NFL To Welcome Another Tax Cheat to the Robber Baron Club
The Jacksonville Jaguars are being sold. Long-time owner Wayne Weaver is selling his franchise to one Shahid Khan, should NFL owners approve.
Who is Shahid Khan? Well, he tried to buy the St. Louis Rams a couple of years back after Georgia Frontiere died, but it turns out that he was a huge tax cheat:
Khan is one of hundreds of wealthy taxpayers whom the IRS has targeted in recent years for allegedly sheltering hundreds of millions of dollars by using complex financial transactions that were hard to detect on tax returns. The transactions were created by lawyers, bankers and accountants, some of whom have been prosecuted for fraud and gone to prison…
The IRS said in court papers that the Khans hired the Chicago-based BDO Seidman accounting firm and met with tax partner Robert Greisman. The Khans engaged in at least five questionable tax shelters, with names like Son-of-Boss and Dad, and paid BDO $8.5 million in fees, about 10 percent of the alleged tax savings, according to court documents…Yet when the revenue agency questioned Khan about his returns, he was unable to identify what services BDO provided, an IRS agent said in court documents.
And, from Forbes, here’s a description of the tax schemes Khan employed:
Khan used three Son of Boss shelters, which generally cook up phony losses using foreign currency options, and two Distressed Asset/Debt (dad) shelters, in which troubled securities are bought for pennies on the dollar and then written off at their original full value.
That’s how the 1%’ers get away with this crap.
The NFL should not approve this purchase. What kind of message does it send to its fan base when a guy who tried to cheat the Feds out of $85 mill is allowed to buy a team?
Of course, the NFL is full of guys like that. So, I imagine that Wayne Weaver’s words will rule the day:
“This gentleman is absolutely the American story,” Weaver said of Khan.
In the America of 2011, he certainly is.
Tags: National Football League; IRS; Jacksonville Jaguars; Shahid Khan; El Somnambulo; Steve Tanzer
If he can somehow get Andy Reid fired, I might be willing to look the other way.
Well, on the same day that Weaver announced the sale of the team, he also fired HIS head coach Jack Del Rio, and extended his GM for three more years. Seems kinda strange to extend your GM when you’re not gonna be there…
So, there’s at least one opening for Big Red.
Personally, it upsets me more that an activity as destructive of physical health as NFL football is remains legal. I understand the “it’s their choice” argument, though I don’t entirely agree with it — if you don’t think talented kids are funneled into the football machine with little say of their own, you’ve never been around football. Also, there are all sorts of things we don’t allow adults to do even though they’re willing; this is just a matter of where we draw that line.
If I were a scold, I’d say that supporting the sport by watching it made me part of a corrupt system that produces borderline-crippled young adults on a routine basis. They are the rule, not the exception. Even those who retire “healthy” often find a few years later that their aches and limps and sore shoulders are never going to feel any better. We don’t accept that in any other industry I can think of. What would OSHA make of a pro football training-camp practice?
I won’t say any of that, though, because I’m not that sort of asshole. I don’t think watching football is evil — it will exist for quite a while yet, because attitudes will take a long time to change, and there’s no reason to rob yourself of the pleasure of a perfect pass or a touchdown run or a big hit.
My prediction is that football will gradually become even more a sport of the truly poor, as boxing did, a route out for those with no other options for escaping abject poverty. As the research on injuries, particularly to the head, continues to evolve, I think a lot of parents with other options will hesitate to let their kids play. The first signs came a couple of years ago, when an ex-pro (sorry, forget who) got into a public squabble with his son’s college coach over the coach’s lax approach to player health. Turn off the spigot at the source and the pipeline runs dry, which I believe will happen someday.
I don’t feel this way because I hate football. I like it as much as the average fan, and used to follow the Eagles as closely as the Phillies. I admit I began to lose interest when rules changes made passing supreme, so it wasn’t the violence that drove me away. In fact, I think it was my waning interest that made me more open to the significance of these other issues.
Once I was made aware of the brain injuries, mainly through the reporting of Alan Schwarz of the NYTimes, I began to wince at every big hit, and then the smaller ones, and I noticed it was a rare game without many minor and one or two major injuries. Finally I found I wasn’t enjoying the games anymore.
All that said, Reid has gotta go.
Im glad I stuck with that comment. There were moments, plenty of them, when I felt like throwing in the towel. But I’m not built that way.
That distressed asset deal is sweet. I wonder what a middle class version of that would look like? My house was worth. $300k a couple of years ago, I can now apply my lost $100k inequity against my income and pay zero taxes just like the Charlie Copelands of the world.
I think the ex-pro Geezer referenced is Craig James, whose son was punished by being put into a dark shed by his coach at Texas Tech, Mike Leach.
Not sure I agree about the future of football, however. It is an immensely popular sport that is perfect for television and for gambling, which is enough to keep it going. And the money is good enough to provide an incentive for those looking for a way out of poverty for themselves and their families.
The way to reduce head injuries is to play without helmets and pads. That way the tackles will go back to being drag downs like Aussie Rules or Rugby.
“And the money is good enough to provide an incentive for those looking for a way out of poverty for themselves and their families.”
for the extreme minority of people who pursue a career. think about how many “i was a STAR in college” Staples managers there are…. and how many more “I was a STAR in high school” MacDonalds cashers. that is like saying “just be a movie star, it is your way to a better life”
Thanks, Mike. That’s the guy.
Ben is on the right track here. I’m a middle-class parent who reluctantly allowed his son to play football in high school. He suffered at least one significant concussion. If I knew then what I know now, I would never have allowed him to play.
Multiply that decision by thousands of parents and soon you have a hard time fielding a high school team, cutting the supply line to the colleges, which cuts the supply line to the pros.
Football won’t disappear, but it’s headed for some major changes — not the pros, but the colleges and the high schools. If I’m a high school parent in times when activities are being cut, I’m making a stink about funding for a dangerous sport. In fact, the whole idea of people playing a head-injury-causing sport at educational institutions is what will come under scrutiny. Ultimately it will be scrutiny that it will not survive.
Geezer, I certainly understand your point, but just want to provide some food for thought. There is a school of thought that the ubiquitous youth sport of soccer is, in fact, more dangerous than American football, even when it comes to head injuries. I’m not trying to discredit soccer, which I genuinely enjoy. And I’m sure there are studies out there that draw the opposite conclusion.
“Peak accelerations as measured at the surface of the head were 160 to 180% greater from heading a soccer ball than from routine (noninjurious) impacts during hockey or football, respectively.” — http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10823540
“In soccer, concussions make up 2-3% of all injuries. This is the same rate as for American football!” — faculty.washington.edu/chudler/soccer.html
As for a way out, it is not just those who go on to play professionally who can benefit. We’re just accustomed to that because that is who ESPN and others focus on. However, there are thousands of football players and other student athletes who take advantage of their scholarships to get a college education they might not otherwise be able to afford and turn that into a successful career.
Comment by Jason330 on 30 November 2011 at 8:17 am:
“The way to reduce head injuries is to play without helmets and pads. That way the tackles will go back to being drag downs like Aussie Rules or Rugby.”
There is probably some truth in that. Maybe something akin to the law of unintended consequences. The effort to make football safer in order to reduce injuries may have made football more dangerous because the responsibility for playing safely is left to the equipment (and partially by the rules). This may be a demonstration that sometimes doing too much is just as bad as not doing enough.
I am aware of the head injury aspect of soccer, and would not suggest it as a substitute for football. There are plenty of “punch-drunk” ex-soccer players. But the analogy breaks down because of how few headers a soccer player gets per game vs. how many “non-injurious” head blows a football linemen gets per game. Neither sport is good for your brain (and you can add boxing and ice hockey to the list). And football non-head injuries are cumulatively much worse than soccer injuries.
Remember, too, that the research is still relatively new. It’s only been a couple of years since researchers learned that it’s not the big hits but all the little hits that pave the way to brain injuries.