded wistful about the circumstances that took them to Florida.

“I think we’re going to have a good life here,” she said. “And I am very sad about the way things occurred in North Carolina. It was a state I love very much, and I had hoped to raise my children there and grow old there.”

Wrote Geddings: “My prayer is that I will win this politically-charged legal battle and go about rebuilding my life.”

Morrill is a reporter for the Charlotte Observer, a McClatchy newspaper.