MATT CONTI
“He is more contrite than any defendant I have ever prosecuted. He’s still going to prison,” said Matt Conti, an assistant state attorney general.
Junker, dressed in a blue blazer and red tie, apologized for his actions in a statement on Thursday before Welty.
“I wish to express my apologies to the wonderful people who have served at the Fiesta Bowl as volunteers and staff. Although I worked very hard for 30 years with them to build an organization worthy of them, I failed terribly,” Junker said. “I am very, very sorry. This period of my life has been a nightmare for me, deservedly.”
After Thursday’s hearing, Junker said he had nothing to add about his sentencing.
But he shook a reporter’s hand and asked how the reporter and his family were doing before meeting with friends who came to support him.
The Fiesta Bowl did not send a representative to the hearing. A bowl spokesman said the organization had no comment.
Junker’s eight-month federal prison sentence is about a quarter of the maximum 21⁄ years he could have served as part of plea bargain he reached with state and federal prosecutors in 2012.
During much of Thursday’s hearing, Junker’s attorney, Steve Dichter, alleged the bowl’s former lobbyist, Gary Husk, was the mastermind behind the reimbursement scheme.
He is more contrite than any defendant I have ever prosecuted.”
An Arizona assistant state attorney general, on former Fiesta Bowl Chief Executive John Junker
The judge also queried Conti, the assistant attorney general, about Husk, asking if the lobbyist ever was charged in the Fiesta Bowl case.
Conti informed the judge that Husk had been charged with a misdemeanor for operating a similar reimbursement scheme at his firm, but that he was not charged with anything directly related to the Fiesta Bowl investigation as part of a plea bargain with the Attorney General’s Office.
Husk, in a telephone interview after the hearing, reiterated that he had nothing to do with the Fiesta Bowl campaignfinance scandal. He accused Junker of continuing to engage in a “pattern of deception.”
Husk pleaded guilty earlier this year to two misdemeanor charges of conspiring to make prohibited contributions. He paid $30,000 in restitution and a $1,830 fine.
The $36,800 fine imposed on Junker on Thursday is in addition to the $62,500 in restitution he paid to the Fiesta Bowl and $25,000 he paid to the Federal Election Commission for his campaign-finance violations, according to Dichter.
The Arizona Republic in December 2009 published the first stories about the scheme, which Junker denied for months.
The newspaper’s reporting ultimately led the bowl to hire an outside law firm, which confirmed The Republic’s findings and also found widespread questionable spending by Junker and his staff.
Those expenses included throwing Junker a birthday party in Pebble Beach, Calif., and trips by Junker and others to strip clubs.
Dichter on Thursday said no one was prosecuted for the spending, and he called the alleged financial improprieties “a bunch of nonsense that was drummed up by the press.”
An initial investigation in late 2009 by former Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods lasted less than a week and “found no credible evidence” that bowl management acted illegally or unethically.
Woods received $55,000 for his investigation, and he passed $20,000 of that fee to Husk, who assisted in that inquiry.