By BRUCE RUSHTON (bruce.rushton@sj-r.com)
THE STATE JOURNAL-REGISTER
Posted Jun 06, 2009 @ 11:30 PM
Chess can be as knockdown, drag-out as roller derby, pro wrestling or ultimate cage fighting. Just check the court files.
Lawsuits pending in Springfield are the latest in a legal brawl that spans the nation and pits some of the greatest minds in chess against each other. At stake, some say, is the very survival of the U.S. Chess Federation, which has set up a legal defense fund to pay for a half-dozen lawsuits in four states, including Illinois, the corporate home of America’s official governing body of chess.
In one corner sit Zsuzsa “Susan” Polgar and her husband, Paul Truong, both members of the USCF executive board, who have sued the USCF.
In the other are fellow board members, who have sued back. In a pending Sangamon County lawsuit, the USCF and its board are asking a judge to remove Polgar and Truong from the board. Polgar and Truong, meanwhile, are trying to kick the case up to federal court in Springfield, claiming that some matters of law must be heard under federal law.
It wouldn’t be the first time a federal judge has waded into the jungle of litigation that is consuming big-time chess in the United States.
Besides Illinois, lawsuits have been filed in New York, Pennsylvania, California and Texas. Allegations include computer hacking, slander, libel, resume puffing, fraud, negligence, infliction of emotional distress, violation of federal RICO statutes and board members impersonating other board members in online discussion forums, which have included no shortage of taunts and name-calling. It is, essentially, a series of cyber-squabbles that have morphed into lawsuits.
The legal fights have, quite literally, taken the fun out of the game, says Mark Berling, a Toledo attorney who formed a chess team at his daughter’s elementary school last year. With 50 kids playing this year, it’s proven a promising endeavor. But Berling has decided against encouraging students to join the USCF.
“The last thing I wanted them to do was log on (to the USCF Web site) and have their parents find out about this kind of lunacy,” Berling said.
THE PLAYERS
Susan Polgar and her family are legends in the chess world. She didn’t return an e-mail or phone call from The State Journal-Register, nor did her husband. But Polgar doesn’t hold back in describing herself in court documents. When she sued the USCF in Texas last year, she devoted two full pages to her background.
Born in Hungary, Polgar won her first tournament at age 4. Ranked the world’s best female chess player at 15, she says she forced the World Chess Federation to drop the word “men’s” from a championship tournament after she qualified for matches never before open to women. And she isn’t considered the best player in her family. That honor goes to her younger sister, Judit, who once bested five opponents in simultaneous matches while playing blindfolded, and at 16 beat former world champion Boris Spassky, walking away with $110,000.
As children, Susan Polgar and her two sisters were home-schooled, with as many as eight hours a day devoted to chess and reported visits from such superstars as Bobby Fischer, whose mark of youngest-ever grandmaster was surpassed by Judit.
In 2007, Texas Tech University hired Polgar to coach its chess team, granting her an honorary doctorate and the privilege of speaking at commencement exercises. She is paid $127,500 a year.
Less is known about Polgar''s husband, Truong, although he was hired by Texas Tech along with his wife (he’s paid $76,500 a year).
When running for the USCF board in 2007, Truong in a written campaign statement said he had 20 years of experience in “senior management, marketing and PR.” But Troung’s critics say he boasts of academic degrees he never earned and jobs he never held.
“Following the 2007 Executive Board election, USCF discovered that Truong made numerous dishonest and misleading representations during his Executive Board campaign, including that he had earned a Ph.D. and MBA and that he had held multiple high-level marketing positions with billion-dollar companies,” the USCF says in the Sangamon County lawsuit that seeks his ouster. “All of those representations are false.”
Furthermore, the plaintiffs say, Truong and Polgar hid the fact that they were married until after they won election to the board.
“We don’t know exactly when she got married,” says Samuel Sloan, a former board member who once considered himself a friend of Polgar but has now sued her and Truong in New York.
A book publisher who studied math at the University of California at Berkeley, Sloan has experience in courtrooms. Acting as his own attorney, Sloan won a 9-0 ruling from the U.S.
Supreme Court in a suit he had brought against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Sloan hasn’t been as successful in his legal battle against Polgar and Truong, which he also is handling without benefit of a lawyer. A judge has dismissed the lawsuit, and Sloan is now before an appeals court. Win or lose, Sloan’s case marked the beginning of legal wars that have consumed organized chess in the United States, and his accusations echo in Springfield and beyond.
THE FAKE SAM SLOAN
Sloan remembers the day easily.
It was June 25, 2005. Sloan was flying to Chicago to play a grudge match against a CPA he says had been stalking him on the Internet with baseless charges of pedophilia. It was a $1,000 purse.
When Sloan landed in Illinois, he discovered someone had posted a message in his name on an Internet chess message board while he was en route. To an outsider, the posting critical of sitting board members doesn’t sound too bad, especially considering that Sloan was running for the board. But there were more messages, at least 2,500 more, to be precise. And they weren’t all innocuous.
Some contained homophobic references to USCF officials. Others were laced with profanity. Sloan says some of his own postings were lifted from a section of the USCF’s Web site that is accessible only to a few and pasted in public forums where anyone could see them, and with only a word or two changed.
Making matters worse, the Fake Sam Sloan spawned imitators, Sloan alleges, as many as four at one time. Most didn’t last long, he says in his lawsuit, which of necessity includes some fairly tortured language as he describes the situation:
“The Real Fake Sam Sloan continued persistently for more than a solid year with no breaks, whereas the Fake Fake Sam Sloans would quit after a week or two,” Sloan writes.
Sloan, who won a special election to fill a vacancy on the USCF board in 2006, lost an election for a full four-year term in 2007, when Truong and Polgar both won seats. It wasn’t long before lawyers’ phones started ringing.
With the Fake Sam Sloan disparaging USCF officials and board members on Internet message boards and the real Sam Sloan suing, the chess federation launched an investigation in the fall of 2007.
Based on IP addresses, a law firm hired by the USCF to track down the fake Sam Sloan concluded that Truong was the culprit. Truong, according to court files, will neither confirm nor deny the accusation.
The fight has spilled over to bankruptcy court in New York, where Truong filed for Chapter 7 relief in June 2007, shortly after being hired by Texas Tech. But Truong in his bankruptcy petition says he was unemployed. Brian Lafferty, one of Truong’s critics in the chess world, made sure a copy of a Texas Tech pay stub ended up in the hands of the bankruptcy court.
Polgar also sneaks in cyberspace, her enemies say. The USCF alleges Polgar was privy to the Fake Sam Sloan investigation because she, with the help of a business associate in Seattle, hacked into the e-mail account of a board member who sat on the litigation committee. Besides reading e-mails sent by the board’s lawyer to litigation committee members, Polgar and her allies set up a blog and posted privileged attorney-client communications for the world to see, the USCF says.
It’s a baseless allegation, one of Polgar’s lawyers says.
“Not only is it not true, the plaintiffs know it’s not true,” says Whitney Leigh, who is based in San Francisco (Polgar also has counsel in Illinois and Texas). “This is entirely made up by four executive board members who are hoping to force her to spend so much on litigation she would be forced to leave the board.”
A FLOOD OF LAWSUITS
Sloan was first to the courthouse, suing Polgar, Truong, the USCF, Texas Tech, various USCF officials, even the United States — among other things, he wants the U.S. Department of Justice to oversee a new federation board election. He also says the brouhaha has cost him membership in his beloved Marshall Chess Club, which has expelled him. He says he’s been told confidentially that it’s all about politics, but he never discusses such matters at the club.
“I just play chess,” he says.
Next came Gordon Ray Parker, a Philadelphian considered an expert in chess opening strategies who began his federal lawsuit thusly: “It is a sad day for organized chess in the United States.”
In his lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania, Parker alleges that Truong adopted his identity in Internet postings, posting obscene messages and crude allegations against USCF insiders, just as Truong allegedly did with Sloan.
But, Parker claims, Sloan was in on the deal, allowing his online identity to be stolen so that fake postings would generate sympathy among the USCF members and propel him to the chess federation board. A federal judge in December dismissed most of Parker's case, but kept alive three claims against Truong and Polgar.
The USCF sued Polgar in California state court last summer, alleging she and unnamed allies illegally hacked into computer accounts with the help of purloined passwords. In addition to intercepting e-mails between the federation’s lawyer and the board’s litigation committee, the USCF says Polgar and her allies hacked the federation president’s USCF account and impersonated him in bogus messages posted on a federation Web site.
Less than two months after the USCF sued her, Polgar fired back with a lawsuit against the federation and others filed in Texas. Polgar accuses the USCF of “jealous attacks” and alleges that the federation and board members conspired to destroy her because she’s a woman and a foreigner. She blames the USCF for unflattering stories posted on the Internet and published in The New York Times and Lubbock Avalanche Journal.
“The USCF has apparently become alarmed and irrationally concerned with Polgar’s success and her championing of chess among all people, especially young women," one of her attorneys wrote.
A judge has dismissed Polgar’s claims of negligence and infliction of emotional distress, but has otherwise allowed the lawsuit to proceed.
Then came the Springfield lawsuit, filed late last year by the federation after the USCF board last summer couldn’t convince federation delegates — there are more than 100 who represent the 50 states — that Truong should be ousted. The USCF is now asking a judge to throw him off the board.
Under federation bylaws, attempts to throw Truong off the board should have ended with the failed recall last summer, Leigh says. “Rogue executive directors” are now spending money the USCF doesn’t have to continue the legal fight, he says.
THE END GAME
Sloan thinks Polgar and her husband are trying to drive the USCF into financial ruin so they can take over the federation.
“What else would it be?” he says.
Polgar has offered to settle her suit against the USCF for $1 and an apology, and the federation might not be able to afford much more. The USCF’s tax returns show a hand-to-mouth organization that generates roughly $3 million a year in revenue and has spent more than it’s taken in for the last three years. Board members draw no pay. But it’s not about the money, Sloan says.
The USCF has names, lots of names. Since its inception in 1939 courtesy of a chess-loving lawyer who happened to live in Chicago and so filed incorporation papers in Illinois, the USCF has kept track of and ranked more than 600,000 players, Sloan says. It’s a who’s-who and who’s-best list that cannot be duplicated.
“The worst-case scenario is she wins the case and we have to pay the $25 million (she’s seeking),” Sloan says. “We still have the names. We’re still recognized as the official organization of chess in the United States.”
Back in Toledo, Berling is one of those names, his membership in the USCF less than a year old. As a lawyer and player of a game whose sanctioning body dictates handshakes before and after contests, he says he can’t understand it.
If all the litigants truly loved the game, Berling says, they would drop the lawsuits, fire the lawyers, resign from the board and declare peace. He doesn’t care who’s right.
“If they continue with this madness in the court system ... even the winner is going to be a loser," he sais. "The federation, if they win, then what? They still have to pay the attorneys.
"Polgar and Truong should say thanks for the good times and leave. Otherwise, they’re going to dig their heels in until everyone’s bankrupt. They’ll do incalculable damage to themselves and the federation, no matter who comes out on top.
“And the big loser will be the chess public.”