The Thomas Wright Affair: Another House Leader Gone Wrong

Early Career
First elected to the House of Representatives in 1992 after losing his seat on the Wilmington City Council, Wright had worked as a fireman and EMS worker. Ironically, Wright’s brother was part of the Wilmington 10 case, in which the defendants were charged with shooting at fire fighters responding to the firebombing of a grocery store during race riots in 1971. A federal appeals court overturned their convictions.

Out on a Limb for Jim
Thomas Wright won his spurs in Raleigh in 1999, breaking with fellow Black Caucus members to elect Jim Black to serve as Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives by one vote over Dan Blue, another Black Caucus member and former Speaker. Wright was swiftly rewarded,  becoming a Black spear-carrier. For instance, when Republican leader Leo Daughtry, a tobacco quota holder, challenged Black’s Golden LEAF Foundation, arguing that tobacco settlement billions should go to the farmers instead, Wright accused him of having a conflict of interest (News & Observer 3/11/99).

How prescient that Thomas Wright was talking about conflicts of interest – because one day the shoe would be on another foot. His own.

Fast Tommy
How do you beat a speeding ticket? Get yourself elected to the General Assembly. In 2007, a Bladen County state trooper clocked Rep. Wright going 72 mph in a 55-mph zone – but the charge against him was dismissed two months later. “It was a courtesy dismissal because the legislature was in session,” said Rex Gore, the district attorney for Bladen and surrounding counties. Gore, a Democrat, said his office also made a clerical error in initially handling the case, which factored into the decision to erase the charge (Charlotte Observer, 3/14/07).

Regulation Games
Thomas Wright could do more than get a ticket fixed. He was a one-man regulatory relief agency, not out of philosophical concern about big government, but for his own gain. He used the threat of regulation to shake loose contributions from industries opposing new government control. For example, in 2005, anesthesiologists were pushing legislation establishing new licensing requirements and clarifying that nurse anesthetists must work under the supervision of a physician.

Administering 65% of the anesthesia in hospitals, the nurse anesthetists obviously hated any idea of being forced to split more fees with their doctor cousins, who were, incidentally, outspending the nurses five-to-one in PAC donations. But the nurses had the ultimate weapon – a powerful legislator willing to bend the rules. After four days of debate in his House Health Committee, Wright finally permitted a vote, which the doctors won easily. But Chairman Wright then simply ignored the vote, refusing to offer the bill for a House floor vote. Did he do it because he was rooting for the underdog? Not likely. Within months, Wright had taken $9000 from nurse anesthesiologists who wanted the bill killed – campaign money that he converted to his own personal use.

Appropriations Co-Chair in the Dark?
Although Jim Black made him a powerful Appropriations Committee Co-chair, Wright claims he had no idea that state dollars were flowing into his own pocket. By this time, Wright was a self-proclaimed self-employed health care consultant and had been hired by the North Carolina Foundation for Advanced Health Programs, a private charity funded with money from drug companies who agreed to pay to avoid price controls on Medicaid prescriptions. The Foundation, however, was under the control of the State Department of Health and Human Services. While accepting $35,000 in remuneration to arrange meetings in 2002-03, Wright explained away the conflict of writing the Department’s budget at the same time he was a recipient of its money by stating, “I never knew that the DHHS had any relationship to this foundation” (News & Observer, 4/3/04).

Wright even voted to block drug company price cuts allowed under federal law and used by other states – a measure that would have netted considerable savings for North Carolina. Did he do it out of an objection to price controls or to encourage drug companies to fund the foundation where he had a job?

The Investigation
In 2006, campaign watchdog Joe Sinsheimer filed a complaint with the State Board of Elections alleging that Wright concealed donations from payday lenders until after the Democratic primary (News & Observer, 12/6/06). Wright’s allies claimed that Sinsheimer was singling out black legislators, but the race card amounted to a joker since Speaker Jim Black was the one being ripped.

Although details of the Board of Elections’ investigation weren’t public, Wright knew they had his bank records, so he quit his legislative committee chairmanships. State leaders all the way up to Governor Mike Easley said he ought to quit the House but Wright refused.

Indicted
On December 10, 2007, Thomas Wright was indicted on a number of charges, which circumstances include:

• Persuading a state official to write a bogus letter in order to help the representative secure a $150,000 bank loan, purportedly to help build a museum commemorating the 1898 Wilmington riots. Torlen Wade of DHHS’s Rural Health office gave Wright a letter promising that $150,000 in state money would be forthcoming for the museum, even though the money was never allocated for the project;
• Converting $185,000 in campaign contributions for his own personal use without reporting the money as required by Campaign Finance law;
• Withdrawing money from a $10,000 line of credit he had secured for the “Community Health Foundation” which Wright also used for his own personal use.
• Soliciting $8,900 in corporate contributions for the Foundation from Anheuser-Busch, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals and AT&T after telling company officials that the organization was a 501 (C)(3) charitable foundation, though he never filed the paperwork to attain tax-exempt status (had the the charitable status been legal, the corporations’ contributions would have been tax-deductible). Wright kept the money for himself.

Citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, Wright refused to testify at his trial.  On April 7, 2008, a jury in a Wake County Superior Court found Thomas Wright guilty of three out of four counts of fraud. Judge Henry Hight sentenced the disgraced former House member to five-eight years in a North Carolina prison, where Wright resides today.

In August of 2008, Wright was back in a Wake County courtroom, where a jury was empaneled to consider an outstanding charge of obstruction of justice for his campaign finance cover-up.  As usual, Wright pled not guilty to failing to disclose more than $150,000 in campaign contributions, blaming the omission on "sloppy paperwork."  Johnnie Umphlett of the State Bureau of Investigation testified, "He [Wright] advised that he beat the [expletive deleted] out of his opponents and it did not matter when he disclosed those campaign reports" (Charlotte Observer, 8/23/08).  Wright was found guilty, and was sentenced to another six-to-eight months, to be served concurrently with his present sentence.  He is expected to be released sometime in 2015.

Interestingly, Torlen Wade retired from state government after his name surfaced in connection with the Wright affair. But he quickly gained employment as a consultant to the state’s Foundation for Advanced Health Programs, where he and Wright both used to work. Wade’s rapid reappearance as a consultant to a state-affiliated foundation shows how little the Raleigh bureaucracy cares about truly cleaning up corruption.

Expelled
Thomas Wright earned a note in history on March 20, 2008 when he became the first member of the House to be expelled since 1880. Three weeks later, he was convicted and sentenced in the Wake County court. Not to be deterred, Wright refused to step down from his primary race, scheduled for May.

The entire situation presented officials at the State Board of Elections with a dilemma. The state Constitution prohibits felons from holding elected office, but the SBOE had never before been faced with a convicted felon who insisted on continuing with his reelection campaign. In late April 2008, the Board of Elections ruled that since Wright was still in the process of appealing his conviction, his name could remain on the ballot for the May 6 Democratic primary – but they added that the legislature needed to clarify whether disqualification becomes official upon conviction or when appeals are exhausted.

Thankfully, Wright was unable to fool the voters again, and his bid for reelection failed. But the Thomas Wright affair reminds us that the combination of greed and the government’s power to regulate makes fertile ground for corruption.

Updated August 28, 2008