Hmm. “[N]o contract or paper exists that would allow x, y, or z to steal this money.” Umm, you don’t need a contract to steal money, just a lack of morals. This sentence doesn’t say anything useful. It doesn’t say whether there was or wasn’t a contract, or what provisions might or might not have been in the contract.

The promoter doesn’t know what happened; he was in the hospital at the time. It might have gone down as claimed, or the promoter’s employees might have seen an opportunity to line their pockets and throw the blame on outsiders. Hopefully police will investigate and find out the truth. The Rocky DWS incident, if true, does make one look askance at the morals of the Covington clan. Still, trying to protect Rocky from a DWS charge when he was involved in an accident that likely wasn’t his fault (given that he was rear-ended), although slimy and showing a bent to bend the truth, was a defensive move, and does not automatically mean that the Covington brothers would act affirmatively to steal money in this instance.

That is why evidence of “prior bad acts” are inadmissible in most states. You want a jury to base its decision on whether sufficient evidence was presented that the defendant is guilty of the charged crime, not on whether the defendant is a bad person generally, because he has done bad stuff in the past. Now, if a defendant has previously been convicted of a crime, s/he can be impeached with that conviction if s/he chooses to testify, assuming the prior conviction isn’t so old as to be stale and moldy.

I don’t know what the truth is, and I don’t want to speculate beyond my surmise that I smell shades of gray here.