Adelman was the low bidder, and the selection committee also concluded it would provide higher quality service than Omega. But because of a poorly designed procedure that gave great weight to which bidder had the most impressive Power Point presentation, Omega finished slightly ahead of Adelman in the committee's initial overall scoring process.
Thompson suspected her administrative superiors would be annoyed if the contract were awarded to a bidder offering a lower-quality product at a higher price, so she persuaded the committee to allow rebidding on a best and final basis, as state law allowed. After its new bid, Adelman was awarded the contract.
Eighteen months later, Thompson found herself in a federal prison, with her career destroyed and her life savings spent. She ended up there because Steve Biskupic, the U.S. attorney for Milwaukee, spent more than a year convicting her of an imaginary crime.
Biskupic's initial theory was that Thompson steered the contract to Adelman because Adelman's owners had (perfectly legally) contributed $10,000 to Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle's re-election campaign, and that she had been bribed to reward Adelman.
This theory had a few problems.
