In June, Charles K. Lee '93 and David G. Sword '93 became graduates of Harvard. With promising futures, they left the University to pursue careers in business and public service.

In July, however, old obligations from the time they spent at Harvard pulled them back towards the University.

Lee and Sword are at the center of investigations being carried out by the Middlesex County District Attorney's office and by the University into $160,000 in missing funds from Evening With Champions, the Eliot House ice-skating charity show.

Lee and Sword, who were both students in Eliot House, were the two organizers for the fall 1992 show with the most responsibility over the charity's money. Sword also served as treasurer for the fall 1991 show. Sword, in particular, is under scrutiny because he allegedly told another student involved in organizing Evening With Champions that he had taken some of the money, according to a highly-placed source and the Boston Globe.

The missing $160,000 was due the Jimmy Fund, which raises money for cancer research and treatment, particularly of young victims. The resulting publicity has been enormous, if predictable. Recent Harvard graduates, with opportunities at six-figure incomes, linked to the diversion of funds intended for a children's charity? That's big news.

Both Sword and Lee have hired attorneys, and neither will discuss the missing money. But the probes, which are expected to last for months, have already had a cost.

Sword resigned this summer from a private youth service he had helped found in Toronto, Canada. Sword gave no reason for the resignation, but told the Toronto Star he was disappointed to be leaving the youth service. "There's so many emotions right now--pride, excitement about a great program... and deep frustration, deep disappointment," Sword told the Toronto Star.

But dozens of friends of the two recent graduates interviewed over the past week say there is a cruel irony in all this. Both students, these friends say, are generous, ethical and committed to Eliot House. No one can imagine Lee or Sword running off with $160,000.

"Anyone who accuses David of anything wrong is wrong," says Jeff Zimmerman '93, who, like Sword, was a member of the Fox final club. "There's no doubt in my mind that he couldn't have done anything like that."

Last month, the Middlesex district attorney's office announced that it was looking into why $160,000 was missing from the accounts of the Evening With Champions, an Eliot House ice skating charity show to benefit the Jimmy Fund. The investigation is now centering on two members of the Class of 1993, each of whom made a significant contribution to the College community. The two classmates come from different backgrounds, but their work together in Eliot House has made them the subject of scrutiny.

"He is a good friend and a good roommate," says Paul Bamford '93, one of Lee's roommates. "He was just the greatest guy."

Even if Lee and Sword are eventually cleared, the biggest damage, many Eliot House residents fear, has already been done. Evening With Champions, which has donated more than $1 million to the Jimmy Fund over the past 23 years, may have lost the public's trust.

The current co-chairs, Jonathan Kolodner '94 and Kelly Morrison '94, acknowledged as much in a press conference last month at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, which spends the money raised by the Jimmy Fund.

"This is a tragic and disheartening situation for us and for the other Eliot House volunteers, the Jimmy Fund and the many New England families who support this wonderful event each year," said Kolodner and Morrison, who are cooperating with the investigation. "It is our hope that this time-honored event will go forward as planned."

David G. Sword and Charles K. Lee come from very different places. Sword, 23, was born in Moose Jaw (pop. 34,424), an agriculture hub in the prairie lands of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Friends say the family has bounced around a lot, and the address given for Sword in the class of 1993 freshman register is for a military post office box in upstate New York.

The Sword family now resides in Fairfax, Virginia. Sword's father, Rod, is a colonel in the Canadian Air Force, and serves as liaison to the United States Air Force Command, according to a family friend.

Lee, who is Korean-American, comes from Tenafly, New Jersey. The borough (pop. 13,326), a New York suburb, is an upper middle class area with an active Asian community. Lee went to the local suburban public high school, which sends about two students to Harvard each year and has a good tennis team.

Lee and Sword shared few friends outside of Evening With Champions organizers In Eliot House, but both were well-known and popular in the house.

Eliot had been Lee's first choice, and he was ecstatic when he was assigned to the house in the first year housing lottery, a friend says. Known by nickname "Chaz," Lee, friends say, kept a high Eliot House residents say he would test drive sports cars and host gatherings in the common room where students smoked cigars and consumed cognac in large quantities.

A close friend of Lee's says Lee finances his expensive tastes with money he inherited from his grandfather. The money allowed him to dress tastefully and Lee's stereo system was the object of veneration in G-entry, though the volume sometimes bothered the neighbors.

Lee had been a committee chair for the Evening Champions during his junior year, and after friends and organizers describe as a year of unusually hard work, he was named co-chair.

Lee was considered an extremely thoughtful, working manager. In the fall, he drove a skater in the show back to her home in Montreal after a death in the skater's family. The only real controversy during Lee's tenure was his choice of Brian T. Kim '93 for a top job in the charity show. Kim was disdained by some as an outsider because he lived in Dunster House.

Lee is now working for a management services company in Connecticut. He concentrated in biology, and the Class of 1993 yearbook lists him as assistant director of the International Relations Council. But Evening With Champions was his main activity.

"Chaz is an extremely honest man and very dedicated to the Evening With Champions," says Julian E. Barnes '93, Lee's roommate and a former president of The Crimson. "I am sure he would only act in the best interests of Eliot House and the Jimmy Fund."

Sword spent much of his time at the Fox, one of the nine all-male final clubs, and less at Eliot, though he kept busy in house activities. "A lot of his roommates were in the Fox," says a friend. "He was there some, but not as much as the other guys."

Sword had an extensive record of service to the Harvard community. The Class of 1993 yearbook lists him as a participant in the Institute of Politics and Phillips Brooks House, as business manager for the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, and as a producer for Citystep, a student-run dance program for underprivileged children.

During his senior year, Sword, a government concentrator, bypassed lucrative opportunities in business, friends say, in order to start Serve Canada, the private youth service in Toronto. According to the Toronto Star, 24 people will begin the program next month and work for the next 48 weeks on public service projects.

"I remember one night near the end of the year, when everyone was out partying," says one friend. "David just stayed in working at his computer. The program he was putting together meant a lot to him."

Sword, who founded the program with two people from the Toronto area, consciously modeled the program on City Year, a youth services program centered in Boston which President Clinton has adopted as a model for his national service plan.

Lauren Dutton, who is in charge of expansion for City Year, said Sword had been in contact with the program's development office.

During his senior year, Sword worked largely on private fundraising for the new service program. The goal of Serve Canada is to bring together people of all backgrounds to work on projects in schools, housing developments and parks.

"He did fundraising from private sources and used that money to sponsor teams of college students, homeless people and intellectuals," a source said.

The organization, which will begin operations in earnest next month, is so new that it does not have a listing in the Toronto phone directory. It does have a prestigious address on King St. West, according to a Federal Express package sent from Sword to Eliot House co-masters Stephen Mitchell and Kristine Forsgard.

The address is in the Scotia Plaza, headquarters of the Bank of Nova Scotia and the heart of Toronto's financial district. The father of one of Serve Canada's co-founders, Cynthia Godsoe '93, is president of the Bank of Nova Scotia.

"What does not make sense to me is how anyone who knows David Sword could believe this," says Jeffrey B. Golden '93, a friend of Sword's from the Fox. "I'm kind of a cynic about people, but I know David so well. He's much too honest and much too good a guy."

If the Evening With Champions money was taken, how might it have happened? One former Evening With Champions official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the treasurer as the main keeper of books for the show. Committees would bring money they made to the treasurer, who would take the money and record it in a general ledger. Most committees kept receipts, but some didn't.

"Committees didn't keep their own money--there were no separate accounts," says the official. "They handed over proceeds to the treasurer, who kept a general record."

Money could be stolen from the Evening With Champions in two ways, the official says. A committee chair, for example, might not give all proceeds over to the treasurer. Or the treasurer might record less in the general ledger than a committee had brought in.

Students who have worked with Evening With Champions believe it would be extremely difficult for a co-chair to take money from the show because co-chairs only supervise the treasurer. They don't keep the books themselves.

In general, one co-chair is assigned to supervise the treasurer. That explains why Lee's co-chair in last year's show, Rachel L. Schultz '93, knew very little of the charity's finances.

"This was a shock to me," Schultz said after news of the missing money broke. "I was unaware of such discrepancies."

The former Evening With Champions official said he did not believe that Sword or Lee had taken any money. The official said an accounting mistake or carelessness was a more reasonable explanation. In interviews with The Crimson, students who knew the two said they had no evidence that either Sword or Lee had done anything wrong or knew about any wrongdoing.

Perhaps the most curious fact about the Evening With Champions finances is the lack of oversight over them. It appears that quality of record-keeping varied widely from year to year, and the charity show, unlike many other student organizations which handle less money, was never incorporated as a not-for-profit corporation.

Incorporation can insure better, more consistent record-keeping because non-profits are required to file annual tax returns. Former Evening With Champions workers say that incorporating the show was often considered.

"We considered it as something for the long term efficiency of the show," says one such worker. "We never considered it from a security point of view."

"In hindsight, I wish someone had done it," said the worker. "I wish Chaz and Rachel had done it."

University Attorney Anne Taylor, Harvard's point person on the Evening With Champions issue, says her office is evaluating every possibility for reforming the way the show is run.

"We are certainly evaluating this situation again and again," Taylor said.

Jill Reilly, a spokesperson for the district attorney, says her office's investigation of the Evening With Champions matter will take months. She says investigators are treating the matter as "a white collar crime case--the embezzlement or stealing of funds." The district attorney will be following a "paper trail" of bank documents and receipts, Reilly says.

In an interview last month, Lee said many of the accounting books for the event have been thrown away or are likely lost and unrecoverable. He said Sword kept a milk carton full of receipts that Lee believes are now missing.

Sword has not returned phone calls from The Crimson, and his father, speaking last week on his behalf, would not comment.

Some students involved in Evening With Champions workers say they remember Lee discussing debts and complaining about how previous records were kept.

"There were records of everything kept at one time," says the former Evening With Champions official. "As for where they were kept, I don't remember."

Lee said in the same interview that he decided to forego a donation to the Jimmy Fund before the show last fall so that the charity could pay off longstanding debts and meet mounting expenses.

However, Jimmy Fund Executive Director Mike Andrews and students in Eliot have expressed doubt about that statement. They have said that in May of this year Lee attended a ceremony to present a commemorative blow-up check to Andrews for more than $100,000.

When this year's co-chairs, Jonathan Kolodner '94 and Kelly Morrison '94, prepared to make the donation promised in the blow-up check, they discovered the money was missing.

But neither they nor the district attorney seem to know where this missing money went.

And for two members of the Class of 1993, it is this mystery that has turned a sunny June into a cloudy summer.Facebook PhotoDAVID G. SWORD '93