Ultimately, a grand jury brought felony charges against Hornsby after investigators concluded that he illegally steered contracts not only to LeapFrog but to E-Rate Manager, a shell company run by Hornsby's business partner, Cynthia Joffrion.
Hornsby covertly arranged to get thousands of dollars from the proceeds of the lucrative contracts he helped push through for both companies, according to the indictment.
Jurors watched surveillance tapes in which Hornsby, sitting in a hotel room with a glass of wine, is heard advising Joffrion how to pay him a $145,000 kickback by buying antiques, classic cars, paintings and other valuable items that could then be sold.
"If I give you cash ... how in the [expletive] are they going to know that?" Joffrion asked Hornsby during the Dec. 20, 2004, meeting. "I'm not telling anybody. I'm not going to jail."
"Me either," Hornsby replied. The tape then shows him stuffing a $1,000 down payment into his pocket.
Prosecutors said Hornsby ordered school employees to destroy e-mail messages that might have implicated him. One employee kept a copy of the e-mail backup tapes, giving prosecutors a timeline for the deals.
Hornsby had been given the top job in the Prince George's County schools system in 2003 despite conflict-of-interest allegations that had ended his service as schools superintendent in Yonkers, N.Y.
Once in Maryland, Hornsby replaced Iris Metts, who had feuded openly with the school board and left the system deep in deficit. Hornsby had helped to raise test scores as an administrator in Yonkers and Houston, and the hope was that he would do the same in Prince George's, which had struggled to help underachieving students.
He resigned in 2005, halfway through his four-year contract and months after the suspicious contract scheme was revealed in The Sun. In addition to making $250,000 a year, Hornsby received a $125,000 severance payment when he quit the school system, the second-largest in the state and 18th-largest in the country, and one that had already seen considerable turbulence in recent years.
His departure came days before the county school board issued the results of an audit that was highly critical of his activities.
Among other things, the audit showed that Owens, whose sales territory was not supposed to cover Maryland, received half of the commission on the school system's $1 million purchase in June 2004 of education software from LeapFrog, a deal that had been pushed and approved by Hornsby.
