NEW YORK, Jan. 18 -- In a last round of legal skirmishes before the trial of former WorldCom Inc. chief executive Bernard J. Ebbers gets underway, U.S. District Judge Barbara S. Jones ruled Tuesday that Ebbers's lawyers may question the prosecution's star witness about alleged marital infidelities.
Former WorldCom chief financial officer Scott D. Sullivan pleaded guilty in March to misclassifying expenses to pump up the bottom line of WorldCom. His testimony is expected to be crucial to the government's efforts to convict Ebbers, 63, of conspiracy, securities fraud and filing false documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission. WorldCom declared bankruptcy in 2002, revealed $11 billion in accounting irregularities and now does business as MCI Inc. of Ashburn.
Bernard J. Ebbers, former WorldCom chief executive, leaves court after pretrial hearings that addressed a witness's alleged marital infidelity and the relevance of Enron. Jury selection is set to begin today.
(Mary Altaffer -- AP)
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Jones ruled that hearing about Sullivan's alleged infidelity would help jurors determine whether he is truthful and that Ebbers's lawyers are "entitled to very wide latitude" when cross-examining the chief witness against him. Since Ebbers rarely used e-mail, Sullivan's descriptions of their conversations may be the government's best evidence of what Ebbers knew about the telecommunication company's accounting.
The ruling came at a motions hearing held one day before prospective jurors from Manhattan, the Bronx and the northern suburbs of New York City will come into U.S. District Court to begin filling out questionnaires.
Two blocks down the street at Manhattan Supreme Court, jury selection began Tuesday for the retrial of former Tyco International Ltd. chief executive L. Dennis Kozlowski and former chief financial officer Mark H. Swartz, who are charged with grand larceny and securities fraud, among other things, for allegedly looting the Bermuda-based conglomerate of more than $600 million. The first case against them ended in a mistrial.
In the Ebbers case, Jones also blocked the government from introducing e-mails written between Ebbers's wife and his personal assistant and ruled to limit references at trial to Enron Corp., which spectacularly collapsed shortly before WorldCom did. Prosecutors had argued that insiders' discussions of Enron's legal problems showed they were conscious that WorldCom's accounting methods were also flawed. But Jones ruled that the references were too opaque to be clearly relevant and that the comparisons could prejudice the jury against Ebbers. So the government may neither introduce evidence that Ebbers watched the congressional hearings on Enron and commented to Sullivan about them nor tell the jury about a conversation in which two lower-level executives compared their company to the oil giant.
"This trial is not about Enron," Jones said.
But the prosecution team led by Assistant U.S. Attorney David B. Anders also scored some victories. Jones ruled that the government may call at least two financial professionals to the stand to describe what happened when WorldCom told the markets about the accounting fraud. She also refused to grant immunity to several former WorldCom executives who have told the defense they will not testify on Ebbers's behalf for fear of incriminating themselves.
Ebbers's lead lawyer, Reid H. Weingarten, had argued that the potential witnesses, including former WorldCom chief operating officer Ronald R. Beaumont, would bring in "evidence that is highly exculpatory. . . . None of them believed what they were doing was illegitimate." But prosecutors said the evidence was not as helpful to the defense as Weingarten believed, and Jones refused to grant the witnesses immunity.
The trial is expected to last four to eight weeks once jury selection is completed.
