Dicky Maegle died yesterday. Not familiar with that name? He is the greatest running back in the history of Rice University (then Rice Institute). In 1954 he was an All-American, led the nation in punt returns, led the nation in yards per carry, led the Southwest Conference in rushing and in scoring. That same year he was 6th in Heisman balloting. He played 5 years with the San Francisco 49ers during their glory years of the late ‘50s. Yet today he is little remembered for those achievements.
What Maegle is remembered for is the second most bizarre play in the history of college football (Wrong Way Riegels holds that honor). During the 1954 Cotton Bowl, with Rice playing Alabama, Maegle took a pitch at Rice’s 5-yard line and went around end. He saw nothing but daylight ahead of him and sprinted off towards what would be the longest run from scrimmage in Cotton Bowl history, a 95-yard touchdown. However, as he approached the Alabama bench in midfield, an Alabama linebacker Tommy Lewis, darted off the bench to tackle Maegle. Maegle was so far ahead of anyone, that officials awarded him the touchdown, which garnered his Cotton Bowl record.
Lewis knew what he had done and apologized to Maegle at half-time. Rice won the game 31-6. Sometime later, Lewis and Maegle were reunited for a joint appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. Lewis publicly gave the reason for his miscreant act as “I was so just so full of Alabama.” Interestingly that was the same excuse that Harvey Updyke, the Alabama fan who poisoned trees at Toomer’s Corner in Auburn gave for his crime. According to his New York Times (NYT) obituary, “Maegle wasn’t laughing about that Cotton Bowl game as time passed; he believed that the Lewis episode overshadowed his considerable football achievements. “People still just don’t get it,” he remarked some 40 years later. When people introduce me, all they ever mention is what happened in that game.””
I thought about Lewis and his reprobate act when I read about the latest PR disaster by Wells Fargo. In a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article, Simon Clark reported, “a former top Wells Fargo WFC & Co. executive in London said the lender had a flawed compliance culture and executives acted like a mafia to suppress internal critics, according to a recorded phone call submitted to a U.K. court. Alicia Reyes was chief executive of Wells Fargo’s European investment bank. She left the bank in January 2020 and criticized the lender in an April 2020 telephone call with a former Wells Fargo contract worker who is suing for unfair dismissal after he raised concerns internally about compliance failings in the U.K.” According to Clark, Reyes said, “It’s like a mafia, literally. This place is just a scheme. There’s no intention of actually solving problems or building things. There’s just smoke and mirrors and a coverup.” In a Press Release, the bank said, “We operate in compliance with the regulatory framework and we take these obligations very seriously.”
Wells Fargo is fighting a wrongful termination claim by Ville-Valtteri Helenius, a Wells Fargo contractor between October 2018 and December 2019 who worked on a project to ensure the bank complied with UK financial regulation. According to Clark, “While working at Wells Fargo in 2019, Mr. Helenius became concerned the bank wasn’t complying with rules known as the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II, or MIFID II, according to a filing from his lawyer. Some European clients of the bank weren’t being charged enough for research, which meant the bank was providing inducements to clients to do business with the bank in a way that wasn’t allowed under the MIFID rules, Mr. Helenius believed, according to the filing.” Moreover, “Mr. Helenius told Wells Fargo executives including Ms. Reyes that the bank had to spend $23.4 million to ensure compliance, according to the filing. Ms. Reyes asked him to attend meetings with executives to discuss compliance.”
Wells Fargo responded that Mr. Helenius was not unfairly dismissed. In fact, “The bank said in a legal filing that the regulatory problems Mr. Helenius identified were known to the bank and that the appropriate authorities had been notified. Xavier Vanhoy, a Wells Fargo executive in Europe, said in a written statement to the court that Mr. Helenius had a “dogmatic approach” and “an inflated view of his own role and position.” Yet perhaps most damningly, Wells Fargo admitted that the approach was not wrong but simply too expensive for the bank, the “bank had $42.1 billion of loans, deposits, securities and derivatives in the U.K. as of Dec. 31, second only to the U.S., according to the bank. Wells Fargo Securities International Ltd., the unit Ms. Reyes led, lost $66.7 million in 2020 after earning $41.1 million the year before.” Wells Fargo said in a court filing, “Mr. Helenius tended to argue for what I would call a ‘Rolls Royce’ solution (I accept this is often the best solution in an ideal world, but it is also the most expensive).” I guess they wanted a VW solution.
Alice Reyes, who has since left Wells Fargo, also said in the recorded phone call, “that she left Wells Fargo because she didn’t agree with the way the bank operated. Wells does a lot of things on the wrong side of regulation. Too many for my liking. That’s why I left. We were aligned because I was trying to solve the problems and you were helping,” Ms. Reyes told Mr. Helenius. “You had subject matter expertise and we were trying to solve it, but there was no intention.” “They said, ‘wait a minute, we have a potential whistleblower here and we need to take him out.’ They followed that pattern with every single person,” she said. “It’s a kill-the-messenger culture. You are in this together with thousands of other people, including me.””
Sort of like an off the bench tackle by Lewis those many years ago.
[View source.]
