A former candidate for Cartersville mayor was sentenced in federal court in today for bank fraud in a $1.25  million mortgage fraud scheme, federal prosecutors in Atlanta said.

U.S. District Court Judge Charles A. Pannell Jr. sentenced H. Gregory Cordell, 46, of Cartersville to two years and three months in federal prison and ordered him to pay $1,005,804 in restitution,  federal prosecutors said.

A federal grand jury indicted Cordell, a Cartersville real estate agent and developer, in February 2009 in connection with a Cartersville home and six acres of land that Cordell had bought for $1.25 million in 2003, prosecutors said.
Cordell ran an unsuccessful mayoral campaign against the incumbent mayor in 2006.

Although the seller had listed the property for sale at approximately $950,000, Cordell and the seller agreed to inflate the sales price by $307,000, prosecutors said. Cordell then secured an inflated mortgage from Washington Mutual and the additional funds were kicked back to him, without the bank’s knowledge, after the sale, prosecutors said.

In his loan application, Cordell also overstated his annual income, claiming that his portfolio of assets included several properties that he no longer owned, and also understated his financial liabilities, prosecutors said.

When Cordell refinanced the property in 2004, he included some of the same fraudulent claims on the refinance application, according to prosecutors. A month later, the house was destroyed by arson. Cordell’s insurer paid off the mortgage while the fire was under investigation. Cordell eventually sold the property but spent the $900,000 sale proceeds without reimbursing his insurer, prosecutors said.   Instead, Cordell spent the money on a private airplane, a Porsche, two Suburbans, two Mercedes Benz SUVs and other vehicles.

Cordell, “through his fraudulent actions and later, his extravagant purchases of airplanes and luxury vehicles, exhibited a self greed that he will now have to answer for,” said Brian D. Lamkin, special agent in charge of the FBI’s
Atlanta office.

Cordell’s insurance company secured more than a $1 million judgment against Cordell in connection with the fire.  In August 2008, he was indicted by a Bartow County grand jury on charges of arson, insurance fraud and loan fraud. Those charges are pending.

“Mortgage fraud involving fraudulently inflated sales prices contributed to the housing bubble that, when it burst, caused so much damage to the economy in Georgia and across the nation,” U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates of the Northern District of Georgia said after Cordell was sentenced.  “This defendant not only lied on mortgage applications to get over $1 million in loans, he fraudulently inflated the purchase price to get a bigger mortgage and then was paid a kickback under the table from the proceeds.”

The U.S. attorney in Atlanta has announced that federal prosecutors are reviewing a YouTube video of a brutal beating of a 20-year-old Atlanta man to see if prosecution of his attackers is warranted under federal hate crime statutes.

Calling the video – which went viral shortly after it was posted on YouTube Jan. 4 – “appalling  and unacceptable in our community”, Sally Quillian Yates, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said that federal prosecutors, along with the FBI and the Atlanta Police Department “are working to determine if the actions portrayed in the video violate federal law, including the hate crime statute.”

Yates said that the federal inquiry into “possible civil rights violations based on a person’s sexual orientation” is a priority of her office, as is combating violent gang activity in the long crime plagued Pittsburgh community near Turner Field where the beating took place. Yates urged anyone with information about the video and the beating it depicted to contact the FBI or Atlanta police.

Meanwhile, the beating victim has called a noon news conference today to tell his story. He was identified as a “black gay youth” in a news release issued by the H.I.P. HIV Intervention Project in Atlanta.  Calling the recording of the beating a “video of hate,” the intervention project news release stated, “We are in horror of the violent community act against an innocent young black same gender loving youth in the City of Atlanta… .”

The news conference – scheduled for noon at the city community center at the corner of Georgia Avenue and Hill Street, coincides with Tuesday’s National Black HIV/Aids Awareness Day.  National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day was founded by five national organizations more than a decade ago to encourage a national HIV testing and treatment initiative that focused on black communities.

To see video of the beating go to http://www.cbsatlanta.com/story/16690315/video-shows-gang-members-beating-gay-man.

Pictures from the 2/8/12 press conference by Brandon White, person self-identified as being the beating victim in the YouTube video, are on the Daily Report’s Facebook page.

A former police chief of Talbotton in Talbot County has pleaded guilty to a federal charge of making a false statement to a federal agent, federal prosecutors in Georgia’s Middle District in Macon announced today.

Former Talbotton Police Chief Michael Howard, 43, admitted during his plea hearing that last year he lied to a federal agent when he denied knowing that a known drug dealer had transported narcotics through Talbot County, according to Michael J. Moore, U.S. Attorney for Georgia’s Middle District.

According to federal prosecutors, an informant had told Howard that he had $15,000 and that he would be traveling through Talbot County in connection with a planned drug deal. The informant also asked Howard if he would be interested in assisting him by providing the informant with protection until the deal was consummated, prosecutors said.  Howard apparently expressed an interest in the FBI informant’s offer but ultimately turned it down, telling the informant that he was off duty and not wearing his uniform and so could not be of any assistance in running interference for him, federal prosecutors said.

Howard faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a fine as high as $250,000. He is scheduled to be sentenced April 25.

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An Illinois resident has pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Atlanta to making threats  at multiple metro Atlanta schools, including Northview High School in John’s Creek, Stephenson Middle School in Stone Mountain, Meadowcreek High School in Norcross and Marietta High School, according to federal prosecutors.

Valtrez Stewart, 29, of Oak Lawn, Ill., pleaded guilty to four counts of mailing threatening communications that contained collages of newspaper and magazines clippings.  The indictment also accused Stewart of issuing threats against two other schools — Marietta Middle School and Stone Mountain Middle School.

The messages, according to federal prosecutors, claimed that a bomb would detonate at the targeted school, killing at last 20 people.  The messages also promised what prosecutors described as “brutal murders” if money was not paid to certain individuals by a certain date.

According to federal prosecutors, Stewart made the threats as a way of prompting law enforcement agencies to begin investigating people he disliked for allegedly making the deadly threats that Stewart himself had made.

Stewart is scheduled to be sentenced March 28 and faces as much as 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

A former staff attorney for personal injury firm Joel & Associates has been sentenced to 18 months in jail after pleading guilty to stealing $145,000 from the firm. Wayne Williams, 50, who was the managing attorney for the firm between 2004 and 2007, pleaded guilty to intercepting about 24 checks and depositing them into his personal account, according to a release from the office of Fulton County District Attorney Paul L. Howard.

A review of the firm’s books led to the discovery of the thefts, according to the DA’s office.

On Monday, Williams pleaded guilty to 21 counts of theft by taking and 19 counts of first-degree forgery; Fulton County Magistrate Judge Walter Lovett sentenced him to 20 years, with 18 months to serve and the balance on probation. He must also make restitution, surrender his law license and perform 500 hours of community service.

Williams’ attorney, Fulton County Public Defender Bert G. Roughton III, refused to discuss the case. Joel & Associates principal David C. Joel was unavailable.

Williams was prosecuted by Chief Senior District Attorney Bradley R. Malkin of the DA’s White Collar Crime Unit. He was assisted by DA investigator Natalie Brunner and Atlanta Police Det. Joseph Siwemuke.

Cobb Superior Court Judge Reuben Green sentenced former nurse-anesthetist Paul Patrick Serdula to life plus 25 years Friday afternoon for the videotaped sexual assaults of 19 women and girls, Lindsay Field reported in Saturday’s editions of the Marietta Daily Journal and the Cherokee Tribune.

Field quoted the judge telling Serdula: “My intent … is to send you to life in prison followed by 25 years in prison with the intent that if you did get out you would be on probation for the remainder of your life. … People are supposed to be able to trust doctors. People trust them blindly.”

Serdula’s lawyer, Jimmy Berry, has been setting up his client’s appeal since even before Serdula was convicted in April of fondling, sodomizing and videotaping women and girls while they were under anesthesia, most for dental procedures or childbirth. Berry asked for a stipulated bench trial rather than a guilty plea in order to preserve his client’s right to appeal on failed motions. One of those failed motions was for the judge to recuse because of his friendship with his former boss, Cobb County District Attorney Patrick H. Head. The other was to suppress the videotaped evidence on the grounds that police overreached their warrant to search the defendant’s cell phone.

“There was nothing else to try,” Berry told the Daily Report in April, following the conviction. “There was no defense. They’ve got videos.”

MDJ story here.

A Notre Dame law professor writes in Slate today that when a student in his torts class asked about Penn State’s potential liability in the sex abuse scandal, the professor decided to confront his own history: “So here it is: I am a victim of sexual abuse.”

Professor Mark McKenna’s article makes a particularly interesting point: “[I]t is a mistake to characterize Jerry Sandusky as some kind of subhuman monster. The inclination to do so is entirely understandable, for his behavior was unequivocally monstrous. But to describe him as a monster shields us from the reality that human beings have the capacity for tremendous evil.”

The article can be found here.

The Washingtonian magazine asks why Penn State football coach Joe Paterno chose King & Spalding’s Wick Sollers to represent him in the fallout from the school’s sex abuse scandal, pointing out that Sollers generally defends corporate executives on the quiet. Sollers “is not among the circle of elite Washington white-collar defenders whom celebrities, politicians, and other high-profile folks usually turn to in this city when they’re in trouble,” says the magazine.

Sollers is the managing partner of King & Spalding’s Washington office and has chaired the firm’s special matters and government investigations practice. His firm bio says his defense work includes accounting fraud cases, criminal environmental, health care and FDA matters and internal corporate investigations. He also represented former President George H.W. Bush in the Iran-Contra affair.

Paterno was fired Wednesday along with Penn State’s president, after Pennsylvania prosecutors charged former Penn State defensive coach Jerry Sandusky with sex abuse of teenage boys and two university officials with covering up his alleged crimes.

Sollers was in the news himself last spring after former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement quit King & Spalding because the firm refused to defend the Defense of Marriage Act for his client, the U.S. House of Representatives. Sollers, who’d recruited Clement to the firm, said in a statement amidst fallout from the departure that it was “reasonable” for Clement to think King & Spalding would accept the DOMA matter even though the firm’s standard client/matter review process was not followed, calling the episode an “unfortunate misunderstanding with a friend.”

Here is the gripping lead on today’s coverage of a murder trial by Amy Leigh Womack of the Macon Telegraph: “Cynthia Poole was stocking shelves with shampoo, soap and deodorant at Family Dollar on Houston Avenue on April 12 when a masked gunman entered the store. The she heard her manager say, ‘Stay calm, I will give you the money.’”

Sadly, Poole’s testimony Tuesday in Bibb County Superior Court was that the gunman shot her boss anyway. Gary Bennett Cole Jr., 38, died behind the counter, Macon Judicial Circuit District Attorney Greg Winters said.

Antonio Browner, 20, is on trial for murder, armed robbery and firearm charges. His attorney, Bobby Bearden, has an interesting defense. Bearden contends his client was coerced at gunpoint to do the robbery by 25-year-old Quartez Carter, who was serving as the lookout. The defense blames Carter for the shooting as well because Carter gave Bearden the gun, which happened to have “a hair trigger” and went off by accident.

Indeed, the robbery never happened because the man who was killed was the only employee on duty who knew the combination to the safe.