Headline: Visit to Ellis trial a tawdry experience
Dek Head: Allegations portray a seamy side of county government.
Label: BILL TORPY AT LARGE
Corrections: >
Correction
Notes:
Reporter: Bill Torpy
Desk: Archive
Story Staff
Source:
Day: Sunday
Dateline:
Print Run 9/28/2014
Date:
A visit to DeKalb County court this week was a jaunt to government's seamy underbelly.
There at the front of Judge Courtney Johnson's courtroom, his countenance dour, sat one Kelvin
Walton, a well-dressed, sad-eyed plug of a man. Strategically positioned behind Walton, the star
witness in the corruption case against suspended county CEO Burrell Ellis, was the Board of
Shame. On it, prosecutors had scribbled the events in 2012 that led him to this perch: May 2, lied
to Special Purpose Grand Jury; May 10, confronted by DA; Aug 12, wearing a wire.
On those secretly recorded tapes, Walton comes across as a fawning, eager-to-please yes man.
On this day in court, he was testifying about why Ellis, the guy he sucked up to on the tapes --who stared unflappably ahead throughout his testimony --- should be convicted of extortion and
conspiracy.
Walton is a weak-minded fellow with some larceny in his heart, which is not a good thing when
you also oversee contract procurement for a large metro county.
Investigators were already fishing for corruption in DeKalb when they nailed Walton for lying
about getting some freebies (tree work at home from a contractor). From there, it was short work
to turn him into an informer.
Maybe while they were at it, they should have invested in lessons for Walton at the Tony Danza
Acting School. The tapes show him as a sometimes overly suggestive subordinate, sort of an Igor
to Dr. Frankenstein, throwing out possible ways to retaliate against contractors who were
unwilling to contribute to Ellis' re-election campaign.
Ellis' defense team seized upon that, saying Walton twisted conversations to make Ellis appear
conniving.
Nevertheless, it doesn't look good so far for Ellis. He is either a venal shakedown artist, as
prosecutors claim, or a manipulative, hyper-sensitive pol. At best, he comes across like an
insecure junior high girl whose Sadie Hawkins date has blown her off.
It was fall 2012, and Ellis was heading to sure re-election. But he owed a couple hundred grand,
having overspent two months earlier to beat two marginal opponents in the Democratic primary,
the election in DeKalb that counts.
The tapes show a close relationship between the CEO and his procurement director. At one
point, Walton, who wears monogrammed shirts with gleaming cuff links, apparently gave the
usually impeccably dressed Ellis fashion advice. "You wearing that?" Walton asked Ellis as the
latter prepared to attend some event.
If only the informer had been wearing a video camera instead of secretly toting a digital voice
recorder. (His recorder pen had unfortunately punked out.)
But then, according to the tape, the pair went back to more pressing business --- Ellis' ire that a
Cobb County vendor was not returning his calls soliciting political donations.
"They can't not be returning calls, " Ellis said to the ever-agreeing Walton.
Walton said he'd tell the county purchasing department to no longer use the company.
"Yeah, just let (the contract) expire, " Ellis said, telling Walton to put a note in the company's file
saying the owners were non-responsive.
The tapes capture Ellis at a time when the mayor-like boss of this county of 700,000 residents
was heading to a second four-year term and thinking about his legacy. He wasn't thinking small,
casting himself in the role of a latter-day Maynard Jackson, using county contracts like a rising
tide to lift a lot of minority-business boats.
"We have to think about the vision, " the Wharton School grad told Walton, holding up the
example of the fabled Atlanta mayor and H.J. Russell, the African American construction firm
that long has been an iconic minority business success.
"We can make some millionaires, " Ellis told Walton.
As an example of an opportunity missed, Ellis brought up a minority builder who came in second
during a bidding process and could have been drawn into the mix.
"It started me thinking there should be more minorities here, " he said. "Here's an example of a
brother who went before that commission and nobody gave him a second thought."
"Someone has to grab me, " Walton implored, saying he doesn't automatically recognize which
firms are minority owned.
"I'm about to bring a couple strong brothers in this government, " Ellis said. " I think the next
(chief operating officer) is going to be a brother." The next county attorney, too, he said would
be a "brother."
Then he quickly added, "I'm looking for the best people."
Seven months later, the chief operating officer, Ted Rhinehart, who is white, left for private
business. He could not be reached to talk about why he left. The current COO is black, as is the
current county attorney, who also came six months after Ellis' statement, although Ellis would
consider her a "sister."
But, according to Walton, Ellis' desire to enrich minority contractors had very definite limits.
He cited a firm whose owners enraged Ellis by not returning his solicitation calls. "NPI was a
minority contractor, and we were about to dry them up, " the snitch testified.
Another witness, Terry Merrell, gave a glimpse of how unsettling the DeKalb Way could be to
an outsider not accustomed to it. Merrell, a God-fearing Hoosier, runs a firm that landed a $5
million county contract that included spreading waste-water sludge over fields.
He testified that Ellis asked him for $25,000 in campaign contributions. In the same
conversation, Merrell said, Ellis also suggested that he could personally intercede to smooth out
some very aggravating problems Merrell's company was having with a local sub-contractor.
"What he said next just sent shivers through my spine, " Merrell testified. "He said 'Do you want
me to make a phone call?' and I said, 'No, I don't want you to make a phone call.' I didn't want
any part of that."
Ellis, whose defense team has yet to present its case, has pleaded not guilty. He has said he did
nothing more than all big-time politicians must do: raise money to run for office. He has said no
coercion, improper inducements or retaliation were involved.
A jury will soon sort it all out.
Braves new
world: tax
avoidance,
brand rehab
Dek Head: Cobb stadium allows corporations to enjoy the magic of baseball.
Label: BILL TORPY AT LARGE
Corrections: >
Correction
Notes:
Reporter: Bill Torpy
Desk: Archive
Story Staff
Source:
Day: Sunday
Dateline:
Print Run 9/21/2014
Date:
I went to Turner Field on Wednesday for the first time this year with some friends. We penciled
in the date weeks ago because it looked like the Braves might be in the thick of a playoff race.
However, the previous night, the Washington Nationals celebrated in Turner Field as division
champs, and the prospect of a wild card berth is as improbable as a B.J. Upton hitting streak.
Somehow, it was fitting that the embarrassment of watching their rivals dance on their diamond
came on the same day the Braves broke ground on the new ball field they are building 12 miles
up I-75 in Cobb County.
I was a part of a season ticket group for about 15 years, from 1993, when Braves Fever was
infectious, until about 2009, when the charm had worn off.
Turner Field on Wednesday night was not electric. In fact, when we arrived in the fourth inning,
there were still loads of Tom Glavine bobblehead dolls available.
The park was, as always, pleasant and airy, and it's hard not to get in a good mood walking
around the concourse to your seats. But entering the 17-year-old park, I also felt melancholy, like
I was visiting a friend on his deathbed.
"Look at that girder, " I told my bud Rankin. "That could hold up that grandstand for another 200
years."
Instead, in three years, it will be on the back of a flatbed truck heading towards a recycling
facility as the Braves take the field elsewhere. Such a waste of infrastructure.
I shouldn't take it personally. It's just business, they say. The Braves say they are moving closer
to their suburban fan base. They made an economic decision, just like I did when I became an
occasional walk-up fan instead of a season-ticket holder.
So let's step back and look at the business of the Braves --- and I'm not talking about the team
investing over $100 million in perhaps the two worst everyday players in the business. Those
were honest mistakes.
The Braves for years were the plaything of Atlanta media magnate Ted Turner, who then was
bought out by another media conglomerate, AOL-Time Warner.
In 2006, Time Warner wanted out of baseball. John Malone, the chairman of Liberty Media, was
looking to get rid of $1.8 billion worth of Time Warner stock without paying taxes on it. So
Time Warner handed over the Braves, then worth about $460 million, and $1.4 billion in cash to
Liberty in return for the stock.
"Liberty is expected to ... (save) more than $600 million in taxes, " The Wall Street Journal
reported.
"When else can you sell a highly appreciated asset for cash and never pay tax?" a Lehman
Bother's tax guru enthused to the WSJ. "What more could you want from a technique? It's not
like you're deferring the tax on the cash; you're permanently avoiding it. It's fantastic."
In essence, Malone got a free Major League Baseball team and $140 million in cash for his
trouble. It was indeed fantastic.
The Braves went from being a big spender in the glory days of the 1990s under Ted Turner to
just another mid-market team bumping along, throwing nickels around like they were manhole
covers. They were just bit players to a Colorado-based, tax-avoiding colossus.
Of course, Liberty doesn't avoid receiving tax money.
Late last year, as the company wrapped up a year in which its operating income increased to
$814 million, representatives of its baseball asset convened in top-secret meetings with
representatives of Cobb County.
Cobb is a conservative county, and its leaders don't like taxes much, either. In fact, they don't
like taxes so much that they promised to give the Liberty Media Braves up to nearly $400
million in future tax money to build a stadium.
Stadiums no longer have quaint names like Fenway or Comiskey or Three Rivers. Instead they
are marketing synergies.
Last week, the Braves announced that the new park will be named SunTrust Park; the bank is
paying a reported $10 million a year for that distinction.
SunTrust Banks Chairman and CEO Bill Rogers said at the ground-breaking that naming the
park after the financial institution "is appropriate: This is our hometown."
"It allows us to engage with more people, " he continued. "Our branding and association with the
Braves gives us more opportunities, more at-bats so to speak."
Banks increasingly join up with major league teams because it allows them to appear major
league, and it catches people at a time when they are happy and engaged.
SunTrust could use some image rehab. In June, the bank was hit with $968 million in fines and
consumer payouts as it settled with the government over allegations of abusive mortgage
practices.
Attorney General Eric Holder said, "SunTrust's conduct is a prime example of the widespread
underwriting failures that helped bring about the financial crisis."
SunTrust's chief Rogers was "pleased to have resolved these legacy mortgage settlements."
Weeks later, in July, SunTrust agreed to pay up to $320 million to settle a criminal investigation
looking into how it handled homeowners seeking loan modifications during the financial
meltdown.
Christy Romero, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, was
apparently so angered by SunTrust's "slipshod and negligent administration" that she put out a
statement about how the bank handled the Home Affordable Modification Program.
"Unwilling to put resources into HAMP despite holding billions in TARP funds, SunTrust
simply placed piles of unopened homeowners' HAMP applications and paperwork on an office
floor until at one point, the floor buckled under the sheer weight of the document packages.
Documents and paperwork were lost. SunTrust issued 'mass denials' to HAMP applicants and
lied to the Treasury Department about the reasons for the denials."
"The negligence which Sun Trust administered its HAMP is appalling, miserable, inexcusable
and repulsive, " she continued. "Real people lost their homes and many others faced financial
ruin."
Play ball!
Headline: Fear turns godly man into a killer
Dek Head:
Label:
Corrections: >
Correction
Notes:
Reporter: Bill Torpy
Desk: Archive
Story Staff
Source:
Day: Thursday
Dateline:
Print Run 11/27/2014
Date:
Phillip Sailors is a retired Christian man, a missionary who spent time serving the Lord in Latin
America, and is well loved in his church.
He's also a killer, a man so worried that his Lilburn neighborhood was crime-ridden that when
someone accidentally drove up to his home, his default reaction was to grab his revolver and
shoot blindly into a car filled with terrified young people.
Sailors, 71, this month walked away with a misdemeanor plea deal, a $500 fine and a guilty
conscience that will, his attorney says, haunt him to the grave. Still, that's not a bad deal for
someone who put someone 50 years his junior into a grave.
Sailors is a man who faced murder charges and, police say, showed little remorse after he
followed a fleeing car down his driveway and shot a college student in the head.
In fact, Sailors fired his first shot, a warning salvo, as the driver, 22-year-old Rodrigo Diaz,
rolled down his window to apologize. The young man and his three teenaged friends were lost
the night of Jan. 26, 2013. They were on their way to pick up a friend to go skating. Their GPS
wrongly put them in Sailors' driveway instead of their destination, which was a home across the
street.
The young man's death lays bare how irrational fear overtakes reasonable caution, how
communities get caught up in paranoia that tells them they are under siege by criminals, even
though the crime rate in the U.S. has steadily declined for decades.
After firing a .22-caliber bullet into Diaz's brain, Sailors justified his fears to investigators,
saying there had been a rash of recent burglaries and he worried the teens in his driveway were
breaking into one of his cars --- or worse.
Mike Puglise, Sailors' lawyer, said the home next to his client had been broken into.
"He wants the community to know he acted out of fear; he let his fears get away from him, " said
Puglise, who once was a Lilburn cop. "Gwinnett has changed so much. We are hearing about
horrible things on the news and we think the worst. Mr. Sailors wishes he could take that bullet
back."
Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter, the prosecutor who cut the deal, discounted
Sailors' fears as unwarranted.
"There's no evidence of break-ins, " said Porter. "That was a neighborhood rumor. There's a fear
that goes through these neighborhoods."
Porter and Puglise do agree on one thing: "It was one horrible mistake after another, " Porter
said.
The first mistake was technological --- Diaz's GPS brought him to Sailors' home. As they sat in
the driveway in Diaz's 1994 Mitsubishi 3000GT, his girlfriend, Angie Rebolledo, called three
times in two minutes trying to reach the friend they were picking up.
Inside the house, which sits isolated on a small hill, Sailors was with his wife, reading religious
fare on his Kindle.
Sailors heard a noise and went outside to investigate. He saw headlights and, he said, two figures
running from his two parked vehicles. He went inside to get his revolver, returned outside and
fired a shot in the air. He said the car revved up and drove toward him. He said he started
running away, reached back and fired a shot.
"I shot him. He tried to steal my car so I shot him, " an officer quoted him saying.
Another officer arrived to hear a "chilling scream." It was Angie, covered with her boyfriend's
blood.
"I didn't do anything bad, " the shattered teen told Sailors after the shooting as they stood on his
lawn. She told police he responded, "Why are you at my home?"
Lilburn police put two of the surviving teens in holding cells at the station, and a third in a
booking room, apparently believing they were a robbing crew. One was a sobbing 17-year-old
girl, and the youngest passenger was a bewildered, 120-pound, 15-year-old boy. All three are
Latino. Police called around to other Gwinnett departments looking for a Spanish-speaking
officer on duty to translate but could not find one. They did not know the girl spoke pretty good
English.
The elderly gunman was not locked up. Instead, he was brought to an interview room, where his
family gave him the Sunday paper and $7 for vending machine snacks. Sailors alternated
between being nonchalant and aggravated for being kept at the station, police said.
On the way there, he told a cop he was surprised that the Atlanta Hawks had been able to
overcome a 27-point deficit and beat the Boston Celtics.
Later, he became upset because the cops wouldn't tell him "why the kids were in his yard, " an
officer noted. Still later, "he was aggravated he was still at the station and had already read
everything at the station."
His attorney says he was simply in shock, overcome by grief.
As Lilburn cops investigated, it started sinking in that the kids, not the longtime resident, might
be telling the truth.
They looked for burglary tools in the car but found Rollerblades. They noticed the teens were
well-dressed, not clothed in casual burglar garb.
The three survivors' stories, and the physical evidence, indicated that Diaz was frantically trying
to drive away from the gun-wielding homeowner, not toward him. And, the kids insisted, they
never got out of the car.
"Sailors said he was scared that someone was trying to rob him, " one investigator later wrote.
"Why did he go outside two times?"
By dawn, Diaz was dead and Sailors faced murder charges.
But this month, the murder charges dissipated into a count of misdemeanor involuntary
manslaughter. The plea agreement said Sailors caused the death of "a human being, without any
intention to do so, by commission of a lawful act in an unlawful manner."
Following a fleeing car and firing a shot at a terrified driver who accidentally drove onto
someone's property is lawful?
Porter, who is known for sending vans full of convicted criminals to state institutions, said Diaz's
family was the impetus for the creative sentencing solution.
The family had recently settled a negligent death lawsuit with Sailors for an undisclosed amount
and are vastly forgiving people who want the tragedy thing behind them. Besides, one brother
told a TV station, what good would it do to put an old guy in prison. It wouldn't bring back his
dead brother.
Porter said he probably could have convicted Sailors on murder charges, noting it was clear the
homeowner's story didn't match the facts.
This was not a case of self-defense, the prosecutor said. "This had nothing to do with 'Stand Your
Ground' laws. I'm not a huge fan of firearms for home defense."
Too many people have no clue of what they are doing when it comes to firearms, Porter said.
But, Porter added, "I didn't see any public safety reason for sending a 70-year-old man with no
record to prison for the rest of his life."
He doesn't believe this sentence will be a clarion call to frightened homeowners or nuts with
guns to come out blazing. Besides he doesn't use convictions to send messages. He said he goes
case by case and lets the body of his work speak.
Ultimately, said Porter, "I answer to crime victims, although I acknowledge that it is not their
final decision" to prosecute or be merciful.
He said Sailors will not get his gun back, although there is nothing in the future to keep him from
re-arming himself