For seven months, Kelly Mathis was certain he would be cleared in the Allied Veterans of the World gambling investigation.
Eight words changed that.
“What do we do if we can’t decide?”
The question came in October 2013 from jurors deep into their second day of deliberations in Mathis’ trial.
Despite all that had happened since his arrest March 12, 2013, Mathis’ belief that he’d be vindicated never wavered.
Not after spending four days in jail, including part of the time in solitary confinement.
Or having his name splashed all over television and newspaper headlines.
And not after his trial in Seminole County, even when the judge didn’t allow jurors to hear what defense attorneys thought was key evidence.
Two hours after that question, jurors announced Mathis was guilty of all but one of 104 charges.
He was sentenced in February 2014 to six years in prison, though he remains free while his case is on appeal.
Last week, two years after being one of 57 people arrested in the multistate sweep, Mathis talked about the impact on the people he loves.
His wife who watched as police led her husband of nearly 20 years out of his law office in handcuffs.
His four daughters who he worries will be skewered by friends, though, he doesn’t know if that’s happened.
And his 72-year-old mother, shaken by the arrest of her youngest child, the one who made her so proud by becoming a lawyer.
Mathis also was resolute that attorneys should be concerned about the outcome of his case. He wasn’t involved in Allied’s business operations, he said. He was only the lawyer.
If his conviction stands, he and his attorney said, it could be a dangerous precedent for the legal profession.
Shooting for the stars at a young age
Being a lawyer was pretty much all Mathis wanted to do since elementary school. “I wanted to shoot for the stars,” he said.
His father was a carpenter who wanted something more for his children. That something more also included getting an education. The elder Mathis had to drop out of school in the eighth grade to help his family.
Mathis, 51, had worked alongside his father at times on job sites, proving to him the physical work tied to his father’s career choice wasn’t for him.
Instead, Mathis graduated from Florida State University, then went to Vanderbilt University Law School.
He wanted to return to Florida after he graduated from law school in 1988 and accepted a job in Jacksonville.
It’s where he met his wife at a Christmas party, opened his own firm in 2004 after working for a few others and served as president of The Jacksonville Bar Association in 2006-07.
It also is where his life and career took a turn when a new client walked in his office in 2006.
Researching history of sweepstakes law
Allied representatives ap-proached Mathis and asked if he knew anything about sweepstakes law.
Mathis had primarily practiced insurance and medical malpractice, business law and some personal injury. Years later, he still doesn’t know why Allied selected him.
He said his extensive research showed there weren’t a lot of recent gambling-related laws. For example, Mathis said, the slot machine law written in 1937 had few updates.
When Mathis determined sweepstakes were legal, he said officials in several counties initially resisted his findings. “It just doesn’t sound right,” he recalled them saying.
But, he said, nearly all the law enforcement officials he spoke with after they read his analysis agreed with him.
“There were very few exceptions,” he said.
One of those exceptions was Seminole County, years after the Internet cafes had been operating there. The cafes sold Internet time and gave away sweepstakes entries that were checked on machines that resembled slot machines.
In January 2011, Seminole County’s board of commissioners banned the cafes, saying sweepstakes games were illegal gambling.
Mathis attributes that decision to Seminole Sheriff Don Eslinger’s influence.
“The sheriff didn’t like it. He wanted them (the cafes) out,” said Mathis, who quickly appealed the ban in federal court.
By the time commissioners banned the Internet cafes, investigators from around the state had been investigating Allied for months.
It would be two years before Mathis learned Eslinger’s agency was a driving force in that investigation.
‘You’re coming with us’
On March 11, 2013, Mathis got a call from a client about a search warrant for a facility in Oklahoma. As Mathis read through the warrant, he wondered why his own name was mentioned several times.
The answer came the next morning.
At 8:25 a.m., while on the phone at his office, Mathis said agents with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement “came rushing in” with a search warrant.
They asked Mathis who could show them where the items listed in the warrant were.
When Mathis said he could, agents told him that wouldn’t work.
“You’re coming with us,” they said.
At first, he thought, this is some kind of mistake. He was the lawyer for Allied, not involved in the business itself.
“We’ll get it all cleared up and I’ll be back tonight,” he told himself.
Agents let him talk briefly to his wife, Donna, who was the firm’s part-time office manager, and to an associate about handling a court appearance in Clay County.
Then, as his wife and colleagues watched, Mathis was led out in handcuffs.
Four nights in jail
When Mathis got to Seminole County, he said, “It seemed like the whole jail was awaiting my arrival.”
Particularly the chief investigator who Mathis said took him into a separate room for about 20 minutes “really to gloat.”
You’re in trouble, he said the captain told him. This is the biggest case in Florida and we’ve got you all dead to rights, he added.
“He kept smiling ear-to-ear with a big grin on his face,” Mathis said. “He had obviously given this quite a lot of thought.”
Mathis said jail officials decided to put him in solitary confinement because there was a question about whether he should be on suicide watch.
Originally, they were going to assign him to a room with full surveillance. “Fortunately, it was crawling with insects and they couldn’t,” Mathis said.
He spent his first day or day-and-a-half in solitary.
When he was moved to the general holding area, several of the 20 or so inmates there were his clients.
“What are you doing in here?” they asked.
Mathis wondered the same thing. “You can’t just arrest a lawyer for practicing law,” he thought.
He thought at any minute someone would come in and say they had made a mistake and apologize.
“It was probably pie in the sky on the apology part,” he said.
It took an emergency petition filed with an appellate court for Mathis to get a hearing for his bond, which was set at $1 million.
He finally headed home to his family.
Not interested in a deal
Before Mathis’ trial started, many of his co-defendants had taken deals that resulted in no jail time and allowed the return of most of their assets.
Those defendants included Jerry Bass and Johnny Duncan, current and former leaders of Allied, and Chase Burns, who designed the sweepstakes software.
Other high-profile defendants to later plead guilty were Jacksonville Fraternal Order of Police President Nelson Cuba and his first vice president, Robbie Freitas.
Mathis didn’t want a deal, he said. Never considered one. He wanted to reclaim his reputation and a trial was the way to do it.
But, he and his attorney, Mitch Stone, said their defense was hamstrung when the judge wouldn’t allow jurors to hear testimony from witnesses who agreed with Mathis that sweepstakes games were legal.
One of those was Steve Rohan, a former Jacksonville deputy general counsel, who told the judge he and Mathis met several times in 2007.
“The (sweepstakes) exception Mr. Mathis proposed, while people might not like it, was a legitimate exception,” Rohan said then.
Stone and Mathis also said jurors were never told sweepstakes were legal, including in the judge’s final instructions to them before they began deliberating.
Instead, jurors only had the words of the prosecutor, who called Mathis’ defense a “head-fake.”
Mathis had planned to testify but changed his mind because he and Stone didn’t think prosecutors had proven the charges against him. In fact, they thought the judge might toss the case completely. (He had dismissed 50 money laundering charges earlier.)
They also worried Mathis’ testimony could last several days, followed by questioning from prosecutors that could drag on. Adding the time to a trial that had been going on for weeks concerned them.
Plus, prosecutors didn’t call an expert witness, Stone said. “Their proof was a bunch of clients saying I thought it was gambling. We thought the jury would not be swayed.”
But they were.
Three weeks after his conviction, Mathis was suspended from practicing law by the Florida Supreme Court.
He faces disbarment but those procedures are on hold at Mathis’ request, pending his appeal. If there is a second trial, Mathis said he will definitely testify.
Verdict should concern other attorneys, Mathis and Stone say
Both Stone and Mathis said attorneys should be concerned about the precedent the case could set.
Stone said Mathis has received an “overwhelming amount of support from people in Jacksonville, from both the Bar and the bench.”
Just that day, Stone said, he had talked with a judge who “had a lack of understanding of how it could happen.”
Mathis wasn’t the “mastermind” of a massive gambling and money laundering venture, they said. Mathis joked he had friends who would testify he wasn’t smart enough to be a mastermind.
The $6 million his firm made over those six or seven years were legal fees paid at a time prosecutors said Allied brought in $300 million.
Officials also repeatedly said Allied only gave 2 percent of its profits to veterans’ charities.
Mathis doesn’t know if that is true. He said he was not involved in his client’s business operations and didn’t know how much money went to veterans.
“I had no idea what they were making,” Mathis said. “I never asked to see the paperwork.”
If Mathis is acquitted and returns to practicing law, he’s not sure how the experience will affect him. He hopes his confidence has not been shattered too badly.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.”
A different kind of life
Every aspect of Mathis’ life has changed. The firm he opened in 2004 and helped build has been dissolved.
He said he was a “little disappointed” colleagues from Mathis & Murphy did not testify on his behalf. He believes they were threatened by prosecutors and feared they could be charged after seeing what happened to him.
But he hopes he would have handled it differently. That he would have stood up for them, including testifying and assisting in their defense.
Mathis said he was dropped as a volunteer with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Northeast Florida immediately after his arrest. He was told he couldn’t contact his “little brother,” with whom he had been paired about a year.
Finding work has been difficult, though he has applied for countless job openings.
“I was trying for some far stretches,” he said. “Even commission sales, I couldn’t get.”
His wife returned to work as a nurse and Mathis took over carpool, cooking and other stay-at-home dad duties.
He has volunteered for Jacksonville Area Legal Aid and has worked some, including recently getting a part-time job doing human resources work for a friend.
Mathis said he has leaned on his faith through the ordeal.
Each time he has been down, God would give him just enough strength to make it through.
“Not what I wanted,” he said, “but what I needed.”
Impact on his family
The situation has been tough on his family.
He and his wife have taken turns supporting one another. Luckily, he said, there have been few moments when they’ve been down at the same time.
He’s worried about his 72-year-old mother, whose health is suffering. (His father died 20 years ago, but was able to see Mathis graduate from law school.)
He said his mother is proud of all of her children, but especially of him. “I always gave her hope,” he said.
To his mother, Mathis was the example of if you work hard and do the right thing, you’ll be rewarded.
“I hope she lives to see me vindicated,” he said, as tears filled his eyes.
Mathis said the experience has taught his daughters life isn’t always fair. “Sometimes, unfortunately, it’s really unfair,” Mathis said.
Every once in a while, something happens and they ask, “Dad, why can’t you do that?”
Nothing has been more difficult, though, than the morning of his sentencing.
He didn’t want his daughters in court that day because he didn’t want them to see him led out of the courtroom if he was immediately taken into custody.
So, he had to say goodbye that morning, not knowing when he might be home again.
“It was the hardest thing in my life,” he said, as he wiped away tears.
He’s grateful he’s been allowed to stay home during the appeal, which he said may not be decided for a couple of years. He knows not everyone is that fortunate.
Mathis and his wife have tried to make life as normal as possible for their daughters so they aren’t focused on his legal problems. He doesn’t want them to carry that burden.
Mathis said he thinks about it every day.
He hopes they don’t.
@editormarilyn
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