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PAGE 4A
THE BANKS COUNTY NEWS
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 30, 2008
Editor: Angela Gary
Phone: 706-367-2490
E-mail: AngieEditor@aol.com
Website: www.mainstreetnews.com
Opinions
“Where the press is free and every man
able to read, all is safe.”
— Thomas Jefferson
What caused Tim Madison’s downfall?
BY MIKE BUFFINGTON
Publisher, The Banks County News
T HE PROSECUTION of former District Attorney Tim Madison, his
wife Linn Jones, and a former ADA is over. Madison has given up
his law license and is in jail on a six-year sentence for theft. His
wife was sentenced to serve 180 days in a detention center and former ADA
Brett Williams got a fine and probation.
Although the charges have worked their way through the legal system, many
wonder how a district attorney could have gotten so far off track. A year ago,
Madison was among the elite of the state’s prosecution community, a position
he’d held for a quarter-century.
Now he’s sitting behind bars.
I cannot fully answer the “why” questions. Nobody can. But having spent
weeks researching and writing the investigative articles we published last spring
about Madison’s questionable financial dealings, I did get a sense about some
of the surrounding events that led up to his fall from grace.
DISTANT RELATIONSHIPS
Madison’s career began with a lot of promise. He was considered a bright,
rising star when he took the DA’s seat in 1983. He had a gift for public speaking
and his closing arguments seemed to carry weight at jury trials. His advocacy
for victims of domestic violence won him supporters in a judicial circuit where
family violence is epidemic.
But over the years, a darker side emerged in Madison’s professional demean
or. The sometimes combative nature of our advocate judicial system is always
difficult on professional relationships, but Madison seemed to be more distant
than necessary. Although not a loner, his professional aloofness toward the
local bar reportedly rubbed some in the area legal community the wrong way.
Efforts to mend that rift were reportedly rebuffed.
That strained professional demeanor eventually grew outside the local com
munity. A former DA in another circuit told me Madison came to be viewed as
“sleazy” by some of his colleagues around the state.
That opinion was amplified when Mr. Madison apparently became obsessed
with winning the annual volleyball tournament held at the state DA convention
each summer. While most other DAs viewed the volleyball tournament as noth
ing more than a fun social occasion, Madison reportedly approached it as a
competitive, must-win event.
Several former employees told me he would have “mandatory” volleyball
practices for his staff to get ready for the summer event, even having one staff
member miss his child’s birthday party to practice volleyball. Madison’s hyper-
competitive, win-at-all-costs mentality was apparently met with disdain by his
peers. He reportedly became known as the “Volleyball A—e” by some of his
colleagues from around the state.
That same distant, strained relationship also evolved between Madison and
many in local law enforcement agencies. Although the two groups should be
natural allies, many local law officials came to mistrust, even detest having to
work with Madison.
Part of that was due to Madison’s aggressive stand toward prosecuting law
enforcement officials; he seemed to relish prosecuting cops. On several occa
sions, he launched high profile investigations into leading law enforcement
officials, only to see those probes fail to prove any wrongdoing.
Some officials told me his disdain for law enforcement officials was so obvi
ous that they wondered if something had happened in his background to make
him dislike cops.
STAFF DISSENSION
Despite these professional tensions, many of those I spoke with who worked
under Madison said that until the mid-1990s, they considered him to be a
“straight arrow” prosecutor. For example, one former ADA said Madison had a
rule that employees in the circuit who wanted to drink alcohol should go outside
the circuit to partake. Madison didn’t want his associates seen drinking in local
establishments.
Most of those I spoke with traced Madison’s current problems to the late
1990s as his first marriage dissolved and he took up with Linn Jones, whom he
would later marry. Madison helped Jones get employment with several area law
enforcement agencies and later hired her in the DA’s office.
But that relationship became divisive inside the DA’s office. Although Jones
worked for several other law enforcement agencies, at least some of the time
she was actually being paid through a victims’ assistance grant administered
by the DA’s office. Madison reportedly helped to find her jobs with area law
agencies.
Not surprisingly, hints of favoritism began tearing at the fabric of the DA’s staff
as Jones received what many considered special treatment by Madison. One
staff member apparently became so upset about the Madison-Jones relationship
that Madison reportedly prayed with the staffer about his personal life problems
and asked for spiritual guidance from the employee.
But if the personal relationships were troubling, so was Jones’ financial rela
tionship with the DA’s office. Several former employees said that at one point
in 1998 or 1999, Madison was questioned by staff members about allegations of
questionable time cards Jones submitted under a grant funded position.
“When confronted, Mr. Madison said Linn (Jones) would make up the time.
She did not. Several senior staff members left during 1998 and early 1999 over
issues like that,” one source close to the situation told me during our investiga
tion last year.
Staff turnover even before Jones entered the picture had already caused
problems. Madison reportedly became angry at the short tenure of some newly-
hired staffers and instituted contracts calling for “liquidated damages” to be paid
if staffers left the DA’s employment before their contract was up.
Although Madison was never charged with having diverted those “liquidated
damages” payments, our investigation last year never found where the funds
had been turned over to any of the county government, as they were supposed
to have been.
analysis
Many of the people who left the DA’s office during this time stayed in touch
with each other over the years. It was as though they had become an under
ground fraternity of former Piedmont ADAs. Many had heard rumors about
ongoing problems in Madison’s office and weren’t shocked that we were inves
tigating some of Madison’s financial dealings.
Still, none of the former staff members I spoke with seemed to really know the
depth of the problems, or the details of what was going on. Many staffers said
they didn’t like what they saw and they didn’t like how Madison treated his staff,
so they found jobs elsewhere and left.
MONEY FROM THE SKY
About the time Madison began a relationship with Jones and the staff prob
lems accelerated, another event happened that seems to have played a key role
in Madison’s eventual downfall. In the late 1990s, the state created an add-on
fee to fines for “victims assistance” programs. Those funds flowed directly to the
DA’s office. For a time, they were relatively small amounts.
But around 2001, the funds began to grow as several towns in Jackson County
began aggressive road patrols. It was like money falling from the sky into the
DA’s office. (At one point, the state shifted the payments to the clerks of court,
but then changed it back the next year to the DA’s office.)
Those funds amounted to a lot of money over the years, but there was virtu
ally no state or local oversight of that money. In 2002, Jackson County audi
tors accidentally found that Madison had made some payroll payments to an
employee from one of the accounts. Those wages had not been included on
the employee’s W-2 form. The auditors issued a “finding” and Madison said he
would stop the practice and turn the funds over to the county to handle.
But that didn’t happen and as late as 2007, he continued to make payments out
of the victims’ assistance accounts for extra wages to employees.
It was also those funds Madison began to use for trip expenses and entertain
ment, sometimes for staff members, but often for himself and Jones. Although
he was not charged with theft in those expenses, they were clearly an abuse of
discretion.
CLOUDS GATHER
After Madison divorced his first wife, he and Jones eventually married.
Rumors that they were driving government vehicles on personal trips began to
circulate. One story alleged that Jones drove a Jeep that had been confiscated
in a drug bust and had a ski rack mounted on top for a trip to Colorado.
Whispers that Madison was drinking heavily and gambling also circulated,
vices that he later blamed at his sentencing hearing for having led him to lose
his “moral compass.”
Staff turnover continued, but Madison apparently became more distant from
the day-to-day operations. Law enforcement officials began to grumble about
the quality of the DA’s staff work. They also complained that Madison was often
gone from the office and they couldn’t reach him to discuss important cases.
After our articles were published in March 2007, a number of people contacted
me — both crime victims and those who had been prosecuted by Madison —
and complained his office had treated them unfairly. I never found evidence he
mishandled criminal cases, but many people apparently believed their case had
not been dealt with correctly.
What no one knew at the time, however, was just how far Madison was reach
ing into the public trough to support his private lifestyle. He put Jones on both
the Banks County and Jackson County payrolls at the same time with a total of
60 hours pay per week. Since he often moved people around the three offices
in the circuit, he knew that the three counties didn’t compare notes on his office
staff or payrolls.
But having Jones on two payrolls did create an unmistakable paper trail, a trail
uncovered last year after we shifted through a mountain of payroll documents
from the three counties in the circuit.
In addition, Madison created a scheme to have a young ADA staffer doubled-
paid, once by the state and again by Banks County. Part of the Banks County
money ADA Brett Williams received was then kicked-back to Madison, although
Williams apparently thought the funds were being used for a training fund.
To his credit, Williams owned up to the payments when I called last year and
asked him about his financial relationship with Madison. He seemed to honestly
believe Madison was using the funds for a legitimate purpose. That Madison
could manipulate an ADA to that extent seemed implausible at the time, but
in the end, the courts also indicated a belief that Williams had been used and
manipulated.
ATTEMPTED TO STOP THE STORY
When we began our newspaper investigation into Madison’s handling of pub
lic funds in January 2007, we had no idea where it would lead. A confidential
source contacted us and based on that, we began asking questions and making
open records requests. (We eventually made some 22 open records requests to
local and state agencies during our investigation.)
How lucky can Republicans be?
When Madison heard about our asking questions and the records requests,
he secretly attempted to have a lawyer pressure us to back off.
At the time, the state probe into former Jefferson Police Chief Darren Glenn
was in full swing and we had been openly critical of the state’s handling of that
investigation. Ironically, it had been Madison who started the Glenn investigation
way back in 2005.
When he learned of our questioning about his office finances, Madison con
tacted Glenn’s attorney, former state attorney general Mike Bowers, and asked
him to pressure “the newspaper” to back off our investigation of the DA’s office.
Madison reportedly told Bowers he would make the Glenn case go away if
Bowers would convince us to stop asking questions.
We knew nothing about that at the time. Bowers never contacted us about
Madison’s call. We only learned about it months later after Madison had been
indicted.
But in retrospect, it fits. Madison attempted to get the state to give him back the
Glenn case in January 2007, about the same time we began making a number
of open records requests to the DA’s office. And he told one of our reporters at
the time he didn’t think the Glenn case should go forward.
In the end, the state refused to hand the Glenn case back to Madison and
the matter became moot. Still, his bid to play politics with the case is troubling.
Why Madison thought Bowers would go along with such a scheme, or why he
thought we would acquiesce to such a deal, isn’t clear. In hindsight, it appears to
have been an act of desperation by a man who had something to hide.
DOWNFALL
After our investigative series was published in March 2007, and Madison
resigned in May, some in the judicial circuit expressed amazement, questioning
if Madison had really done anything wrong. Indeed, I was a little shocked at
some in the legal community who expressed strong support of Madison in spite
of the serious allegations he was facing and the nature of the evidence.
And that was our biggest concern. When we began our series of investigative
articles, I was doubtful about follow up. Although Madison had irritated many
of his colleagues, he was still part of a tight fraternity that doesn’t like one of its
own coming under a microscope. Lawyers may fight among themselves over
cases, but they tend to circle the wagons when one of their own comes under
fire from the outside.
That reluctance to believe a district attorney would steal from the counties he
represented was a major consideration in how we presented our stories about
Madison’s financial dealings. We knew we would have to show what had hap
pened, or people just wouldn’t believe what they were reading.
That was why we published copies of checks and printed a long list of expen
ditures from DA office accounts. The details of what had happened were impor
tant to show the serious nature of what we were writing about.
Of course, Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker did quickly launch an
investigation into Madison’s office. Our fear that no real investigation would fol
low proved to be unfounded. AG Baker and his office stepped up and quickly
did the right thing. For that, they are to be commended.
LESSONS LEARNED
But none of this really answers how or why Madison got so far off course.
Was it arrogance? Was it having stayed in office so long he believed himself to
be invincible? Was it greed? Did alcohol abuse dislodge his “moral compass”
as he claimed in court?
Perhaps it was a little of all of those things. But I think the biggest part of the
problem was a simple lack of accountability inherent in the DA’s position.
DA offices operate as independent islands. Because of what they do, they
have to have a large measure of political independence. They don’t answer to
their local county governments since they are a state agency. But they don’t
answer to the state, either, because they are elected independently and aren’t
part of a “real” state agency.
In addition, DA political races are rare unless there is an open seat. Incumbent
DAs seldom have opposition at the ballot box, which leaves them almost totally
unaccountable to the public.
For the most part, DA offices self-regulate. Local bar groups could apply pres
sure to the office, but most lawyers don’t want to be openly critical of a DA with
whom they have to do business in representing clients.
In short, being a DA is almost like being a local king.
It is this lack of oversight and accountability that I believe is the biggest lesson
to be learned from Madison’s downfall. Whatever the condition of his internal
“moral compass,” he stole public funds because he could. There was no insti
tutional accountability, either locally or at the state level, to make sure it couldn’t
happen.
Every public agency, including the DA’s office, should get independent finan
cial auditing every year and all public funds mandated by the state should be
audited.
None of this is to excuse Madison’s actions. He didn’t have to steal or abuse
public funds. Most DAs across the state don’t abuse them.
But as this sad story shows, even our top prosecutors are subject to tempta
tion. They are human, with all the moral frailties that implies.
But DAs are also granted immense power over the lives of other people.
Without oversight, that can become a bad combination.
For their protection, and ours as taxpayers, prosecutors should be held to the
same level of financial accountability as any other public official.
Such safeguards, had they been in place, might have prevented Tim Madison
from compromising his oath of office.
Tuesday’s presidential primary results produced another
stark indicator of the disaster facing Democrats this fall.
At the beginning of this election season, it looked like
the 2008 campaign would represent salvation at last for the
beleaguered Democratic Party. Our Republican president is
breaking records for unpopularity, and scandal continues to
dog Washington Republicans. Campaign cash that had gone
overwhelmingly to national Republicans has shifted heavily
in favor of the Democrats.
Now, as their presidential nomination battle slogs for
ward, Democrats appear increasingly likely to fumble away
the golden opportunity to take the White House. Many cable
talking heads agree. Their analysis goes like this: The egos
of New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband
are unnecessarily prolonging the Democratic nomination
fight, even though she has no hope of winning. The talking
heads believe that if she would just get out of the way, the
party’s stronger candidate, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama,
could get on with the business of beating the Republican
nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, and the Democrats
would be better off for it.
The national media is right that Clinton has no chance of
winning the nomination. If anything became clear Tuesday
night during Clinton’s big Pennsylvania win, it is that no
matter what happens in the remaining primaries, Obama’s
biased media allies will interpret it as a sign of Clinton’s
impending demise. The next Clinton
stumble, be it on May 6 or later, will
be used by the press to declare her
dead and gone once and for all.
The press is also correct that the
Democrats’ hope of winning the
presidency is slipping away because
of the nomination fight. They are
right for the wrong reason, however.
The reason Democrats are blow
ing their opportunity is not because
of the length of their primary battle. It
is because, once again, Democratic
primary voters are determined to
nominate a weak candidate.
Obama has a very high, even insurmountable, hill to
climb to win the presidency. His race is certainly a major
factor, but it is not decisive. Even his liberalism, while an
obstacle, is not the biggest one he faces. Obama’s most
difficult problem (like John Kerry’s in 2004) is his total
cultural disconnect from voters outside the urban elite of
our big cities.
Kerry is a Massachusetts politician married to a billion
aire and living in Boston’s most exclusive neighborhood.
Obama is a Harvard-educated lawyer who lives in intown
Chicago, and who won his U.S. Senate seat on the strength
of metro Chicago’s dominance of Illinois statewide politics
(plus some great luck in drawing a series of fatally flawed
opponents).
Neither Kerry nor Obama was raised in truly wealthy
households, but the backgrounds of both are very different
from those of most Americans. Kerry is the son of a diplo
mat who attended prep school in Europe for a time. Obama
talks about his Kansan mother, but he was raised in Hawaii
and attended an elite private high school before heading
for the Ivy League.
The Clintons certainly have their faults as candidates and
as people, but both spent almost two decades in Arkansas
politics, and they understand how people outside the
nation’s elite live their lives in ways that Kerry and Obama
never can. You don’t run for office eight times in Arkansas
without learning to appeal to folks you would never meet at
the Yale Club.
Obama’s much-ballyhooed comment about rural
Pennsylvania voters being “bitter” was probably insulting
to some, but its significance is much deeper than that of
a run-of-the-mill gaffe. It revealed that he has a sense that
someone who lives in Donora, Pa. (or Dublin, Ga.), is a
specimen of another species to be examined and explained
to his fellow urban elites. He has as much connection to
them as any of us would have to a Martian.
The depth of Obama’s rural disconnect and the electoral
problem he faces are revealed by the county returns from
Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary. In many counties outside
metro Philadelphia, Clinton was so dominant against
Obama (who outspent her by millions) that she won the
Democratic primary with almost the same percentage
margin that McCain (who was running against the fringe
Ron Paul and the withdrawn Mike Huckabee) won the
Republican primary. What should scare Democrats is
that voters in those counties will determine whether the
Democratic presidential nominee wins Pennsylvania’s
electoral votes in the fall.
Those folks are also similar to the voters who will decide
whether Obama carries Ohio, Michigan and other industrial
swing states come November.
So as usual, the Democrats are the Republicans’ best
asset when it comes to winning an election. Just more proof
that it’s better to be lucky than good, especially when the
other side picks an adversary who makes sure you’re lucky
over and over again.
You can reach Bill Shipp at P.O. Box 2520, Kennesaw,
GA 30156, e-mail: shipp1@bellsouth.net, or Web address:
billshipponline.com.
bill
shipp