Rigged: The undoing of America’s premier bodybuilding leaguesJim Manion subverted the National Physique Committee’s nonprofit mission by establishing a parallel for-profit company, The Post found.by Desmond Butler and John Sullivan
Over more than four decades, the man who built the world’s premier amateur bodybuilding federation subverted the group’s nonprofit mission by establishing a parallel for-profit company that took over the sport for the benefit of himself and his family, a Washington Post investigation has found.
Many of those who worked alongside Jim Manion have turned against him and accused him of fostering an atmosphere of intimidation and compromising the sport with conflicts of interest and self-dealing. Manion went from an elected president of a small nonprofit to the leader of a company that now dominates a multimillion-dollar industry. He has turned the organization into a family dynasty, appointing his grandson, Tyler Manion, as vice president. Tyler’s father, J.M. Manion, was paid nearly $900,000 over three years by the charity for photography services.
The Post’s reporting is based on interviews with more than 80 people inside the sport, along with lawsuits, emails, tax forms, audits and internal documents dating back to 1978. Among current and former officials and promoters, 15 spoke on the record in hopes, they said, of breaking Manion’s hold on the sport. They include one former top contest judge who has sued Jim Manion in a business dispute and several others who are working for rival organizations in competition with him.
Manion’s rise is a story of an audacious takeover that began in the late 1970s when he was tapped to lead the newly created National Physique Committee of the AAU, or NPC. The nonprofit was founded as a charity for the benefit of athletes and the sport “to promote and improve physique competition,” its charter states. Gradually, oversight eroded. Former board members say they stopped receiving audits and financial reports. Elections and term limits went by the wayside, according to internal NPC documents.
Manion dissolved the nonprofit and turned the NPC into a private, for-profit company. Such a change requires a vote by the board, according to the laws governing nonprofits in Ohio, where the NPC was incorporated. Eight board members told The Post that they didn’t know the organization had been privatized until years later. Manion continued holding board meetings as if nothing had changed, board members said.
Steve O’Brien, a longtime NPC vice president, said that he didn’t know the nonprofit had been dissolved until last year. Another board member said she first learned of the privatization when a Post reporter asked her about it in November.
“I’m amazed about the fact that these guys have stolen this corporation right from underneath our noses,” said O’Brien, a former bodybuilder and contest promoter on the West Coast who competed in the sport’s heyday in the 1970s at Muscle Beach in Venice, Calif.
In general, nonprofit corporations in Ohio are not permitted to transform themselves into for-profit companies, Kelly May, a spokeswoman for Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, said.
“Ohio Revised Code Chapter 1702 permits nonprofit corporations to convert to other entities, but not to for-profit corporations,” May said. “In general, charitable assets must always remain charitable.”
Jim Manion, who earned $278,184 in his last known salary at the nonprofit in 2016, took several steps to solidify his control over the NPC and its revenue while his family set up companies that appear related to NPC entities.
Over the course of his tenure as NPC president, Manion signed over control of the NPC’s trademark to himself as an individual, documents show. J.M. Manion and his wife started a for-profit company using the same name as the NPC News website. During this time, the Manions encouraged advertisers at the official NPC News magazine to buy ads on the website, according to interviews.
J.M. also listed himself as co-owner of a clothing company that sold NPC-branded gear, according to his LinkedIn page, which was taken down after The Post asked a spokesman for Jim Manion about it. Jim Manion’s wife started a company whose initials matched the NPC’s data processing vendor three months before that vendor was hired, Pennsylvania corporate records show.
Financial deals by nonprofits that provide an excessive benefit to individuals connected to the nonprofit are generally prohibited under federal law.
Available NPC records and tax filings do not include enough detail to determine whether the companies linked to the Manion family profited from the NPC. For example, the tax filings and the minutes do not list the names of its vendors. Nonprofits are required to name vendors if they earn over $100,000 and are among the top five highest paid contractors.
In response to Post questions to Jim and Tyler Manion, as well as their organization, spokesman Jon Hammond emailed a one-sentence statement.
“The NPC was formed and has always been governed in accordance with all federal, state and local laws,” the statement said.
On Oct. 25, The Post published a story in which 20 women described their experiences with J.M. Manion. Some of the women said he asked them to pose for nude photographs that then appeared on his soft-core pornography sites. After that story was published, an official with one of the two most prominent contests in the sport, the Arnold Classic, said J.M. would not be photographing the event in March.
J.M. did not respond to requests for comment. Following publication of The Post’s story, Brian H. Simmons, a lawyer representing Jim Manion, the NPC and the IFBB Pro League, the professional bodybuilding arm that Manion also owns, said his clients “emphatically deny any and all wrongdoing.” Simmons added that some people cited in The Post’s story “possess a clear animus against my clients due to many prior disputes between the parties and/or the fact they are directly competing or seeking to directly compete against NPC and/or IFBB Pro League.”
Some high-profile figures in bodybuilding say Manion has been good for the sport.
Lee Haney, an eight-time Mr. Olympia, said Manion has helped with his mentoring program for decades.
“Jim Manion is a man of integrity and we’ve been friends for years. We’ve prayed together over the phone.”
Sandy Williamson, a former vice president of the nonprofit NPC and a prominent contest judge, said the organization has done wonders for women.
“I’ve been working under Jim Manion for 40 years and the guy has always been about the athletes,” Williamson said. “He has helped women get contracts and build businesses, he’s always been about the athletes. The people who you are talking to are not part of this organization anymore because they were never about the athletes.”
While long viewed as a fringe sport, bodybuilding attracts thousands of athletes in the United States and many more internationally. The two organizations run by the Manion family oversee hundreds of contests per year, from smaller regional events for amateurs around the country and abroad to the headline competitions where top male pros can earn more than $600,000, such as the Olympia, which is now underway in Las Vegas. Pro women earn much less than men.
The sport is both art and competition, with athletes working out in weight rooms to sculpt their bodies and following pre-contest diet regimens designed to better show off their muscles onstage. Athletes compete in categories based on the degree of musculature. In contests, they perform a series of poses onstage for judges who score them according to criteria outlined by the federations.
Judges and insiders say the Manions have effectively built an old-fashioned patronage system to reward favored athletes, coaches, sponsors and others. Several former officials and athletes said in interviews that they were ostracized from Manion’s organizations after disagreements with him or family members.
O’Brien said he sold his West Coast shows after Manion, who chooses the promoters, asked him how old he was and suggested a replacement. O’Brien was 70 at the time, and selling seemed the only option. O’Brien said he now regrets not speaking out earlier about the management of the NPC.
At a contest in Phoenix in 2010, O’Brien said he witnessed a judge altering the winning lineup after phone conversations with Manion and his son, J.M. “I got really pissed off,” said O’Brien, who has judged some of the top professional competitions in the world.
Wayne DeMilia worked closely with Manion for more than two decades as head of the NPC’s then-professional affiliate in the United States. He returned to bodybuilding in 2017 after a 13-year absence to run a rival amateur organization, IFBB Physique America, under the auspices of the original worldwide professional bodybuilding organization, now known as the International Fitness and Bodybuilding Federation (IFBB).
Founded in 1946 in Montreal by the famed Weider brothers, Ben and Joe, the IFBB was the world’s leading federation until Manion split from it in 2017 and later formed his own professional league. Manion chose a similar name for his new federation, the IFBB Pro League, which has surpassed the original IFBB because it runs the two largest events, the Olympia and the Arnold Schwarzenegger-owned Arnold Classic.
DeMilia, who was the first to approach The Post with allegations about Manion’s empire, said he has made it his mission to hold Manion accountable. Many former colleagues told DeMilia that greed was warping it, he said, adding that athletes and others in the business were helpless to do anything but bow to the Manions.
“If you’re making money and you enjoy being part of the sport, that’s what you have to put up with now,” DeMilia said.
Onetime NPC stalwarts are leaving in anger over how the Manions have run the organization.
Pete Fancher, once a board member from Florida, promoted his last contest in 2018, and told The Post that Manion rules the organization “by fear.” He looks back at Manion’s leadership with “disgust, pure disgust.”
Miles Neussle, a former board member, held his last show in July and then resigned because of Manion’s “arrogance, corruption and intimidation,” he told The Post.
Brent Jones ran bodybuilding competitions in Kentucky for decades, but he gave it up in October because of the “sexualization of the sport and the corruption,” he said in a statement he posted on social media.
Stuffing the ballot boxIf Ken Sprague could replay the founding of the NPC, he says, he wouldn’t have cheated to put Manion in the top job.
Sprague was the owner of Gold’s Gym in Venice, Calif., known as the center of bodybuilding. Manion was president of the Amateur Athletic Union’s Physique Committee, which then presided over amateur bodybuilding in America. In 1978, an act of Congress removed the AAU from governance of any sport, and bodybuilders moved to start their own organization.
To head off another candidate whom he didn’t think was up to the job, Sprague says he championed Manion, then a former bodybuilder from Pittsburgh, to lead the newly independent organization, the National Physique Committee of the AAU. The election was by a secret ballot, but Sprague said he was able to stuff the box with a fistful of Manion “votes,” he recalled in an interview from his home in Georgia.
“It was very easy to miscount,” Sprague, 77, said. “I’m not proud of it. But the calculation was that it was best for bodybuilding at that time.”
Once in place as president of the NPC, Manion developed his own power base. In 1981, the organization’s name was changed to the National Physique Committee of the USA.
Many people who were once close to Manion say he adopted some of the mannerisms and vocabulary of mafia films and TV shows, according to several insiders who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution.
Inside his warehouse in Pittsburgh, a poster from the gangster movie “Goodfellas” used to have Manion’s face pasted onto Robert De Niro’s, the insiders said. Manion sometimes greets male associates with kisses on the cheek, others say, and talks about people who make money for him as his “earners,” as if he were Tony Soprano.
Richard Rondinelli, a promoter who knew Manion from the early days and was later convicted of tax evasion charges related to selling steroids, said he found it comical that NPC associates would refer to the Manions as “the family,” as if they were connected to the mafia.
“The family? The family of what? I have no idea,” Rondinelli said. “Is it the Partridge Family?”
But the image Jim Manion cultivated is no joke to many people in the bodybuilding world who spoke to The Post. More than a dozen expressed fear of retaliation for speaking out.
Board members said the drift away from oversight dates back to the 1980s and 1990s, when the sport was booming, gyms were sprouting everywhere and many of the board members were making money running contests.
The NPC’s original bylaws, obtained by The Post, had protections in place that were gradually eliminated or ignored, such as yearly independent audits, term limits and power vested in the voting members, documents and interviews show. The Post also obtained minutes from meetings of the NPC’s board of governors and trustees, spanning the years 1985 to 2017, but was unable to acquire complete records. The NPC declined a request for its minutes.
The board of governors had the power to choose which promoters could run and profit from major events while paying the NPC for the privilege. But over time, the board stopped selecting the promoters, former board members say, and Manion began picking them himself.
“All of a sudden you get the same promoters for every national event,” said Jim Rockell, who was an NPC vice president, a frequent head judge at top pro events and once a close friend of Manion’s. “And there were no other bids. Bids were already sealed, and they were already determined ahead of time. And that’s how that went.”
Rockell, who now works with DeMilia as executive vice president of IFBB Physique America, says he was cast out of Manion’s circle several years ago. Rockell said he ignored a directive to stay away from DeMilia, an outspoken Manion critic. DeMilia was not working in the sport at the time, and he and Rockell had a friendly dinner. The word got back to Manion, Rockell said, and the two argued.
Rockell said Manion told him: “If you think you can talk to anyone you want, you are mistaken.”
Manion stopped assigning Rockell as a judge in his federations, Rockell said, so he resigned.
Rockell said Manion demanded that promoters pay his way to the contests, sometimes with first-class plane tickets, and put him up in fancy hotels. “It was always a suite,” Rockell said.
The NPC’s revenue became less transparent at some point in the 1980s, board members say, when Manion stopped presenting the charity’s financials to the board. O’Brien and Rockell said they cannot remember seeing the charity’s tax filings during the decades they served as vice presidents, though the forms require an officer to certify that copies were provided to all members of the governing board before filing.
Fancher, the Florida promoter who was on the NPC’s board of governors from the early 1990s until its dissolution in 2018, was asked by The Post whether he ever saw financials. His reply was terse: “Oh, hell no!”
Many of the officials and promoters who spoke to The Post said they noticed that during the nonprofit era NPC-branded clothing and gym gear was being sold by a business connected to the Manions. This is not allowed under rules governing nonprofits unless the board approves a license and the NPC is compensated at fair market value. But the board members were unclear whether the NPC was compensated, and they did not ask.
“All insider transactions are looked at by rules governing excess benefit transactions,” said Benjamin Leff, a professor who teaches the law of charitable and nonprofit organizations at American University’s Washington College of Law. If the insider “paid fair market value, it’s done in a written agreement and the disallowed person does not participate in the decision, it can be okay. All this should be well-documented in the minutes.” Ex-board members say that Manion did not offer information about the clothing business to the board.
“Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing,” said Rockell, who used to carry NPC merchandise in his gym. “You figure as a member of the NPC, you’re buying it to support the organization.”
Some NPC financial documents, including internal audits from the 1980s and early 1990s, show some income from apparel. One year, it was grouped in a category with donations and videocassettes and listed at $31,000.
According to a LinkedIn page for J.M. Manion, he became co-owner of California Active Wear in 1986, in charge of photography, marketing and accounting. J.M. is listed as a co-owner of California Active Wear with John Albert, his uncle, in Experian’s corporate database.
Rockell said he bought the NPC merchandise he sold in his gym from California Active Wear and dealt with Albert on the orders.
Albert could not be reached for comment.
In 1996, a website linked to California Active Wear was registered to J.M. Manion’s personal email. The site, npcwear.com, has been offering NPC branded apparel since at least 1997, archived versions show. Internet domain records show that both npc-wear.com and npcwear.com have been registered since 2000 to J.M. Productions, a company owned by J.M. Manion, corporate business records show. At various times, the clothing sites included links to J.M.’s soft-core pornography sites, The Post found.
Board members say they were not aware of any licensing of the NPC name. In a 2008 lawsuit, however, the NPC stated it had licensed its trademark for clothing but did not name any companies. There is no line item for apparel income reported in tax filings for the NPC from 1998 to 2017 and the filings show no revenue from the licensing of the trademark during that period.
The treasurerBoard members describe Harry Wulff, NPC’s longtime treasurer who became vice president of the private NPC company, as quiet, reserved and often in the background.
Wulff was also busy. According to tax filings made by the nonprofits, he worked 100-hour weeks. Between 2006 and 2009 Wulff was making $108,000 annually from the NPC, and was listed as working an average of 40 hours per week. But that was only his second job — in those years he also earned $88,000 to $112,000 a year from a nonprofit printer’s association he ran. The nonprofit declared he worked an average of 60 hours per week as its president.
Wulff has been deeply involved in the NPC since the 1980s and shared an office with Manion at the Pittsburgh warehouse. Their wives were also in business together, documents show.
On Sept. 24, 1987, Manion’s wife, Deborah A. Albert, and Wulff’s wife, Jane A. Wulff, filed incorporation papers to start a for-profit company called Data Service International, described as “a computer listing service.” State business records list the corporate address for the company as the home addresses of the Wulffs.
Less than three weeks later, at the NPC board meeting in Atlantic City, Wulff announced that the NPC would begin using a new computer service to keep track of its membership registrations, the minutes show. The service, Wulff said, would have a dedicated operator, just for the NPC.
The minutes did not mention the name of the company. The board passed a motion unanimously to approve the use of the unnamed company. The following year, members were told to mail checks to “D.S.I.”
Finding D.S.I. would have proved difficult for customers. The Post could not find a listed phone or commercial business address for D.S.I. or locate the company in any commercial credit or business database over the 35 years it has been in business.
After the switch to D.S.I., data processing costs for the NPC grew steadily — from $51,000 in 1985 to $425,000 in 2004, NPC audit records and tax filings show. In 2015, the final year data processing is accounted for, the NPC spent $284,000.
Even with the addition of D.S.I.’s services, the NPC continued to rely on an outdated system to register members, according to a case study by Blue Archer, a Pittsburgh-based company hired by the NPC to help transition to online registrations in 2016. In the study, Blue Archer said that the NPC had relied on an inefficient paper system for membership and was “stuck in the past....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/manion-bodybuilding-competition-npc-subversion/?itid=hp-top-table-main_p001_f005
