Fall of College President Stuns Students, Staff

He was, by all accounts, a quiet man, humble, even timid, “an outstanding Christian gentleman” who worked tirelessly on behalf of the small Baptist college he had led for a quarter century.

As president of Mississippi College, Lewis Nobles was more than an administrator--he was a figure of rock-solid moral authority, responsible for both the academic and spiritual well-being of his nearly 4,000 young charges.

Students and staff at the small campus of brick Colonial-style buildings were shocked 18 months ago when Nobles was forced to resign over allegations of financial improprieties. That was bad enough. But then the details of his alleged secret life began to trickle out: hints of offshore bank accounts, tales of far-flung liaisons with prostitutes and a mysterious vial of strychnine found in his office.

As Nobles went into seclusion, college officials accused him of embezzling more than $3 million--nearly $400,000 of which allegedly was paid to expensive hookers whom he supposedly flew to secret rendezvous around the country.

His friends couldn’t believe it.

“I know of no one who really knows the man who thinks he’s guilty,” said Ed McDonald, a lifelong friend. “He might be unorthodox in the way he conducts some of his business, but as far as using any of the college’s money for his personal use, I don’t believe it. And I won’t believe it unless he tells me he did it.”

Nobles hasn’t told much of anything to many people lately. Two days before his last court hearing, the 69-year-old college president went on the lam. He fled to San Francisco under an assumed name. When FBI agents found him in a Union Square hotel room, he collapsed into seizures after swallowing cyanide, authorities said.

After suffering a stroke last week, Nobles remains hospitalized in California, his family by his side. “He is in very serious condition,” said his attorney, Amy Whitten, adding that the stroke left him partially paralyzed.

If the allegations prove true, the rise and fall of Lewis Nobles would seem to be the story of a modern-day Bible Belt Jekyll and Hyde--the saga of a man known for his rectitude and having the respect of his peers, but whose placid demeanor hid an out-of-control inner-self.

It would also be a story about the seductive, corrupting influence of power. For in his 25 years at the helm of Mississippi College--during which he increased the school’s endowment, launched an ambitious building program and started new athletic programs and a law school--Nobles wielded virtually unchallenged authority.

The college’s board of trustees, critics say, was packed with Nobles’ friends and bowed to his wishes--as did the Mississippi Baptist Convention, under whose authority the school ostensibly belonged.

“He was Mississippi College,” said Charles Willibanks, who served on the law school faculty from 1977 to 1981, when he resigned, he said, in disillusionment over Nobles’ dishonesty. “He did everything--he had full and complete and absolute power.”

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Nobles’ rock-solid image began to unravel in August, 1993, when a college staff member approached a longtime benefactor about making a donation, only to be informed that it already had been made.

After a preliminary investigation, it was discovered that many donations made to the college through Nobles had not been reaching school coffers.

When trustees confronted him, the balding, heavy-set Nobles said that he had deposited the money in a secret bank account but had spent it for proper purposes. A complaint filed by the college in civil court alleges that the documentation he produced to back up his claim was forged.

Nobles is lauded by longtime friends for his brilliance. But school officials describe a series of clumsy attempts to cover up his alleged crimes.

“Nobles produced a relatively few possibly legitimate checks payable from his account to Mississippi College--and a mass of forged bank statements and checks,” the complaint said. “The bank statements were fakes in that they were typed on a photocopy of a real bank statement.”

University officials said they found the real bank statements in Nobles’ office--along with the rubber stamp that they claim he had used to imprint “PAID” and the bank numbers on the stack of allegedly fake checks.

Also found in his campus office were $27,844 in cash and numerous empty bank cash wrappers. Although authorities will not confirm it, there were published reports that they also found photographs of scantily clad women--and this on a campus where nude magazines are confiscated from students who try to sneak them into dormitories.

In a federal indictment issued in September, Nobles was charged with misappropriating $1.7 million from Jan. 1, 1989, to Aug. 3, 1993, the period covered under the statute of limitations. Six percent of the money was spent for legitimate college purposes, 16% went to women in various states for sexual favors and the rest was used in private real estate investments and other personal interests, according to the indictment.

The most hotly contested charges in the 20-count indictment are four counts of violating the seldom-used federal Mann Act, the so-called White Slave Traffic Act that charges Nobles with enticing women to cross state lines to commit prostitution--women from Atlanta and New York who allegedly traveled to other states to be with him.

Grady Tollison, one of Nobles’ attorneys, said that in 23 years of practicing law, he had never seen the Mann Act used. He complained that the charges would “scandalize” the trial, which had been scheduled for Feb. 7. He was working to get those charges dismissed when Nobles, who was free on bond, disappeared last month.

McDonald was dumbfounded by his childhood friend’s disappearance and subsequent suicide attempt. “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “There’s bound to be something that caused the man to snap.”

He mentioned as possible culprits the psychological pressures caused by skyrocketing legal expenses, the freezing of Nobles’ assets and the drumbeat of embarrassing--and in McDonald’s view, one-sided--news stories. He might also have mentioned the penalty if Nobles is found guilty on all counts: up to 165 years in prison and fines totaling $5.15 million.

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Up until his disappearance, Nobles had continued to insist that he was not guilty.

But on Jan. 26, a mug shot went out on FBI bulletins nationwide and dominated the front page of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. It was a frontal view of the elephantine-eared Nobles, gazing impassively into the camera, his mouth slightly open. Authorities found his car at the Memphis airport. Before long, they’d tracked him to a San Francisco hotel. He had registered under the name of a deceased Mississippi College dean.

Willibanks is one of the few people who knew Nobles who says he isn’t shocked by the allegations. The former law professor launched a crusade in 1981 to get college trustees and the state Baptist Convention to curtail Nobles’ power. His pleas, he says, fell on deaf ears.

“I told them at the time that there was going to be a disaster unless somebody took control of the situation.”

An alumnus, Willibanks gave up a law practice in northeast Mississippi and returned to Jackson to teach because, he said, he thought the new law school had the potential of becoming a Southern powerhouse on the order of Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia or the University of Texas.

While Willibanks said he never had any indication of financial irregularities, he was alarmed by what he termed Nobles’ “lack of truthfulness” and willingness to reward friends at the school’s expense.

For example, Willibanks said, while the law school was struggling to gain accreditation, the faculty voted on regulations for gaining tenure and then informed the American Bar Assn. of the rules after Nobles had signed off on them. But Nobles, without telling the law school, later granted tenure to a law school teacher, the personal lawyer of a school trustee, Willibanks said. “We were in a position of trying to cover it up or explain it.”

“There were a number of these kinds of things that kept occurring, and it appeared that this was the way things would continue to be at the college,” Willibanks said. “I think Dr. Nobles at some point in time came up with the attitude that he was Mississippi College, and that gave him the right to do whatever he wanted.”

But Nobles was highly regarded by his peers nationally. In 1986, the Exxon Education Foundation selected him as one of the 18 most effective college presidents.

“The board of trustees and the others who dealt with him felt that he could do no wrong,” said Charles Martin, the college’s vice president for academic affairs.

Even Nobles’ critics credit him with improving the school’s finances and campus.

At six feet and 230 pounds, Nobles was a large man who seemed to, in Martin’s words, “radiate quiet confidence.” He also often came across as timid.

“I don’t think Dr. Nobles ever looked me in the eyes when I talked to him,” said Willibanks, who added that he considered himself Nobles’ closest friend on the law school faculty before the falling out. “He always looked down.”

Martin said he and Nobles sometimes traveled to the same conferences, but Nobles usually traveled and dined separately. “I would bump into him at meetings as I would colleagues from other institutions. He was that kind of person, a private kind of person.”

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McDonald, who has started a defense fund, said that Nobles has explained his actions to the satisfaction of those who know him well, despite his having been “tried and found guilty in the press.”

The so-called prostitutes, McDonald insisted, were employees of institutions that Nobles dealt with on his travels for the college. “He’d gone out to dinner with a couple of them, but always when their supervisor was there. Sex never entered the conversation.”

The pornography supposedly found in Nobles’ office was a magazine that had been confiscated from a student years ago, his friend explained. Nobles “didn’t want it on his desk, so he shoved it under some files in his file cabinet and it’s been there ever since.”

And McDonald, noting that Nobles was a chemist, saw nothing unusual or sinister about the vial of strychnine in his office.

Nobles’ wife has remained silent. The only comment from a family member came from his son-in-law, who told reporters that the family was worried about his health. Nobles is diabetic, has mild high blood pressure and had been under the care of a psychiatrist for stress.

After his arrest in San Francisco, he underwent emergency ulcer surgery and then was operated on for a lacerated esophagus. Doctors said he also developed symptoms similar to pneumonia while in the hospital. If he recovers from the stroke, his attorney said, he will undergo several months of psychological testing at a federal facility in Virginia before being returned to Mississippi to stand trial.

Nobles has granted only two brief interviews since being charged, one to a Baptist publication and the other last October to the television program “A Current Affair.” He insisted in both interviews that he is not guilty.

The money he allegedly stole “had been returned to the college directly and indirectly, totally,” he told the television program. The women who testified against him before a federal grand jury must have done so to escape prosecution themselves, he said.

He acknowledged that books were found in his office on how to hide money in offshore bank accounts but said: “If you check with the Justice Department . . . I think you’ll find that there were no foreign investments ever made.”

Nobles added: “I certainly am at peace with my God.”