USA Swimming’s Consultant on Coach Background Checks Registered Website and Business Names ‘Hooking Up With Tawnie Lynn’ — Explains ‘It’s Personal’
Rutgers, Utah, Baltimore, And the No-Accountability Zone of Sports Potentates And Media
April 5, 2013Flashback 1: How USA Swimming’s Background Check Guru Barry ‘Hooking Up With Tawnie Lynn’ Nadell Helped Introduce Kid Athletes to Coach Charles Baechler — A Disbarred Rapist Judge
April 7, 2013by Irvin Muchnick and Tim Joyce
Concussion Inc. has learned that the private investigator who helped design the flawed system for screening the backgrounds of USA Swimming coaches last year himself registered the Internet domain name “HookingUpWithTawnieLynn.com” and variations.
At the same time, Barry Nadell — owner-operator of Chatsworth, California-based Nadell Investigations (http://barrynadell.com) — also registered with the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk the fictitious business names “Hooking Up With Tawnie Lynn,” “Hookin Up With Tawnie Lynn,” “Nadell Media,” and “Nadell Productions.” At http://muchnick.net/nadell.pdf, we uploaded screen shots of the online search showing that all four names were registered on August 17, 2012, at county document number 2012166762.
This revelation is certain to fuel the debate over the efficacy and good faith of the background checks of the U.S. Olympic Committee’s national governing body for swimming, which began coach screenings in 2006. In recent months, Concussion Inc. has exposed that South Dakota state swimming official and youth club coach Charles Baechler is a disbarred former Washington State judge who pleaded guilty to charges stemming from a sexual assault of a woman who had been a defendant in his court. We also published the full background of convicted federal criminal and multi-alias con man James Pantera, who was head coach of a high school swimming team in San Diego and certified to start a USA Swimming club there.
Yet in a telephone interview Friday evening, Nadell, who according to Internet searches is 62 years old, denied that his Hooking Up With Tawnie Lynn enterprise raised issues of impropriety or even cast any appearance of impropriety.
“There is nothing to talk about,” Nadell said. “It’s personal. Those are just catchy names.”
No live Internet site yet exists at the web address HookingUpWithTawnieLynn.com. Asked if it was reasonable to suggest that he might be contemplating the launch of a pornography site or an online dating service, Nadell said, “They do not have to do with pornography. They do not have to do with a dating service.”
Asked if he had disclosed to client USA Swimming the registration of these names, Nadell said, “No.”
USA Swimming has not responded to any inquiries from Concussion Inc. since before last summer’s Olympic Trials. At the Trials in Omaha, USA Swimming’s public relations director Karen Linhart threatened to have security eject one of us (Muchnick) from Omaha’s CenturyLink Center after being asked a question about a swimming coach who was under criminal investigation for once molesting a minor swimmer under his supervision. (The coach, Noah Rucker, later would be convicted in Virginia.) As this article was being published, we had received no reply to an email about Nadell’s business names, which was sent to Linhart, safe sport director Susan Woessner, and executive director Chuck Wielgus.
We concluded our interview of Nadell by asking him if he had anything to add to our readers’ understanding of this bizarre development.
Nadell said, “No. I have a number of investments. I also own a Starbucks and property in Atlanta. I’m a wealthy man.”