CLEVELAND, Ohio -- For more than a year, the informant met secretly with FBI agents. He repeatedly slid into a dark sedan with tinted windows, sharing a narrative that would rock the family business of Cleveland Browns' owner Jimmy Haslam.
Morgan Stanley Smith Barney financial adviser John Verble described to agents in 2011 how employees of Pilot Flying J, the nation's largest operator of travel centers, were fleecing trucking companies out of tens of millions of dollars in a rebate scam.
After agreeing to be an informant, Verble obtained hours of hidden recordings of one of his clients, a Pilot Flying J sales executive, who had revealed to him how the scheme worked, according to court filings.