A federal grand jury in Atlanta has indicted the former vice president of Appalachian Community Bank, the U.S. attorney in Atlanta announced today.

The grand jury indicted DeKalb County resident William R. “Rusty” Beamon Jr., 52,  on six counts of defrauding the bank.  Appalachian Community Bank, which was headquartered in Ellijay,  was also known as the Gilmer County Bank. It was shut down by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on March 19, 2010.

Federal prosecutors said Beamon was in charge of the bank’s foreclosure liquidation department. They said Beamon arranged for the bank to make loans to his wife and to a shell company he owned in order to finance fraudulent real estate purchases from the bank’s foreclosure inventory for substantially less than the properties’ fair market value.

In 2009, Beamon told a real estate agent that he personally owned a house in Cumming, then hired the agent to market and lease the property for him, prosecutors said. But the home belonged to the bank, which had foreclosed on the property in January 2009,  according to the indictment.

Beamon collected more than $20,000 in rental payments and security deposits by leasing the bank-owned property and deposited them in his personal bank accounts, according to federal prosecutors.

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Former Murray County Deputy Joshua Greeson told reporters at an impromptu news conference Wednesday afternoon that has been posted on YouTube that he arrested a witness in a state judicial ethics investigation on what turned out to be false charges because he was “following orders that I was given to do,” by his captain,  Michael Henderson.

Greeson held the news conference in Rome after pleading not guilty to a federal indictment unsealed Wednesday that accuses him of making false statements to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and deleting information from his cell phone in an attempt to obstruct a civil rights investigation.

Greeson said that he arrested Angela Garmley, who had been cooperating with the state Judicial Qualifications Commission in its investigation of Murray County Magistrate Judge Bryant Cochran, based on a lookout for her car that Henderson – who was Greeson’s supervisor and is Cochran’s cousin – had given him several weeks before her arrest.

The JQC had been investigating Cochran for several months before he resigned to end the probe a day after Garmley was arrested.  The GBI determined that the methamphetamine that Greeson found hidden beneath Garmley’s car during a traffic stop had been planted, but Greeson has not been charged with planting the drugs. Neither federal prosecutors nor the GBI have said who they think may have done so.

On Wednesday, Henderson’s attorney, Lawrence Stagg, could not be reached for comment.

In the video, Greeson is accompanied by his attorney, Ed Marger, Greeson said that Henderson had given him the lookout, telling him that the  car was suspected of “hauling drugs.”  He said it was “three weeks or so later” before he spotted it and stopped it for failing to dim the headlights for an oncoming car.  The car belonged to Garmley, who was a passenger in the car. But within days, the GBI had recommended that the charges be dismissed because the drugs had been planted.

Greeson said that a day before he was to be interviewed by the GBI, Henderson stopped by his house and warned him “not to mention the lookout on the vehicle he gave me,” Greeson told reporters. Henderson also told him “if I didn’t say nothing about the vehicle that nobody else would know about it,” he said.

Greeson said that he was “scared about what he [Henderson] would do if I didn’t, and repeated what his supervisor had told him to the GBI. But he said he soon changed his mind, contacted GBI agents and told them what Henderson had told him to say. “It was the only thing I told them that wasn’t right,” he said. “If he [Henderson] hadn’t stopped by my house, I wouldn’t be part of this. It was just being afraid of him.”

Greeson also apologized for arresting Garmley.”I never wanted to be a person who done somebody wrong,” he said.
Greeson said that when GBI agents asked him if he had deleted anything from his cell phone in connection with the case, he said he gave them his cell phone freely and told them, “I delete stuff all the time, message, pictures…. Like anybody does.”

He said when agents asked him if he had deleted anything pertaining to the case, he told them he had deleted photos of the drugs he had discovered under Garmley’s car that he had taken when they were in a detective’s office.

“I didn’t think it was substantial when I was deleting them,” he said. “The reason I deleted them was… I didn’t want anything to remind me of this case. It was the worst headache.”

A Camden County associate probate judge who was briefly famous in 1996 when she issued the marriage license for John F. Kennedy Jr. and his bride-to-be pleaded guilty today to three felonies stemming from an ethics investigation by the state Judicial Qualifications Commission, said a special prosecutor who negotiated the plea deal.

Shirley Wise, an associate probate judge who in November was elected chief probate judge of the county, pleaded guilty to theft by taking, theft by deception, and violating her oath of office, a felony under Georgia law, said Brian Rickman, the district attorney of Georgia’s Mountain Circuit who was appointed as a special prosecutor to handle the criminal case by Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens.

David Cavender, Chief Superior Court Judge of the Atlantic Judicial Circuit, sentenced Wise as a  first offender to seven years probation and ordered her to pay $5,500 in restitution to the county and a $1,000 fine, Rickman said after the plea hearing.

Wise also agreed, as a special condition of her sentence, that she would not seek or accept any public office – an agreement that was not limited to a judicial post, Rickman said.

Wise’s attorney, James Stein of St. Mary’s, said that in pleading guilty, Wise accepted responsibility for her actions and mitigated expenses for Camden County’s taxpayers “who would have been burdened with the expenses of a trial” if she had chosen to fight the charges.

“It was in the best interest of all concerned,” he said. “Serious consideration was given to mitigating expenses for everyone concerned. … The whole purpose was to put this thing to rest and stop the clock on expenses of the county and everyone concerned.”

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.

Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens has announced on his website that four men have been indicted in an alleged illegal tobacco trafficking ring formed to dodge paying taxes.

The men – one in Hall County and three in Cobb County – were charged with racketeering and possession of cigarettes with counterfeit stamps. The indictments are part of a three year investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Atlanta Field Division, the Georgia Attorney General’s Office, the Georgia Department of Revenue, the Gwinnett County District Attorney’s Office and the Lawrenceville Police Department and the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Department, according to Olens announcement.

Assistant Attorney General Greg Lohmeier is prosecuting the case on behalf of the state.

A federal magistrate judge in Gainesville reconvened a detention hearing this morning for four North Georgia men accused of plotting to assassinate government lawyers and judges, blow up federal buildings in metro Atlanta and produce a  deadly biological toxin they allegedly intended to spread along metro Atlanta’s interstates.

The four men —Frederick Thomas, 73, of Cleveland; and Emory Dan Roberts, 67, Ray H. Adams, 65, and Samuel J. Crump, 68, all of Toccoa— were arrested by federal agents on Nov. 1.  Federal agents identified them in court affidavits as members of a “fringe offshoot” of a known Georgia militia group.  Although federal authorities have not publicly identified that group, Roberts has been identified on a website for the Georgia Militia as its Toccoa commander.

The four men have been held without bond since their arrest at the request of federal prosecutors who claimed there was a “serious risk” they would obstruct justice and because there were no conditions of release that would “reasonably assure the safety of any other person and the community.” Today’s hearing is a continuation of a hearing that took place last week before U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan S. Cole.

All four men entered pleas of not guilty last week and are seeking release on bond pending trial.  A federal grand jury indicted them on Nov. 3.  The indictment accuses Roberts and Thomas of conspiring to obtain explosives and unregistered silencers to further the alleged assassination plot.  Crump and Adams were charged conspiring to and then attempting to manufacture ricin, a deadly toxin.

The four allegedly intended to use an online novel by a blogger and a self-described member of an Alabama militia group as a blueprint for their anticipated actions, including murder, according to one alleged recording made by an undercover federal informant.

The online manuscript, “Absolved,” by Mike Vandeboegh, is a fictional account in which 23 federal prosecutors and other government attorneys in a dozen federal agencies systematically are slain mby a small band of killers – all of them former U.S. soldiers who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan.    Following the arrests, Vandeboegh wrote on his blog, “Sipsey Street Irregulars,” that the book “is fiction,” although he also described it as a “useful dire warning.”

Last week, the court heard testimony from several witnesses, including Thomas’s wife.  Defense lawyers also submitted to the court Thomas’s honorable discharge from the U.S. Army as well as letters attesting to the good character of Thomas and Roberts, according to the case docket. More evidence is expected to be presented to the court today.

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.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected the U.S. solicitor general’s request to participate in next month’s argument over a Georgia case concerning allegedly false grand jury testimony.

The case involves Charles Rehberg’s claims that Dougherty County authorities improperly pursued a criminal investigation against him as a political favor to Albany’s Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital. Three times Rehberg, an accountant who had sent anonymous faxes criticizing the hospital, was indicted on various charges, including making harassing phone calls. But three times the charges were dismissed. 

Rehberg’s suit alleges Dougherty County DA’s office investigator James Paulk lied to the grand jury. Paulk’s lawyer has said his client didn’t make any false statements to the grand jury. The 11th Circuit ruled that Paulk was entitled to immunity for his grand jury testimony. But on Rehberg’s request, the high court in March agreed to consider that question.

Rehberg’s suit also named former Dougherty DA and 2010 Democratic attorney general nominee Ken Hodges as a defendant, as well as then-Houston Circuit DA Kelly R. Burke, who took over the matter after Hodges recused. The 11th Circuit decided Hodges and Burke should have immunity on all of the claims against them.

One of Rehberg’s lawyers has said although his client’s certiorari petition said it concerned only the claims against Paulk, a win at the Supreme Court could revive a conspiracy claim against the two former DAs, an assessment Hodges has disputed.

The U.S. solicitor general—whose relationship with the court is so tight that he is sometimes referred to as “the 10th justice”—has filed an amicus brief that Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog says clearly sides with the investigator.

The SG tried to take five minutes from each side’s time at the oral argument scheduled for Nov. 1—a proposal Rehberg’s lawyers protested.

The high court on Tuesday denied without explanation the SG’s request for argument time.

Two state ethics commissioners are set to pare down the list of applicants for the panel’s executive secretary position and conduct preliminary interviews next week.

Ethics commission member Kevin D. Abernethy estimated between 30 and40 people have applied for the agency director position since the opening was announced in June. He and fellow commissioner Joshua B. Belinfante will question candidates and recommend finalists after the five-member commission’s regular meeting at headquarters on Aug. 5. Read more »

An investigation by the state Office of the Inspector General led the Georgia Department of Transportation to cancel a six-year contract that could have been worth as much as $21 million after the IG determined that a DOT staff member had taken cash consultant fees from an employee of the contractor.

According to an IG investigative report concluded March 22, an employee of Serco Inc., paid DOT employee Anthony Bradford $2,500 in cash for consultant services late last year. Bradford, a 16-year DOT employee who manages the department’s Traffic Management Center, was also paid about $7,200 for consulting work he did for Serco in 2009, and is currently consulting for another company in California. Read more »