Lawyers offers contrasting views at ex-film office head's criminal trial

DES MOINES – Rival lawyers painted starkly different pictures Tuesday of Thomas Wheeler at the start of the former Iowa Film Office manager's criminal trial for allegedly helping filmmakers fraudulently obtain state tax credits for bogus claims, inflated expenses and unqualified purchases as prosecutors contend.

Prosecutor Rob Sands, an assistant Iowa attorney general, portrayed Wheeler, 42, of Indianola, as “an inside man” who helped filmmakers “fleece” the Iowa treasury for millions of dollars by knowingly altering and substituting public documents and approving false and inflated expenses submitted to his office – items that included two luxury vehicles that were taken to California for personal use.

Defense lawyer Angela Campbell contrasted that view by describing Wheeler to jurors as a low-level manager with no expertise in the movie industry who was put in charge of an ill-conceived but lucrative new state tax incentive program created by the Legislature to attract filmmakers that “spiraled into a giant mess” due to inadequate staffing, training, direction, oversight and clearly defined program perimeters.

“They're going to say he was the mastermind of this massive fraud plan. That was false,” Campbell told a nine-woman, three-man Polk County jury that was seated Tuesday.

“He didn't get one penny,” she added. “Actually, he lost his job, he had his face plastered all over the news, he's been called thief, the inside man, a conspirator. He's lost his reputation. He's lost everything for zero dollars. We're going to ask you if that's what a criminal does.”

Wheeler is accused of nine felony counts stemming from mismanagement of the state film tax-credit program -- operated within the state Department of Economic Development – that provided a 25 percent tax credit for production expenditures made in Iowa and a 25 percent tax credit for investors for projects that spent at least $100,000 in Iowa.

Former Gov. Chet Culver suspended the program in September 2009 after DED employees raised concerns about lax oversight, inadequate documentation of expenditures, payments for questionable in-kind services, and credits that had been issued for the purchase of luxury vehicles. After the scandal broke, six people lost their jobs within the economic development agency, including Wheeler.

Sands said the rapid expansion of the film tax credit program placed Wheeler in a position of power “and while he sometimes chose to follow the law, he sometimes chose not to” – citing the luxury car purchases as examples of alleged abuses that went unchecked under his watch as head of the one-person film office. He said Wheeler kept the deceptive dealings concealed from his superiors and the public.

“There's no evidence the defendant got any money for what he did,” the prosecutor said in his opening argument. “But we don't need a money trail because we've got a paper trail.”

Campbell told jurors “the state comes up here and flashes the cars in front of you to sort of incite you” when it was the Legislature who wrote the law that permitted such purchases and it was Wheeler who repeatedly tried to get a number of vague aspects and “huge gaps” in the program clarified, tightened and modified with little success from his superiors or other state agencies that were supposed to be auditing or assisting in the oversight duties.

“The state will have you believe that all of this was Tom Wheeler's fault, and all this should be put on his shoulders and all this fraud was perpetuated by him,” she said. “You're going to see that that's not the case.”

The state was scheduled to begin calling prosecution witnesses to the stand on Wednesday in a trial that District Judge Douglas Staskal expected would span three weeks.