Its a long story but the lurid details kept me hooked. Essentially, this guy was living the good life on his employer's ticket, and he says he only did it because his boss told him to. Yeah, like warning bells didn't go off in his head. If he had any common sense, he would've known his limits.
===========From Yahoo========
Strippers and liquid lunches: Business as usual at Dow Jones?
By Matt Bean, Court TV
NEW YORK (Court TV) As the publisher behind the financial bible The Wall Street Journal and the respected business weekly Barron's, Dow Jones is used to exposing corporate excess, not practicing it.
But in the 1990s, according to a lawsuit brought by a former employee, an extravagant and sometimes sordid world lurked behind the front pages of Barron's, complete with strippers, theater ticket loopholes and liquid lunches.
These and other perks, according to Patrick Allocco, a top ad sales representative with Dow Jones between 1992 and 2001, were funded by expense accounts meant to be used to attract potential advertisers until the company put a clamp on the practice in 2000, firing him as a sacrificial lamb, he claims.
To be sure, Allocco's suit has been pared down considerably since he first filed it on April 5. A judge hearing the case has already thrown out some of the claims and referred others to a union forum.Good for him.
But last month Dow Jones admitted in its response and counterclaim that advertising representatives at Barron's were indeed permitted to visit strip clubs and restaurants on the corporate dime and that Allocco was allowed to expense alcohol for employee parties held in Barron's offices, one of which featured an exotic dancer.
Lurid disclosures notwithstanding, the company maintains that Allocco was fired for racking up unauthorized theater ticket charges on his corporate American Express card $38,418.80 worth from 1999 to his suspension in December 2000 and for "abandonment" of his job in early 2001.
Allocco's central claim is that his managers at Barron's Eric Cieplik and Gary Holland directed him to commit expense account fraud, and he shouldn't have been fired for playing by their rules.I believe this same concept is involved in the Enron hearings. The crooks are saying that they shouldn't be held responsible because they were ordered to be crooks by their crooked bosses
"Every expense I incurred was signed off on," Allocco said. "Any expense at the time had to be signed off by Eric Cieplik. It wouldn't have been possible without him." Three individual sources within Dow Jones interviewed by Courttv.com agreed.
But Allocco's task is to prove in court that the expense fraud was a top-down affair. U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence McKenna weighed in with a July 10 ruling saying that it was unlikely Allocco "could have believed that his expense account practices were perfectly acceptable behavior." But McKenna determined that one of his breach of contract claims and a fraud claim would be matters best decided at trial.
Allocco, 41, who remains unemployed, with his moral code, I wouldn't hire him either is not letting his case wind quietly through the courts. He's hired a persistent publicist and is represented by high-profile lawyer Dominic Barbara, who counts the so-called Long Island Lothario, Joey Buttafuoco, as one of his former clients.
Barbara, who frequently appears on the Howard Stern show, is quick to explain why the public should care about the internal wranglings of a Dow Jones branch.
"It's a public corporation," Barbara told Courttv.com. "Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal are the ones who watch everyone else. Now someone is going to watch them."
Barbara said he was surprised that Dow Jones admitted its funds were used for strip-club lunches and office parties, calling the admissions "a smoking bra."
Another of Allocco's lawyers, Ronald Rosenberg, denied that his team had sought to play up the juicy aspects of the case, saying, "Those are just the facts I've been given. If they appeal to the prurient interests of some people, then that's not my problem."
But Allocco, who has on his side several current and former Dow Jones employees who back his claims that Barron's executives created and benefited from the culture of excess, even had voice mails from his Barron's office professionally transferred to a CD, ostensibly to spur Dow Jones to settle.
Settlement talks, Barbara explained, have been "unproductive."
Dow Jones and the company's lawyers at the Park Avenue firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher declined to comment on the case. But a spokesman for the company, Brigitte Trafford, offered this statement:
"We believe that Mr. Allocco's case is trivial and without merit. We will contest this case vigorously. We're confident that the matter will be resolved in our favor."
"Booze-soaked" lunches
The loophole that Allocco and his managers allegedly exploited is well-mined territory throughout the business world: The expense account.
According to Allocco's suit, he and his manager at Barron's, Eric Cieplik (who is named in the suit and has since retired from the company) often went out for "booze-soaked" lunches that Cieplik made sure were charged to different representatives' cards. When lunch was finished and the check came to the table, "Give me a client's name," was the refrain.
Entertainment budgets are intrinsic to the advertising sales business, where wining and dining potential clients is an accepted practice. But according to Allocco, Barron's sales managers and representatives systematically invented clients to receive reimbursement for lunches, dinners and parties that were only attended by employees.
Dow Jones admitted in its response to Allocco's suit that its funds were used for non-client business lunches. But lunches were only the beginning of the $150,000 to $200,000 per year Allocco says he was burning through at the peak of his tenure at Dow Jones.
Allocco moved to Barron's after two successful years with The Wall Street Journal. Soon after he began work in February 1992, Allocco took over the sales of advertising to the import auto category with companies like BMW, Mercedes and Jaguar, it was the largest ad sales sector.
Billing those clients, and others, for expenses unrelated to attracting their business appeared to exploit coarse expense accounting at Barron's, according to Allocco, where the entertainment fund was tracked as a large pool rather than as individual accounts. As a result, until the installation of a new, online system in 2000, Allocco said, "they could never track what was spent in the company."
Dow Jones did not respond specifically to this claim in its response.
According to current and former Dow Jones employees familiar with the advertising department Cieplik made Allocco the point man for illicit expenses, signing off on questionable expenses and allowing Allocco to obtain cash advances from his corporate American Express card.So, they set him up? Is that what they're trying to say?
"You can't put down $300 of booze from a liquor store on an expense account," said one source. "The managers made him the go-to guy."
The wellspring of cash-financed monthly bacchanalias were "for birthdays, graduations, promotions, engagements, marriage, divorces or any reason whatsoever," Allocco claims in the suit. Many of the celebrations revolved around alcohol. The suit charges that his superiors at Barron's encouraged a culture of drinking in which employees were "required to keep up with their supervisors, drink for drink, or risk being ostracized."Peer pressure alcoholism, anyone?
Fraudulent expense accounting also bankrolled frequent trips to strip clubs for employees. "On occasions too numerous to mention," states the suit, Allocco was "instructed to use the corporate American Express card and/or take cash advances to pay for excursions to strip clubs such as 'Scores,' 'Stringfellows,' 'Billy's Topless' or 'Camelot' in Washington, D.C."Excellent! Now I have some tourist sites for my upcoming trip to NYC.
Like most ruby-light establishments, Scores, a high-end strip club with a strict dress code, has discreet billing processes, which allow credit card purchases without an itemized statement. A representative from Scores said that the purchase of so-called "Diamond Dollars" would be billed as "IMB Restaurant" on a credit card account. And the billing for Stringfellows registered as "SONY" on the statement, said Allocco, and would then be entered into the expense form as "Sony's Restaurant."
All of these expenses were reimbursed under the guise of client entertainment. At one point, according to Allocco, ad representatives ran out of client names, so they made them up. "There was a sales rep that I knew who even started using the names of state forests," he said.
In one of the most ribald abuses of company policy Allocco details, a stripper was brought to the office for the birthday of marketing director Don Black. According to several employees, after peeling down to a G-string, she provided lap dances to many of the men present as a boom box pumped away in the background.
"These were senior guys," Allocco said, noting that the women in the office kept quiet. How many of you forgot about the female employees and just envisioned a bunch of guys in suits whooping it up with a stripper in the cubicle section of your building?
