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Former Ocmulgee Director on Trial for TheftDavid C. Wilson, former director of the Ocmulgee Regional Library System, went on trial in U.S. District Court in Dublin, Georgia, October 3 facing five counts of theft and one count of grand jury witness tampering. Wilson pleaded not guilty to the charges in April.The details, which until now have remained largely shrouded in court-ordered secrecy, involve allegations that Wilson wrote checks to himself for dubious expense claims from funds belonging to both the regional system and the individual county libraries, especially the Dodge County Library, which houses the ORLS headquarters in Eastman. However, the October 7 Macon Telegraph reported that U.S. District Court Judge Dudley Bowen advised jurors that they should only consider evidence of impropriety involving systemwide finances, because the county budgets were not clearly under federal jurisdiction. During the week prosecutors paraded a variety of witnesses before the jury, the Savannah Morning News reported October 5. These included a library employee who testified he worked at Wilson’s farm on library time and received additional pay from the library for those services, and an ORLS bookkeeper who said Wilson padded his salary by adding $12,000 a year in travel allowances and received tens of thousands of dollars in undocumented reimbursement checks. The witness-tampering charge stems from an allegation by ORLS handyman Ricky Snellgrove, who testified that on May 9, 2004, Wilson asked him to lie to state investigators about kickbacks he had allegedly taken from payments to Snellgrove for library work. In his closing argument October 6, Wilson’s attorney Page Pate stated that the government’s investigation was shoddy and failed to provide documentation that the checks were written for anything but appropriate library business. The grand jury began its deliberations October 7. Posted October 7, 2005. |
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