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LOOZ
HEROES AND VILLAINS
There aren't many people in Georgia's politi
cal history who could be considered particularly
heroic, but Floyd ''Fuzzy" Hoard might qualify.
Hoard was a state prosecutor who tried to clean
up crime and corruption more than 40 years ago
in the Piedmont Judicial Circuit, which comprises
Jackson, Barrow and Banks counties in Northeast
Georgia.
It was an area dominated back then by car
thieves, bootleggers and cockfighters. The people
who were supposed to enforce the laws weren't
much better—even the local sheriff was once ar
rested on auto theft charges. Hoard was elected
solicitor general (the equivalent of a district
attorney) on a pledge to clean up the circuit,
and he went after a group of gangsters known
collectively as the Dixie Mafia. Hoard showed he
was serious shortly after he took office by
ordering a raid on an auto theft ring
One of Hoard's major targets was
a bootlegging kingpin named A.
C. "Cliff" Park, known as "the old
man" to his partners in crime. In
the spring of 1967, Hoard raided a
garage and a house where Park was
storing illegal liquor and seized 31
cases of whiskey and 2,254 cases of
beer worth more than S21,000. Park
and two of his associates were fined
S6,300.
Later that summer, Hoard was prepar
ing a case related to auto larceny for a Jackson
County grand jury to consider, but he never
finished presenting the evidence. On the morn
ing of Aug. 7, 1967, Hoard turned the key in
the ignition of his Ford Galaxy to drive to the
courthouse. Ten sticks of dynamite that had been
wired to the coil exploded and killed him almost
instantly.
It was a shocking assassination that made
national headlines and dominated newspapers
across Georgia. Governor Lester Maddox sent in
an army of state troopers and GBI agents to in
vestigate, and within a few months they arrested
Park and four men he had hired to kill Hoard.
Prosecutors eventually secured a conviction and
death penalty against Park, who died in prison
before the sentence could be carried out.
The murder and the subsequent convictions of
the killers marked a turning point in the efforts
to fight lawlessness in that part of Georgia. As
the Jackson Herald commented later, “after the
killing of Hoard, it became impossible to ignore
the crime issue. Slowly, Jackson County shook off
its stigma as a haven for crime, but it took the
brutal slaying of Hoard to begin that process."
What a contrast, then, to look at the activi
ties of the man who later ascended to the office
of district attorney in the Piedmont Judicial
Circuit, the same position that Floyd Hoard once
held. Tim Madison was the Piedmont District
Attorney until he resigned last May. Madison
stepped down as the GBI and Attorney General
Thurbert Baker were investigating charges that
money from a victim's assistance fund and money
seized in drug busts had been misappropriated.
That investigation culminated last week in
the indictment of Madison, his wife and a former
assistant district attorney by a Banks County
grand jury. According to the allegations
in the indictment, the trio had been
involved in scamming a substan
tial amount of money from Banks
County. These activities allegedly
included the forging of timecards
so that Madison's wife could draw
pay for work she didn't actually
perform.
Even worse was the charge that
Madison, in the language of the
indictment, "having been duly adminis
tered the oath of district attorney as pre
scribed by law... did willfully and intentionally
violate the terms of his oath." The indictment
was handed down, ironically, just a few weeks
after the 40th anniversary of Hoard's death.
Floyd Hoard carried out his oath of office to
enforce the law and seek justice, even though it
eventually cost him his life. Tirr. Madison, if the
grand jury indictment is accurate, violated that
same oath of office for the purpose of stealing
a few thousand dollars in public funds from a
county government. One man was a true hero.
The other was a chintzy little money-grubber.
How sad that they would both hold the same of
fice of public trust.
Tom Crawford
Tom Crawford is the editor of Capitol Impact’s Georgia
Report, an Internet news site at www.gareport.com that
covers government and politics in Georgia.
Till MMfcKM WMLI
by TOM TOMORROW
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