Pilot Flying J ex-president wants new attorney

With the clock ticking on his fate in a scheme to rip off trucking companies, former Pilot Flying J President Mark Hazelwood wants to ditch a Texas law firm with a roster of celebrity clients and tap a Knoxville attorney instead, court records show.

Attorney Brad Henry on Monday filed a motion in U.S. District Court on behalf of Hazelwood, seeking permission to take over the ex-president’s defense.

Hazelwood faces sentencing before U.S. District Judge Curtis Collier in August for both heading up a band of thieving sales executives at the nation’s largest diesel fuel retailer and pushing them to think bigger in their defrauding of Pilot Flying J’s trucking customers.

A jury in Collier’s Chattanooga courtroom convicted Hazelwood in February of conspiring to commit wire fraud and related charges in a scheme to lure trucking companies to do business with Pilot Flying J with promises of discounts on diesel fuel and then shortchanging them to the tune of at least $56.5 million in five years.

Pilot Flying J has been paying Hazelwood’s legal bills. He used that money to tap the law firm of Texas attorney Rusty Hardin, revered as a legal powerhouse, for his defense.

Hardin has won big cases for a celebritystudded list of clients. Those have included: Baseball pitcher Roger Clemens, acquitted of charges he lied to Congress about steroid use; Victoria Osteen, wife of televangelist and author Joel Osteen and accused in a lawsuit of shoving a flight attendant; Arthur Anderson, the accounting firm accused of obstruction of justice in the Enron scandal; and the estate of Texas millionaire J. Howard Marshall, whose then-wife — former Playboy Bunny and stripper Anna Nicole Smith — sought to claim his fortune when he died.

Henry declined comment Wednesday on why Hazelwood now wants to tap Henry’s firm of Breeding & Henry. Hardin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.