When Jonas Jennings approached Jim Donnan about possibly going into coaching shortly after retiring from the NFL, his former head coach with the Georgia Bulldogs gave him some different advice.
“He told me he had a better opportunity that would put me on Easy Street,” said Jennings, a former offensive lineman from Atlanta.
Instead, that opportunity put Jennings on a witness stand, as he testified for the prosecution in the federal fraud trial against Donnan in U.S. District Court on Thursday. Jennings said Donnan became “like a father figure” to him as he played for the Bulldogs from 1996-2000 and said that’s why he took Donnan’s advice and invested $800,000 in the wholesale merchandise company the coach was representing in 2010. GLC Limited of Huntington, W.Va., was pronounced insolvent in December 2010, and Jennings lost $537,500.
“All I heard was ‘guarantee’ from a guy I knew very well,” Jennings testified. “He said my principal was guaranteed, and I would get whatever percentage on that (first) deal. He said, ‘you’ve got nothing to worry about.’”
Former UGA linebacker Kendrell Bell followed Jennings to the stand as the fraud trial against Donnan concluded its third day in U.S. District Court. Bell said he lost all $2 million he invested through his former coach, but has recovered about half through separate legal proceedings.
Donnan came through for Jennings in the beginning, just as they had with Bell before him. Bell said he earned $75,000 in just a few months on a $500,000 investment and he rolled over the entire amount into “a second deal.”
Jennings said he received his first two monthly repayments of $87,500 each. But they missed his next scheduled payment and then came through with only $60,000 later. By then Jennings had already invested in the second deal with Donnan, and he said he never received any more money from GLC.
“That’s when I saw a side of coach Donnan I”d never seen before,” Jennings told the court. “I told him I don’t need to gain money, but I can’t lose money because I depend on that money.”
Jennings said he had a hard time getting Donnan on the phone. In the most sensational moment of Thursday’s proceedings, Jennings read the entire text exchange he had with Donnan from the day they first discussed a potential investment until they were no longer communicating late in 2010. Donnan filed for bankruptcy in July 2011.
“I can’t believe you put me in this situation. Sad.” That was one of the last texts Jennings read in court.
Jennings and Bell were among six witnesses called by the prosecution on Thursday. Also taking the stand were Gregory Crabtree, the owner of GLC who has accepted a plea agreement; Lisa Holbrook, Crabtree’s stepdaughter and de facto comptroller; Jennifer Kilcrease, a UGA employee who did bookkeeping work for Donnan on the side; and Mike Cheek, a former Coca-Cola vice president and adjunct professor at UGA who invested more than $2 million into GLC through Donnan.
Crabtree was expected to be the day’s star witness. He told the jury that Donnan, who solicited investors for him, knew full well that Crabtree used investor money to repay late investors in what prosecutors describe as a Ponzi scheme. He testified that Donnan visited the warehouses of GLC Limited in Huntington, W.Va., and Columbus, Ohio, more than once and took fellow investors with him.
In November 2010, when it became clear that the operation was crumbling, Donnan presented Crabtree with a handwritten document he asked Crabtree to sign. It said that Donnan had no knowledge that investor money was used to pay other investors. The document, which Crabtree signed, was presented as evidence and shown to jurors on a large video screen.
“‘He said it was ‘to help me save face with my friends,” Crabtree testified. “I said, ‘Jim, you know you knew before this.’”
Donnan’s lead attorney Ed Tolley attacked Crabtree’s credibility as a witness earlier in the day. He asked Jim Burritt, the chief restructuring officer called in by investors to assess the operation, if he ever said anything to Donnan about Crabtree’s trustworthiness.
“I said I thought Crabtree was a pathological liar,” Burditt said.
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