DATE: Saturday, October 4, 1997             TAG: 9710040584

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B4   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY LAURA LaFAY, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: RICHMOND                          LENGTH:   76 lines

2 INDICTED FOR BID-RIGGING AT GILMORE'S STATE OFFICE SUCCESSOR SAYS CANDIDATE REQUESTED THE INVESTIGATION.

Two people have been indicted in the wake of a state police investigation into bid-rigging in the office of former state Attorney General and current GOP gubernatorial candidate James S. Gilmore.

A grand jury last week charged Robert Daniel Brashier, a former legal assistant at the attorney general's office, with five counts of bid-rigging from March 16 through May 14. Brashier was fired from his job in July, according to the attorney general's office.

Kriss Middlestadt Wilson, a Richmond print broker, was charged with four counts during the same period. Both men are scheduled to appear in Richmond's Manchester courthouse Oct. 14.

The charges are the apparent result of an alleged bid-rigging scheme that came to light in May.

Under the scheme, Wilson allegedly solicited overly high bids from individual printers and then submitted a slightly lower bid for his company. Once chosen for the job, Wilson's company allegedly contracted the work out to a volume printer for less than half the price and pocketed the difference.

Richard Cullen, who replaced Gilmore as attorney general when Gilmore quit to run for governor in June, said late Friday that Gilmore requested the investigation six days before leaving office.

Cullen said he later asked the state police to appoint a special prosecutor in the case. The state police complied by taking the matter to Robert E. Trono, special counsel to the Metropolitan Richmond Multi-Jurisdictional Grand Jury, he said.

``As this is now a criminal case,'' Cullen said, ``this Office (sic) will have no additional comment.''

The alleged scheme unraveled in early May when a Richmond printer, Robert S. Barnett, was asked if he would print 2,400 copies of a promotional booklet about consumer fraud for Gilmore's office.

Gilmore, the GOP candidate for governor, was criticized at the time for using state money to print the booklets which contain several photos of himself, invoke his name repeatedly, and portray him as a vigorous protector against fraud.

In interviews this week, Barnett, 47, said Wilson's office manager called him during the first week of May and asked if he could print the booklets for $5,000. Barnett said he agreed to do so, since $5,000 was a good price, and that he then faxed a generic bid to Wilson's office.

On May 9, Barnett said, the company's owner instructed him to fax the same bid directly to Brashier in the attorney general's office. Barnett said he did so, but that he decreased the bid to $1,258 - a fairer price for the work.

A flurry of angry calls from Wilson's office followed, Barnett said. At one point, he said, ``Kriss Wilson called and told me to `send the . . . $5,000 bid' or I wouldn't get any more business from them.''

``He said something to the effect that his contact at the attorney general's office was going to lose his job if I did not fax the bid.''

When he continued to refuse to send a $5,000 bid, Barnett said, Wilson's office manager told him, ``It doesn't matter. I can cut and paste your bids.''

Barnett said he later got a call from the attorney general's office asking him to resubmit the bid for $10,000. At that point, he said, he asked for a copy of his original bid and found it had been altered. He supplied a copy of the altered bid to The Virginian-Pilot.

Invoking the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, Barnett obtained copies of all of the bids and found that each was priced roughly 250 percent to 450 percent above market, and that Wilson's bid was $5 lower than the lowest bid he had solicited. Barnett became fixated on the matter. He told a legal assistant at the attorney general's office that ``there was a problem.'' He talked to two lawyers from the office and wrote to Gilmore. He got no response.

After Gilmore resigned to run for governor, Barnett wrote to Cullen and said he got no response. In frustration, he stood in front of the attorney general's office on June 6 and handed out to passersby a four-page summary of his findings. The summary was entitled, ``FRAUD AND BID-RIGGING IN JIM GILMORE'S OFFICE.''

Reached at campaign headquarters late Friday, Gilmore spokesman Mark Miner said, ``The bottom line is, once Jim Gilmore found out about this he took it directly to the state police.'' KEYWORDS: INDICTMENT BID-RIGGING

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