The Oracle THURSDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2014 I VOL. 52 NO. 27
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA
Former white-collar criminal to share crooked past
By Wesley Higgins N E W S
Martin Copello and Huzzatun Iqra were crowned Homecoming King and Queen, respectively, Wednesday in the Marshall Student Center Ballroom. ORACLE PHOTO / ADAM MATHIEU
Students favor Crist in straw poll By Wesley Higgins N E W S
E D I T O R
Republicans may want to consider paying attention to youth in the weeks leading up to the Florida elections. According to the straw poll conducted Tuesday, USF students favor Charlie Crist over Rick Scott by 20 percentage points in the race for governor. In further fortune for the Florida Democratic party, all the Democrats running for cabinet positions were favored by an approximate average of 8 percent. But before the Democrats pop the champagne, they need to figure out whether millennials actually care enough to go out and vote. Poll overseer Susan MacManus, a political science professor at USF, said there was a sizeable portion of those polled who said they didn’t care for any candidate. Younger voters struggle to identify with the gubernatorial candidates and are sick of hearing about them.
“There’s been an oversaturation of negative ads on the governor’s race for months now,” she said. “Negative ads really offend younger voters.” What could bring out youth, however, is the medical marijuana legalization amendment. “The premise early on, by some, was that putting such an amendment on the ballot would spike youth turnout,” MacManus said. “It was true that more people voted on that than on the governor race.” MacManus, however, said she was surprised that only 70 percent favored legalizing medical marijuana, given the presumption that everyone in college likes pot. To figure out how to rally young voters, election supervisors could look at the straw poll for where students are getting their campaign news, MacManus said. Though television led the pack at 39 percent, social media is slowly closing the gap at 31 percent. “It explains why campaigning costs so much,” she said. “You have to spend so much
money in all these media markets.” While those polled felt they hear enough about Crist and Scott, they don’t always feel informed about other names and issues on the ballot. Those who took the poll tended to go down party lines when selecting cabinet members. “It reflects the polarization of the country,” she said. “Five or 10 years ago, people were split-ticket voters.” MacManus also said students asked administrators what the amendments meant, especially Amendment 3, which 51 percent said they didn’t understand. The amendment conserving water and land was approved by 65 percent. MacManus said this reflects an expanding environmental consciousness. “Florida is definitely a more pro-environment state than others,” she said. “Our beaches, our coasts, our springs appeal to people.” Another trend captured in
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E D I T O R
In the corporate world, it is taxing to walk the line while fixated on the bottom line. Before Walter Pavlo saw he had crossed the line of corruption, he was already too astray to escape his $6 million crime. After two years in prison, Pavlo now travels the country, pleading with tomorrow’s business leaders to grasp how easy it is to find oneself in the world of white-collar crime. He will speak at 4:30 p.m. Friday at the USF College of Business. “It starts with a small decision that incrementally got worse and worse,” he said. “You tell yourself your intentions are good at first, but then you find yourself in a place you don’t recognize — it’s tough to get back.” *** Like his intentions, Pavlo said his life didn’t start out crooked. Though his grades were mediocre, he said he was an honest student. “I worked hard,” he said. “I probably got a little bit over my head, but I never cheated.” With a master’s in finance from Mercer, he said he felt ready to enter MCI Communications as a senior manager. But Pavlo found himself warping under the pressure of monthly quotas, his failure written on the spreadsheet. So he cheated. “Everyone was getting ahead and getting rich except for me,” he said. “I felt underpaid, under appreciated and forced to do things I didn’t want to do.” Pavlo said some of his col-
Walter Pavlo. SPECIAL TO THE ORACLE leagues felt the same way, so they took advantage of MCI’s lax accounting standards and smudged the numbers of poorperforming clients. Though intended to boost worth in the eyes of the company, he said the feeling of invincibility became a blinder in a race that would soon go far off track. “You can convince yourself very easily that it’s OK, it not hurting anyone and there’s no consequence,” he said. “In that sort of vacuum, you make some really poor decisions.” Over the course of six months, Pavlo and his colleagues siphoned $6 million from their clients to Cayman Island bank accounts. “I felt excited winning the dirty battle that it is,” he said. “Once I got into it, I realized I was wrong — I was totally wrong.” Yet an audit doesn’t care if a thief feels sorry. Pavlo left MCI once inspectors started sniffing around, but the FBI followed. Pavlo confessed and waited to enter prison, four full years
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