And the plot thickens.
Among the documents relating to the failed Stevie Wonder concert gathered by the Senate’s Special Committee on Accountability so far is this one-page list of 2012 appearances by the performer.
Included on the list is the August 18 concert at Stan Sheriff Center.
Click on the list so see a larger version.
The list, a screenshot saved prior to the concert’s official cancellation, appeared on a UK website devoted to Stevie Wonder information. It appears to be a fan site, and does not identify who controls the site. It is not the official Stevie Wonder website, which can be found at www.steviewonder.net.
The date “July 9, 2012″, the day before then-UH athletic director Jim Donovan held a press conference to announce the concert’s cancellation, appears at the bottom of the page along with the original URL. It isn’t clear if that was the date the image was captured, or whether it reflects when it was copied and distributed.
So what does this mean? At this point, it isn’t at all clear. It does appear that the Hawaii concert was in play, or thought to be in play, despite official denials from Stevie Wonder’s exclusive agent that they were not involved and had not approved any Hawaii appearance.
It is possible the information about the concert date originated with Bob Peyton, the promoter who was trying to put the deal together. Peyton, in his statement to UH factfinders, said he was initially working with a booking agent in England, although he later turned to another agent based in Spain. So Peyton’s English contact could have innocently passed the date and concert information on to the fan website.
Possible.
Note, though, that the list did not include an August 17 concert on Maui, which was part of a two-concert deal that Peyton had been pursuing. So could the Honolulu concert date have been “leaked” to the website by one of the scammers in order to give reluctant university officials additional confidence that the deal was for real? They were, according to the statements of those involved, pushing for UH to make the $200,000 payment. Was the concert listing, in short, part of the scam and not from Peyton at all? Also possible.
Round and round we go.
If it wasn’t a scam from the beginning, when did it become one? And if UH wasn’t the victim of a scam, where’s the money?
The Senate Committee will have its hands full trying to sort all this out when it reconvenes on Tuesday afternoon.
regarding the website. A speculation on how it came about. Somewhere there is a work-study student or a student employee who knows the answer because they were tasked with monkeying around with the website. I suspect there’s a lot of student time spent designing and redesigning event and departmental websites. After all fiddling with websites [font style, color etc] seems like work. and it seems like creative work. When you have no real work to do [or want to do] work on the website.
If you’d like to check into it a little more, you can look up the site on WhoIs.com. You’ll see that it is registered to Vaid Bharath.
The entry may have been placed there as a result of (for example) a Google Alert that picked it up from who-knows-where.
In all of this brouhaha, we seem to be missing the point that UH Athletics is a perpetual money loser. If they had to sponsor a fundraiser to make money, there is something wrong. After all, they and their supporters keep portraying Athletics as a cash cow, or a potential cash cow “if we just invest a little more.” Apparently not.
Moreover, the concert ticket sales fizzled; they did not even pick a popular band. Then it turned out to be a scam.
Sometimes it’s hard to let go.
An interesting question raised this morning in the comments of Civil Beat is by Jim Shon, who points out that $200K is a relatively minuscule amount of money. Why the outcry?
Bev Creever also writes in a CB opinion piece that the UH military research that was supposed to bring in so much money has hardly brought in anything. Why no outrage there?
On the one hand, college sports is personal and concrete. Politicians want to protect it, professors scorn it. Military research is complicated.
On the other hand, Hawaii has changed a lot. Thirty or forty years ago, this would not have made front page news. The economy was booming, and there were more frequent and serious corruption scandals. People were also more naive and less demanding of their leaders. Importantly, there was no Internet. We complain about the news monopoly in Hawaii, but this website is proof of the collapse of the old news duopoly, at least among the educated classes, and the ability of what would have been relegated to the back pages of the local paper to go viral. There have been economic, technological and political changes that make this a newsworthy story, or at least seem so.