Redirected: Features

In the Shadows

Scott Henry — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 18:11:00 GMT

The stranger arrived at the movie set late in the evening. Crew members preparing for a long night’s shoot were told the short and stocky, heavily bearded man had come to watch over one of the film’s stars, a fourteen-year-old boy whose mother was leaving in a few hours for a flight to California. But that didn’t explain why the stranger, introduced as Ed Kramer, was busily assembling a shoulder-mounted camera rig to follow the cast and crew into the woods.

The moon was close to full that night, and as the group hiked along an uphill path to the shooting location, makeup artist Krystal Phillips felt uncomfortable. The man seemed to be filming a lot. Creepy, she thought.

Illustration by Jeffrey Smith

It was mid-September of last year, and Phillips and her crewmates had already spent a week at Camp Katoya, an old Girl Scouts camp on the rural outskirts of Milford, Connecticut, that was serving as a location for The Penny Dreadful Picture Show, a middling-budget anthology horror film. In the segment they were shooting, teen scouts are taken on an overnight “snipe hunt” by older scouts trying to scare them, but the campers must fight for their lives when a real monster attacks.

With delicate features and flaxen hair, the young model and actor whom Kramer accompanied had more than a dozen credits in short films and TV projects to his name before coming to Connecticut. Still, Phillips felt protective of this “very adorable, skinny blond kid.” After filming a scene in which the boy gets mysteriously “slimed,” Phillips took him into a nearby cabin to clean him off. Kramer followed them inside.

“I had [the boy] take his shirt off and Ed wanted to help,” she recalls. “I was not okay with him wiping down the boy’s chest, so I said, ‘I’ve got this. It’ll be quicker if I do it.’”

A few minutes later, when she saw Kramer headed toward the room where she’d sent the boy to change, Phillips nudged production assistant Nick Vallas, who intercepted Kramer before he reached the door. While Kramer looked through the handful of release forms Vallas shoved at him, the boy finished dressing.

As the sun was rising and the crew was wrapping up for the day, Vallas left to drive Kramer and the boy, along with two other young actors and their mothers, to the Super 8, where many of the cast had been staying.

At the motel, Vallas dropped off his passengers and took on a new one: the boy’s mother, who needed a ride to the train station. The previous day, before Kramer had arrived, word had gotten around the set that he was accused of molesting three boys in Georgia years before. Although Kramer hadn’t been convicted, Vallas felt concerned enough to return to the motel after dropping off the boy’s mother.

The boy answered the door of room 101 holding a Styrofoam cup, his hair combed. He was wearing just a towel, Vallas later told police. Kramer was standing toward the back of the room, his camera equipment nearby.

Outside, Vallas called Phillips, who’d been Googling Kramer. At seven that morning, she called her mother, who phoned Georgia authorities. By noon Milford police had Kramer in custody. He was charged with “risk of injury to a minor,” a broad statute under Connecticut law that covers sexual assault, placing a child in physical danger, and a range of other crimes.

Squinting sleepily into the camera for his mug shot, with well-defined bags under his heavy-lidded eyes, Kramer appeared considerably older than his fifty years. His beard was graying and unkempt. His haggard face showed no expression.

It was Danny Porter who, after speaking with Krystal Phillips’s mother, made the call to Milford police that culminated in Kramer’s arrest. Porter is Gwinnett County’s district attorney, and in the two decades he’s had the job, his office’s caseload has grown proportionally with the county’s population. Today he oversees a staff of more than forty prosecutors. Like most district attorneys in large metro areas, Porter reserves the highest-profile cases for himself—heinous murders, public corruption, gang violence. Eight years ago, he decided to take the lead on one case his office simply could not close: Georgia v. Edward Kramer.

The Kramer case has been dragging on for twelve years. In August 2000, Kramer was charged with molesting two teenage brothers during sleepovers at his house earlier that summer. His arrest stemmed from an anonymous call to the Gwinnett Department of Family and Children Services. At the time, Kramer was thirty-nine and an established celebrity in gaming and science fiction fandom circles. He was, after all, a cofounder of DragonCon. In just a few years, his creation had become one of the biggest conventions of its kind in the country, filling Downtown Atlanta hotel rooms over a long weekend and pumping millions into the local economy.

The convention also made Kramer wealthy enough to hire attorneys who, in the wake of his arrest, filed motion after motion that kept his case from coming to trial. Months of delays would turn into years. By the time police knocked on the door of the Milford Super 8 last fall, Kramer had used the criminal justice system to accomplish what few accused felons—and even fewer accused child molesters—can: He was, in all practical respects, a free man, able to travel virtually as he pleased, with any real threat of a trial date postponed indefinitely.

This gnawed at Porter, a career prosecutor who joined the DA’s office straight out of the University of Georgia School of Law thirty-one years ago. Porter is slight of build but speaks in a raspy bark and possesses the no-nonsense directness of a man who earns his living sending people to prison. Courthouse observers know him as a workaholic who cares little for the trappings of his position, typically wearing cargo pants and T-shirts around his office on the second floor of the Gwinnett Justice and Administration Center in Lawrenceville.

With Kramer’s arrest in Milford, the case had become more than a personal affront to Porter; it was now an embarrassment. His office was supposed to be keeping track of his whereabouts, yet Porter had no idea Kramer was in Connecticut until he got the early morning phone call from Krystal Phillips’s mother. After Kramer’s arrest, a Connecticut judge released him on $50,000 bond. Porter, meanwhile, persuaded a Gwinnett judge to revoke Kramer’s local bond, making him a fugitive from justice. Within two weeks, Kramer was rearrested in Connecticut. His bail was raised to $2 million, effectively ensuring he would stay in custody while Porter tried to extradite him.

“This case has become a big swirl of lies,” Porter says. “It’s been a perversion of the system from the very beginning.”

Just before Kramer’s extradition hearing last December, Porter felt compelled to be there himself, so he flew to Connecticut. (Vallas, the production assistant who helped set into motion Kramer’s arrest, had died on October 9, when his car veered off the road and hit a telephone pole.) On the stand in Hartford Superior Court, four days before Christmas, Porter made clear why he’s so determined to bring Kramer back to stand trial.

“If the information that I received from Krystal Phillips was true . . . it was very similar in its method of operation to the allegations in our charge,” Porter told the court. “Mr. Kramer makes contact with young boys, promises them fame and fortune in the modeling industry or the movie industry, and then engages in molestation of them.”

On a late Saturday afternoon in May 1987, a thirteen-year-old boy named Richard Dinsmore was sitting by himself, leafing through the program guide at the Atlanta Fantasy Fair, an outsider even among his fellow outsiders. He’d discovered the world of conventions a few months earlier and had talked friends into going, but their interest waned as his grew.

Now, as he waited in the Omni Hotel lobby to be picked up by his mother, a roundish man with dark hair and a full beard walked up and asked if he was there for the convention. They began talking. The man, who introduced himself as Ed Kramer, asked about the boy’s interests—at that time, Elfquest comic books—and boasted about his own fantasy convention, which was still a few months from its debut.

Dinsmore was immediately impressed with Kramer’s knowledge of comics, movies, and games. “Magnetic” is how Dinsmore remembers him.

At twenty-six, Kramer already had an impressive resume outside of the fantasy/sci-fi world. After getting a master’s in health administration from Emory, he’d spent much of the 1980s working in grant management and research for public health agencies and private substance-abuse firms. At various times, he volunteered at the DeKalb children’s shelter, where he counseled troubled teens, and even cochaired a foster-care review panel for juvenile courts. He also moonlighted as a photographer, shooting concerts for local papers like Open City.

Dinsmore was excited to hear Kramer’s plans for his own convention. It was to be called DragonCon, after the Dragon Alliance, an organizing group he’d formed with five fellow gaming geeks. Kramer had already scouted out the local competition—Magnum Opus Con, Dixie-Trek, PhoenixCon, Atlanta Comics Festival—but found their programming too narrowly focused or their presentations too amateurish. His festival would be comprehensive, he explained, giving equal time to role-playing gamers, Trekkies, anime fans, comic book buffs, and Tolkien scholars.

The two exchanged numbers. Growing up without a father at home, Dinsmore yearned for someone like Kramer who could be both friend and mentor. And when he first saw Kramer’s home, he was hooked. Crammed with fantasy-game figures, horror videos, comic books, and concert posters autographed by Gene Simmons and other rock-god heroes, the otherwise unremarkable two-story house on a cul-de-sac in Duluth was a fanboy’s playground.

Also, unlike Dinsmore’s peers, Kramer had a car and plenty of spending money. He took the boy to Braves games and surprised him with concert tickets. They went to dinner often, which could be somewhat embarrassing, Dinsmore recalls, as Kramer was a “nightmare customer,” frequently complaining about the food and service.

There was just one thing standing in the way of the boy’s new friendship. Early on, Kramer came over to the Dinsmore house to introduce himself to Richard’s mother. “My mom thought Ed was a creepy dude and couldn’t understand why he wanted to hang out with me,” Dinsmore says. “I think she used the word inappropriate in every conversation we ever had about him.”

Still, as a divorced parent working full-time while raising three boys, she was stretched thin, Dinsmore says, and often didn’t have the time or energy to argue about whether her thirteen-year-old could go out with his grown-up friend.

For at least two years, Dinsmore slept over at Kramer’s house nearly every other weekend and stayed in his hotel suite during DragonCon. They’d watch movies (The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the raciest title he can remember), play Dungeons & Dragons, and talk about sci-fi books, rock albums, and other things that occupy the minds of teenage boys.

Except girls. “I never knew Ed to have a girlfriend,” says Dinsmore, adding that Kramer never asked him about school crushes or mentioned women in his own life. At the time, he says, this didn’t seem odd, perhaps because Kramer was five foot six and roughly 200 pounds, with skin covered in flaky red splotches from his virulent psoriasis, and shoulders coated with dandruff.

Still, Kramer had a self-confidence—his vanity license plate read “MAGNUS,” Latin for “great,” Dinsmore recalls—that made him easy to admire. “He always thought he was smarter than anyone else in the room,” Dinsmore says.

The only time he felt uncomfortable around his older friend was at night, when the young Dinsmore would lie down on a cot next to his host’s bed. Sometimes Kramer would crouch next to the boy in the dark and ask to hypnotize him.

“He’d say, ‘I need to practice,’” says Dinsmore. “It would get weird for a minute and then he’d say, ‘Oh well, guess I have to work on it,’ and get back into bed.”

As time went by, Dinsmore’s classmates began teasing him about spending so much time with a man twice his age. The sleepovers became less frequent. Then, when Dinsmore was fifteen, he moved to Tennessee to live with his father. He was eighteen when he returned, but Kramer made little effort to reconnect.

By then, Dinsmore says, the DragonCon impresario had a throng of younger boys tagging behind him. Convention insiders referred to them as “Ed’s kids.”

The first DragonCon, in October 1987, drew a crowd of 1,400—a solid success, made even more impressive by the guest speakers, who included fantasy novelist Michael Moorcock and D&D cocreator Gary Gygax. Within its first few years, the event doubled in size, then doubled again, outgrowing the Piermont Plaza Hotel (now the Meliá) and then the Omni, before settling into the Hilton and expanding to the other flagship Downtown hotels.

During DragonCon’s first twelve years or so, it was Kramer who clearly called the shots. While cofounder Pat Henry (no relation to this writer), an accountant by trade, kept the books, Kramer served as manager, negotiating sponsorships, enforcing vendor agreements, and using his networking skills to wrangle such top-shelf celebrities as writers Clive Barker and George R.R. Martin, artist Brian Froud, filmmaker Kevin Smith, and half the cast of Star Wars.

One by one, the older, fan-driven Atlanta cons folded, unable to compete with the newcomer’s catch-all approach and Kramer’s flair for publicity and aggressive style as a booker. Over time, the event expanded in all directions—multitudes of celebrity guests; dozens of separate fan tracks covering every conceivable genre and subculture, from filk-singing to Buffy the Vampire Slayer; live music; acres of dealer booths; and, this year, no fewer than eight separate costume contests.

Sci-fi writer and environmental scientist James Anderson III, an early DragonCon guest and Kramer acquaintance, says he became dismayed as the event began to incorporate racier elements, such as girls in skimpy costumes and S&M demonstrations. Before long, he recalls, the Atlanta fest had developed a reputation as a party con where nerds came hoping to hook up.

But Kramer’s efforts to build on his festival’s success come as little surprise given that it’s always been a business. Unlike such venerable cons as San Diego’s Comic-Con International and Philadelphia’s Philcon, DragonCon was created by its six founders as a profit-making enterprise.

Eventually Kramer and Henry bought out fellow shareholders until they each owned a one-third stake in what, by 1993, had formally been incorporated as the private, for-profit DragonCon/ACE Inc. The rest of the company is owned by several minority shareholders. Although Kramer didn’t draw a salary as DragonCon’s chairman and CEO, his ownership interest meant he could run the event as he saw fit.

Meanwhile Kramer was parlaying his contacts into other moneymaking ventures, such as editing horror story anthologies and putting together movie deals. In 2000 Kramer directed and cowrote Terror at Tate Manor, a direct-to-Internet splatter film costarring one of the boys he would later be accused of molesting.

Ken Johnston, a Georgia Renaissance Festival veteran who gave sword-fighting demonstrations during DragonCon’s early years, remembers Kramer as “a typical promoter”: promising big, sometimes following through, sometimes not. He also heard the salacious whispers about “Ed’s kids” but brushed them off as gossip.

Johnston, who now serves as executive director of the National Civil War Naval Museum in Columbus, recalls, “I never saw Ed do anything untoward with a minor, but yes, he was constantly surrounded by young boys.”

Kramer was arrested on August 25, 2000, two months after that year’s DragonCon. Initially denying him bond, Gwinnett Superior Court Judge Debra Turner declared Kramer a threat to the community. The indictment accused him of fondling the genitals of two brothers, then thirteen and fifteen. According to Porter, the boys’ mother told police that she and Kramer had been dating for three years but had never had sex.

Kramer’s arrest caused a stir among gamers and conventioneers. Cofounder Henry and such prominent DragonCon guests as Harlan Ellison and Anne McCaffrey offered outraged testimonials in Kramer’s defense, while Kramer’s many hangers-on took to online forums to question the honesty of his alleged victims and disparage the motives of his accusers. Those who publicly cited evidence of Kramer’s alleged guilt, like horror writer Nancy Collins, found themselves ostracized from the convention circuit.

Almost from the moment he was assigned a cell in the Gwinnett County Jail, Kramer began lodging formal grievances that would hint at the apparent strategy he’d employ for the next decade: Delay, distract, and paint himself as the true victim. For instance, the “one-size-fits-all” shoes issued by the county didn’t have adequate traction; the jailers wouldn’t switch off TV news coverage of his case, thus exposing him as an accused child molester to fellow prisoners; his medical needs—especially his psoriatic arthritis, which left him with bleeding lesions—were being ignored.

A month into his incarceration, Kramer fell and hit his head. Having undergone surgery when he was fifteen to fuse vertebrae in his neck, he now complained of pain and numbness and was given an MRI. The doctor who reviewed his scan said Kramer had suffered serious trauma and risked paralysis if he didn’t receive another spinal fusion. Eventually Judge Turner simply allowed him to schedule his own medical appointments.

On the strength of his unusual health demands, including twice-daily oatmeal baths he claimed were needed to treat his skin condition, Kramer was released on $75,000 bond in early November 2000. But he was back in jail only a few days later, after a neighbor reported seeing a teenage boy enter his house.

Within weeks, Kramer claimed that a deputy attempting to break up a food fight between inmates had assaulted him, smashing his head into a cinder block wall. In late January 2001, Judge Turner again yielded to Kramer’s complaints by granting him the first in a long series of bond modifications. Kramer would be allowed to stay under house arrest, wearing an ankle monitor, as long as he had no further contact with children under the age of sixteen.

“Ed Kramer is an incredibly difficult inmate,” Porter says. “As soon as he puts on an orange jumpsuit, he becomes an invalid. He makes it so difficult and expensive to keep him in confinement that he just wears everyone down.”

In October 2003, Kramer was reindicted to incorporate a third alleged victim. Still, the criminal case stalled, with several scheduled trial dates passing as Kramer requested delays for health reasons. He underwent a second round of spinal fusion surgery, followed by a gastric bypass procedure, and later was allowed to make trips to a New Jersey clinic for treatment and still more surgery.

Meanwhile he petitioned the court for permission to leave the house to attend certain orthodox Jewish worship services. In all, the court granted eleven separate bond modifications, Porter says, each one giving Kramer more freedom to come and go as he pleased.

“First, it’s the High Holy Days, then it’s, ‘I want to go to the synagogue every Sabbath,’” says Porter. “It became a campaign of attrition to reduce the terms of his bond. He just nickel-and-dimes you to death.”

In late 2003, Kramer was rear-ended while stopped at a train crossing. Two years later, he sued the driver, claiming the impact had resulted in pressure on his spinal cord that made breathing difficult and physical exertion unbearably painful. The lawsuit added that, sixteen months after the accident, Kramer “was being followed by no fewer than sixteen physicians and taking at least fifty-three medications.”

They included Arava and Celebrex for arthritis, hydrocodone for pain, Lexapro for depression, Lipitor for cholesterol, Metformin for diabetes, Oxsoralen-Ultra for psoriasis, Provigil for narcolepsy, Singulair for asthma, Topamax for seizures, and Zyrtec for allergies—as well as various inhalers, respirators, therapeutic cushions, and hearing aids.

In public Kramer leaned heavily on a cane or rode a mobility scooter. Much of his face was often covered with a ventilator mask to help him breathe. Yet court records suggest even Kramer was confused about how he’d gotten so injured. In an unsuccessful personal-injury lawsuit against the county jail, he downplayed the 2003 car accident. But in his suit against the driver—later settled for an undisclosed sum—he claimed that the earlier attack by a jailhouse deputy had resulted in “minor injuries.”

Even so, in 2005 Kramer succeeded in being declared eligible for Social Security disability, with federal Judge Dana McDonald retroactively granting him benefits going back to 2000. And his criminal trial was put on hold again for several months in 2006 while he traveled to Israel for ten days in a failed effort to emigrate. Porter says he agreed to the scheme after consulting with Kramer’s three accusers, who then wanted to put the case behind them.

In late 2006, six years after first being indicted, Kramer attempted to get his criminal charges dismissed by suing Porter’s office for dragging its heels in prosecuting him. Kramer accused Porter in court arguments of attempting to “banish” him, even though, Porter says, the proposed move to Israel had been Kramer’s own idea.

An appeals court, however, concluded that the majority of delays in the criminal case had been caused by the defendant: “The record strongly indicates that Kramer sought or knowingly acquiesced in the delay and that he did not want a speedy trial.”

Even without Kramer at the helm, DragonCon continued to thrive, last year celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary. Its annual costume parade along Peachtree Street, begun in the post-Kramer era, has been embraced by Atlanta as one of the city’s premier people- and creature-watching events.

Still, for many, Kramer casts an ominous shadow over the event—one that current DragonCon leaders have tried to remove. Within a few years of Kramer’s arrest, DragonCon began severing visible ties to its main founder by all but purging his name from the website and forbidding on-site collections for his legal fund. In 2009 Kramer filed the first of two lawsuits against Henry and DragonCon/ACE Inc. In the complaints, now both filed in Fulton County Superior Court, Kramer essentially accuses his former partner of looting the company by spending con funds on junkets to Las Vegas, giving himself a healthy (but unspecified) salary as CEO, and putting his wife and daughters on the payroll.

As soon as Kramer stepped down from the DragonCon board in August 2000 “to attend to a personal legal matter,” Henry deliberately underreported attendance figures, the complaint says, in an apparent effort to hide the company’s value and shortchange Kramer on annual dividends.

According to court documents, between 2004 and 2006, Henry tried to buy Kramer out—eventually offering as much as $500,000—but Kramer refused to sell without seeing a balance sheet. So Henry simply withheld Kramer’s dividend until he threatened legal action.

“It’s a classic squeeze-out,” says attorney McNeill Stokes, who represents Kramer against DragonCon. Stokes says his client eventually received dividends for 2009 and 2010—although he won’t say how much Kramer received for those or previous years—but was forced to file the second suit last year in an effort to collect his 2011 dividend of $154,000.

Henry hung up the phone when contacted for comment, and he did not return subsequent messages. But his postings on the DragonCon website place its 2011 attendance at more than 46,000—far less than the 125,000 visitors who went to Comic-Con last year, but sizable enough to rate among Atlanta’s largest conventions.

DragonCon, however, has never released revenue figures, even under Kramer’s watch. This Labor Day weekend, attendees will pay $120 in advance for admission for all four days, or between $30 and $50 for one-day passes. By all accounts, the event has always had a small payroll, instead relying on up to 2,000 volunteers, with first-timers paying $20 a head for the privilege.

By the spring of 2009, Kramer was, by most measures, a free man. The previous year, in response to his claims that medical bills and legal fees had left him destitute, Judge Karen Beyers effectively freed him to sell his house and move to Chamblee to care for his elderly, cancer-stricken mother. (Beyers followed Judge Turner, who recused herself in 2007 amid accusations of anti-Semitism from Kramer supporters—despite her being raised Jewish.)

Then, at an April 2009 hearing, Beyers placed the molestation case in limbo until Kramer’s health improved enough to withstand the rigors of trial. The court also had ordered his ankle monitor removed, a minor concession to a man who appeared to walk only with great difficulty and could scarcely breathe without the aid of machines.

Kramer had three bond conditions: Stay away from minors, no travel without authorization, and call the DA’s office every Monday to report his whereabouts. Last year Beyers even allowed Kramer to move to Brooklyn temporarily so he could be with his mother in hospice. Presumably the judge didn’t know that Kramer’s mother was already dead.

After Kramer’s arrest in Connecticut, Porter discovered that, instead of using a landline phone for his weekly call-ins, as mandated by the court, Kramer had called from a cell phone that disguised his location. And he learned that, in the months before his arrest, Kramer also had visited a film set outside Fort Knox, Kentucky, and had taken meetings with movie producers in California.

In Kentucky, Kramer put up $500 in funding toward a web series called The Brothers Barbarian and visited the set for a day in May 2011, says Larry Elmore, who was involved with the project. After hearing of his arrest in Connecticut, the producers returned Kramer’s money.

Ray Ellingsen, a founder of Moving Pictures Media Group in La Jolla, California, says he had several meetings in Los Angeles with Kramer about projects that never came to fruition. Afterward, Ellingsen had to have attorneys instruct Kramer to stop telling people he was involved with some of the company’s projects. This summer, Kramer’s Facebook page still claimed he “heads the Multimedia Rights division” for Moving Pictures Media Group. Ellingsen says his company has no such division.

More troubling to Porter than Kramer’s apparent bond violations were his alleged interactions with children. At the Milford police station following Kramer’s arrest last year, the fourteen-year-old boy told police he and Kramer had been living in Brooklyn together for two months, and that his mother had lately joined them. Asked if he’d ever been touched inappropriately, the boy told police that Kramer never “hurt him or touched him,” according to the report. When the boy’s mother arrived at the police station, she said she’d met Kramer online more than a year earlier and that he was a “nice person, a religious person” and would never hurt her son. Kramer himself, when asked by police if he’d ever touched the boy inappropriately, responded that he had not, that it would be against his religion. Police also phoned Brian Colby, of Colby Models, in New York. Colby said that two other boys who work as models were staying at Kramer’s apartment.

But it is accounts of Kramer’s unaided rambles through the Connecticut woods and the Kentucky countryside that have given Porter the ammunition he believes will finally force Kramer to trial.

Accounts of his alleged robustness have already cost Kramer his principal defense attorney. Earlier this year, veteran litigator Edwin Marger withdrew from the criminal case over Kramer’s objections. Kramer’s only attorney of record remaining on the criminal case is former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr, who did not return calls.

Says Marger, “I left Mr. Kramer because I didn’t feel I could any longer present evidence to a court that I believed in. If what has been reported in Connecticut is factual, then it appears the judge may have been misled, as was I.”

Assuming Kramer loses his extradition appeal and is finally returned to Georgia, Porter expects the judge to order a medical exam to make sure that the defendant is indeed healthy enough for a two-week trial.

While Kramer may have trouble holding on to attorneys, he still has a cohort of supporters. From the start, Kramer partisans have waged a canny public relations campaign that has involved online message board postings that attack his accusers and the Gwinnett police, articles by sympathetic reporters and bloggers, a Free Ed website filled with personal testimonials to Kramer’s innocence, and a legal defense fund—as well as the slurs against Judge Turner that were amplified by a 2004 article in Atlanta Jewish Life that portrayed Kramer as a victim of legal persecution and anti-Semitism. Kramer himself told Milford police that his Georgia arrest had “been under false pretenses” and that the alleged victims were “coerced into saying untruthful things.”

Dave Robison, who owns a T-shirt printing business in Snellville, knows Kramer through DragonCon and bonded with him through a mutual love of caving. He still believes his friend to be a victim of false accusations and political persecution. “He tried to help out young people and it turned around and bit him in the ass,” he says.

For now, Kramer occupies a cell in MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison in Suffield, Connecticut. Porter says it’s one of the only facilities in the state that’s equipped to deal with Kramer’s medical demands. “This isn’t a complicated case,” Porter says. “I have my victims, witnesses, and evidence. I’ve already prepared for trial five times.”

Even though Porter is confident he could win a guilty verdict, he worries about Kramer’s incarceration. After all, Kramer, who spent the last decade frustrating and manipulating the state’s legal system to put off his trial, could soon have a new objective: medical reprieve.

“If Ed Kramer’s convicted tomorrow and sentenced to twenty years, what’s the Georgia prison system going to do with him?” Porter says. “The chances of him serving significant time, given the costs of maintaining him, are negligible. That’s the elephant in the room and he probably knows it.”

Since Kramer’s arrest in Connecticut, Richard Dinsmore has been forced to reassess the nature of their onetime relationship. Now thirty-eight and living in Newnan, Dinsmore is married with a ten-year-old son. A few years back, Dinsmore and his wife bought lifetime passes to DragonCon, but he admits that its longtime association with Kramer gives him an “icky feeling.”

“At this point, I’m pretty much at peace with all that happened,” he says. “But I have a really hard time wondering if some kids who came after me are screwed up because I helped Ed perfect his game.”

The Best Team You've Never Seen

Tony Rehagen — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 16:43:00 GMT

The owners of the Atlanta Dream, the city’s five-year-old WNBA franchise, are wondering where everyone is. It’s seven o’clock on a Friday night in late May, thirty minutes before tip-off at the 2012 home opener. Julius Erving—Dr. J himself—is here, a guest of the team, seated front and center. So is Mayor Kasim Reed, ready to help unveil the Dream’s second straight Eastern Conference Championship banner. And then there are the fans. Or more specifically, the seats in Philips Arena’s lower bowl where the fans are supposed to be. “Atlanta sports fans,” says co-owner Kelly Loeffler, a little sarcastic, maybe a little nervous. “They show up halfway through the first quarter.”

“Probably stuck in traffic,” adds co-owner Mary Brock.

Photograph by David Walter Banks

With the Dream now deep in their fifth season, Loeffler and Brock are engaged in a quest that can only be described as quixotic: They’re trying to build a successful pro sports franchise in a city that—historically, chronically, maddeningly—can’t muster support for the big league teams it already has. Cue the litany: We’ve lost our hockey team (twice); the Braves are less likely to sell out a playoff game than a midseason series with the Yankees; and speaking of playoffs, the Hawks were a five seed last year, but during the season, total attendance barely surpassed that of the Charlotte Bobcats, who won all of seven games.

What’s to blame for this malaise, this lameness? Is it the heat? The traffic? The fact that we’re a city of transplanted Philadelphians and Chicagoans and New Yorkers? Or could it be that in forty-six years of big-time pro sports, we’ve claimed exactly one world championship? (And let’s face it, the Braves should have won two or three.)

All of this was true when Loeffler and Brock first joined the Dream’s ownership group almost two years ago. But it was also true that, thanks to prominent programs at Georgia Tech, Tennessee, and Duke, Atlanta was in the heart of women’s basketball country. It was true that, even when we didn’t have our own WNBA team, Atlanta’s ratings for the sport on national TV were among the country’s highest. And perhaps most importantly, it was true—and Lord knows, it remains true—that in an age of obscene salaries, juiced athletes, and cynical fans, the purity and passion of women’s basketball is precisely the tonic we need for what ails us.

Now if we could just get off our butts and come out for a game . . .

When the Dream came to town in 2008, at the dawn of the Great Recession, their founding owner was banking on a sport that had long dwelled in off-hour time slots on fringe cable networks, in a league in which five teams had folded in six years. Ron Terwilliger, who had made his fortune in real estate development, thought it would be fun to own another professional sports team (he had previously owned the Atlanta Attack indoor soccer team, which moved to Kansas City after just two years in the early 1990s). The WNBA was targeting middle-class and upper-middle-class black families—a strong demo here. “But I was realistic about women’s sports,” he says. “I saw it as a possibility, not a probability.” In their inaugural season, the Dream stumbled to a 4–30 record. Before the second year was over, average attendance had dropped by 15 percent and Terwilliger announced he was out as owner. The WNBA stepped in to take control of a team that had no staff, no sponsors, and no place to practice—and, according to the AJC, was losing $3 million a year. It then began the process of shipping the whole mess to Tulsa, which was hungry for its first professional sports franchise.

But despite the lousy attendance, the Dream made the playoffs in only their second year—a startling turnaround engineered by coach of the year Marynell Meadors and rookie of the year Angel McCoughtry. The league found a local owner in Kathy Betty, who ran a management consulting firm and had been a season ticket holder since day one. Along the way, the Dream made new believers out of those who came to a game, where the strength and speed and ferocity of the players, who run for the full four quarters, was a welcome contrast to their male counterparts, who seemed to dog it between dunks.

In the summer of 2010, Betty was a guest in Arthur Blank’s Georgia Dome suite for a Manchester United exhibition game. It was there she bumped into Kelly Loeffler.

Loeffler embodied the WNBA ethos. She had grown up on a farm in central Illinois, shy and pigeon-toed, braces on her legs to fix a gimpy hip, and a patch from surgery to correct a lazy left eye. At a skinny teenage five foot eleven, her nickname had been “Newborn Calf,” because she toppled over so frequently. But on the basketball court in high school, she learned coordination and gathered confidence, which carried her through a career as a business exec in male-dominated industries, first at Toyota, then on Wall Street, before she arrived in Atlanta in 2002. When she met Betty, Loeffler was vice president of investor relations and corporate communications for ICE, a multibillion-dollar online commodities exchange. She wasn’t yet forty years old.

As far as Betty was concerned, Loeffler was a perfect fit for the team, except for one small detail: Loeffler didn’t even know Atlanta had a WNBA team. “Come to a game,” Betty told her. “You might come back an owner.” Weeks later, Loeffler and her husband, ICE CEO Jeff Sprecher, were in the front row at Philips for the finals against Seattle, standing and exchanging high fives with complete strangers.

Also seated courtside were John Brock, CEO and chairman of Coca-Cola Enterprises, and his wife, Mary. Unbeknownst to Loeffler, Betty had made the same pitch to Mary, a philanthropist who sat on the Board of Advisors at Emory and who, along with her husband, gave millions to Georgia Tech for scholarships and biomedical research. At age sixty, Mary had grown up before Title IX and had not played team sports. But she saw what the league stood for and the potential of the Dream as a model for aspiring Atlanta girls.

Loeffler in particular was galvanized by the challenge of making the Dream work as a business. After all, she had built her life on risk, using proceeds from a mortgage on inherited family land to help pay for her MBA, and taking a chance on ICE when it was just two years old. Not to mention the leap of dating and eventually marrying the boss.

When Loeffler and Brock decided to join Betty as owners, the Dream were every bit as big a gamble. In three years, they had never turned a profit. Overall attendance, despite the team’s success, had declined by 25 percent. But when she looked closer and set aside comp tickets, Loeffler saw that ticket sales were actually increasing. Even when the team lowered ticket prices for the 2011 season, revenues continued to grow as total attendance ticked up for the first time in the Dream’s history. And national TV viewership on ESPN2 was also trending up, with the WNBA five years into an eight-year deal with ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2—the first-ever agreement that paid rights fees to the teams in a U.S. women’s professional sports league rather than requiring the teams to pay for coverage.

But more than the numbers, Loeffler sees and feels the change. She and Brock are courtside for every home game. (Betty gave up her ownership at the end of 2011.) Once the game starts, Loeffler is either pumping her fist and high-fiving the fans behind her, shouting encouragement to her team (“Nice look!” “Good shot!” “Stay on her, Lindsey!”), or expressing her opinions to the refs (“C’mon! Call it both ways! Un-freaking-believable!”). During time-outs, Loeffler will sit, take a sip of Sprecher’s beer—“Oh, thank God!”—and scribble ideas on the back of her ticket, like less smoke from pyrotechnics or more energetic music. At home, she’ll watch tape of the games, win or lose, taking notes that she will share with the coach. “Kelly’s worse than I am” about obsessing over games, says Coach Meadors. “She’ll text me at night, ‘You watching the replay?’ But she understands the game.”

At one of the first games in WNBA history, back in 1997, a twelve-year-old girl named Lindsey Harding sat in the sold-out Houston Compaq Center to watch the Comets take the court. The lights went down and the announcer’s voice dipped, drawing out the ooooo in Cynthia Cooper, who strutted onto the floor in her pristine uniform, pumping her open palms into the air, lifting the throng. “The showmanship,” Harding says, still in awe. “These were women acting just like the men.” She had been a promising young track star, but that day, plans changed.

Today Harding is a guard for the Dream. In some ways, she personifies not only the WNBA athlete, but how they have to think differently than the men in the NBA. Harding went to Duke, where she became the all-time assist leader, won the Naismith Award for national player of the year in 2007, and had her jersey retired. But while the NBA allows players to turn pro after only a year of college, the WNBA—or W, for short—requires its athletes to be at least twenty-two years old or four years out of high school. When Harding was announced as the number one pick of the 2007 WNBA draft, she already held a bachelor’s degree in sociology and a certificate in markets and management, along with minors in theater and women’s studies. Indeed, a full 90 percent of current WNBA players have graduated from a four-year institution, compared to 21 percent in the NBA.

Of course, the women will need those degrees more than the men will. The average annual NBA salary is now more than $5 million, and the superstars make upwards of $20 million. The men’s minimum is $490,180. Meanwhile, the salary cap for an entire WNBA team is $878,000. Though neither Harding nor the Dream will divulge her salary, as a six-year league veteran and an all-star, it’s safe to assume she makes somewhere between the WNBA average of around $72,000 and the league maximum of $105,000 (former Hawk Joe Johnson made more than $272,000 per game last year). However, unlike the NBA, the women’s league must provide its players with housing and the use of a car if they want it. So, where Hawks back-up center Zaza Pachulia lives in a $1.98 million Londonberry mansion, Harding commutes from her two-bedroom apartment in Midtown.

In the off-seasons, WNBA players cross the ocean to play, where the rivalries are more intense and the salaries higher. Harding spent her first four winters playing in Russia, Lithuania, and Turkey. In Europe and Asia, American stars can command $400,000 to $600,000 for seven months, and the megastars like L.A.’s Candace Parker or Phoenix’s Diana Taurasi will make close to $1 million.

Still, the typical overseas contract is closer to a WNBA salary, and there is more demand for taller players than for average-height guards (Harding is five foot eight). So to spare her body, Harding turned down offers from overseas and stayed in Atlanta last winter. When she wasn’t training, she suited up for publicity and outreach events. She sat in on meetings with potential sponsors, tried to absorb marketing strategy from Brock and Loeffler, and networked through the owners with other community and business leaders. In April a Dream teammate, Alison Bales, cut her basketball career short to enroll in medical school. Harding is also starting to think about life after basketball. Two years ago, she spent part of her off-season in Los Angeles, taking acting classes. She hopes to leverage her WNBA stardom into a career in motivational speaking. Or she might go back to school to get her MBA and follow in the footsteps of Loeffler, who along with Brock, has become almost as big an influence as Cynthia Cooper. “We look up to them,” says the twenty-eight-year-old. “They are women who had to fight through barriers too.”

Seat 21 of section 103, row AA in Philips Arena offers the same trip-a-referee access enjoyed by Jack Nicholson in L.A. and Spike Lee in New York, close enough to feel the breeze as the players thunder past. For the Dream’s seventeen home games each year, seat 21 is occupied by Christine Hunsaker. Well, at least the vicinity.

“C’mon, girls!” shouts Hunsaker through a rolled-up roster card as she paces the sideline. “Let’s go, Dream!” By halftime she will have lost most of her voice.

Hunsaker has been courtside for almost every season of the WNBA’s existence. When the league was founded in 1997, she was head of cremation services for an international funeral company in Houston. She held season tickets for the Comets and was at the same game where Harding found her calling. Too slow to play even in high school, Hunsaker had been a lifelong fan of women’s basketball, particularly the fast-break-and-press style popularized by legendary University of Tennessee coach Pat Summitt. But even Hunsaker was surprised by the speed and relentlessness of the professionals. Led by the “Big Three”—Sheryl Swoopes, Cynthia Cooper, and Tina Thompson—the Comets were especially impressive, winning the first four league championships.

In those days, a WNBA game averaged more than 10,000 fans. But by the time Hunsaker was transferred to Atlanta in 2000, the novelty of the new league, founded in the afterglow of America’s gold medal in the sport in the 1996 Olympics, had started to wear off. Attendance now averaged around 7,000. With no team yet in Atlanta, Hunsaker held on to her seats in Houston, cashing in her business airline miles as often as she could to catch a game in person. The team folded in 2008, the same year the Dream formed.

She was on the floor for every air ball of the dismal 4–30 campaign, a season that still drew 8,400 fans per game. Yet as she watched the Dream reverse their performance, the seats around her steadily emptied. Last year average attendance was less than 6,500—third to last in the league.

Like Loeffler, she is not shy about giving the refs an earful. When an Atlanta player crashes to the floor, shaking the hardwood, Hunsaker pauses to listen for a whistle that never sounds. “Hey, ref!” she hollers. “Where’s the foul?!” Two weeks ago, she accosted a referee by her first name and was almost ejected from the arena. This time, as the official jogs by, Hunsaker reluctantly takes her seat.

Moments later, Dream guard Tiffany Hayes intercepts a pass, dribbling the length of the court. Hunsaker is back on her feet. The five-foot-ten guard pulls up, then drives into the opposing frontcourt, a wall of defenders before her. The rookie is thrown to the floor. Her teammates pick her up and pat her backside as Hunsaker applauds. “My seventy-eight-year-old father sat here in awe of how hard they play,” she says. “After the game, he told me, ‘That’s the most fun I’ve had. Those ladies could teach the NBA a thing or two. The guys just lay on each other for three quarters.’ If Atlanta just came to one game, they’d be hooked.”

The Dream give away as many as 600 tickets per game, most to youth organizations and sponsors, like Coca-Cola. First Game on Us is a program through which any toe-dipper can go to the Dream website and request up to four free tickets. Ten dollars will reserve the cheapest seat, still on the second level (the top of the bowl is curtained off for WNBA games to pack the fans and help muffle the echo). Season ticket holders get two free tickets per paid seat. And for $105 per game, Hunsaker gets to chide officials, glad-hand the owners, and even meet visiting league president Laurel Richie, who hugged the superfan before tonight’s game and told her, “You are the power behind the WNBA.”

There’s a scrum for a loose ball, and a Dream player is again on the ground. This time Hunsaker looks past the ref toward the opposing player she deems responsible, DeLisha Milton-Jones.

“C’mon, DeLisha!”

The six-foot-one, 185-pound forward puts her hands on her hips and turns to Hunsaker. “Relax,” she says.

The Griffin High School Lady Bears are clustered together on the bleachers in their matching Dream T-shirts—a patch of white cloth in a multicolored quilt of a hundred other fans who’ve come to the school gym to watch the pros dribble and shoot on their hometown hardwood.

Take the Show on the Road is a program started by the Dream two years ago, in which the team buses to schools outside the city and charges $15 to $25 for admission to the open practice, the subsequent autograph and photo session, and a ticket to a game of their choice—with $5 of every ticket going back to support the school’s athletic program.

Today, as the women run drills, Harding is sidelined, working with the trainer on her injured right foot. McCoughtry, currently the league’s leading scorer, is watching courtside with her sore knee mummified in tape. Perhaps that’s why the Lady Bears are having so much trouble paying attention, visiting with one another, glued to their smartphones. All except one.

Xandria Hosely is a senior. She’s been playing basketball year-round since she was in third grade. Always a fan of the NBA and the Miami Heat, she had never heard of the Dream before her coach took her team to Atlanta for a game last season. Since then, Hosely’s been hooked. Her mom bought her two season tickets for this year, and the seventeen-year-old drives herself and a friend twenty-four miles north to Philips, where they catch the action from section 112. Hosely’s favorite player is her Dream counterpart, center Aneika Henry. Today Hosely watches the muscular, six-foot-three Henry practice her turnaround jumper. The teen heard that Henry can dunk (she can), and she hopes to finally see it. “I want to be a center in the WNBA,” Hosely says.

At five foot seven, being a frontcourt player in college is a stretch. But Hosely’s coach, Veronica Lee, says that the girl has the drive and determination to make it—no matter what she aspires to. Ever since her team came back from their Philips Arena field trip last year, Lee says that Hosely has been the one showing the extra work to emulate the moves and intensity of the professionals. With Hosely’s good grades, she has the work ethic to succeed, says Lee. Studies show that 66 percent of black female student athletes graduate college, compared to 46 percent of those who don’t participate in athletics. And 82 percent of all female executives played organized sports after elementary school.

As the minutes expire, the Lady Bears scatter, many headed for the concession stand or off somewhere to socialize. Bit by bit, the cluster disintegrates until Hosely is the only white shirt left, elbows on her knees, hands cupping her chin, fixated with the Dream on the court mere feet in front of her.

Friday night in mid-June at Philips Arena. To this point in the season, the Dream have struggled to find momentum on the court, middling around .500, and tonight the one-loss Sparks are visiting from Los Angeles.

Wherever they travel, their superstar, Candace Parker, always attracts a few extra L.A. jerseys to the home crowd. In the South, she draws a few more in the blazing orange of her alma mater Tennessee Volunteers. But judging by the din punctuating each Dream score, the Atlanta faithful appear to have shown up to defend their turf.

And the team responds. Led by Harding’s relentless defense and agile passing and McCoughtry’s tenacity to the basket, the Dream jump out to an early nineteen-point lead and never look back. On the front row, Loeffler is on her feet, animated as ever, energized by every steal and fast-break layup. Midway through the second half, the scoreboard above center court flashes the attendance: 8,872. The crowd erupts in raucous self-congratulation.

The night will be an anomaly. After cruising to a statement 92–59 win over the Sparks, the Dream will continue to grope for consistency, not helped by nagging injuries to both Harding and McCoughtry. The number 8,872 will also be an outlier. Despite ownership’s early projections that 2012 ticket sales and sponsorship dollars would be up by more than 10 percent from 2010, before the season breaks for four weeks in mid-July due to the Olympics, the Dream’s average attendance will come to 5,966—lower than any season prior.

But for tonight, with the scrubs subbed in to dribble away the final minutes of a decisive upset, Loeffler can clap and spin to hear the roar and see the broad strokes of powder blue and red in the stands, and she can imagine what might be.

Where It All Went Wrong

Doug Monroe — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 18:44:00 GMT

Like ghosts rising out of a Confederate cemetery, Atlanta’s past lapses in judgment haunt the region today, leaving a smoky trail of suburban decay, declining home values, clogged highways, and a vastly diminished reputation.

At the heart of the rot eating at metro Atlanta is the Mother of All Mistakes: the failure to extend MARTA into the suburbs. It wasn’t just a one-time blunder—it was the single worst mistake in a whole cluster bomb of missteps, errors, power plays, and just plain meanness that created the region’s transportation infrastructure.

As we look at the future of Atlanta, there’s no question that battling our notorious traffic and sprawl is key to the metro area’s potential vitality. What if there were a Back to the Future–type option, where we could take a mystical DeLorean (heck, we’d settle for a Buick), ride back in time, and fix something? What event would benefit most from the use of a hypothetical “undo” key?

The transit compromise of 1971.

Before we get into the story of what happened in 1971, we need to back up a few years. In 1965 the Georgia General Assembly voted to create MARTA, the mass transit system for the City of Atlanta and the five core metro counties: Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton, and Gwinnett. Cobb voters rejected MARTA, while it got approval from the city and the four other counties. Although, as it turned out, the state never contributed any dedicated funds for MARTA’s operations, in 1966 Georgia voters approved a constitutional amendment to permit the state to fund 10 percent of the total cost of a rapid rail system in Atlanta. Two years later, in 1968, voters in Atlanta and MARTA’s core counties rejected a plan to finance MARTA through property taxes. In 1971—when the issue was presented to voters again—Clayton and Gwinnett voters dropped their support, and MARTA ended up being backed by only DeKalb, Fulton, and the City of Atlanta.

In 1971, given the lack of support for MARTA by the five core counties, then Mayor Sam Massell came back with a new plan: to provide an ongoing subsidy for MARTA through a sales tax levied in Fulton, DeKalb, and the City of Atlanta. No other jurisdiction in Georgia had a local option sales tax, so the General Assembly had to approve the idea. When the notoriously anti-Atlanta legislators gave the go-ahead, Massell called a press conference that featured a flatbed truck pulling up in front of city hall, facing the Capitol, with a large billboard that said, “Thank You, Georgia Lawmakers!” Massell then dug a hole in the city hall lawn and buried a hatchet to symbolize his appreciation for the state’s rare support of the city.

In a promotional stunt worthy of Mad Men, Massell sent a bevy of young women to the Capitol in pink hot pants with little keys to the city, a proclamation expressing the city’s gratitude, and invitations to city hall for a lunch featuring fried chicken (for Lieutenant Governor Lester Maddox), peanuts (for Governor Jimmy Carter), and, of course, Coca-Cola. “We got a four-column picture—the biggest exposure we ever got from the Atlanta newspapers,” recalls Massell, now president of the Buckhead Coalition.

After getting the legislative approval for the sales-tax option, Massell had to persuade voters to pass the sales tax. “We were going to buy the existing bus company, which was then charging sixty cents and a nickel transfer each way—$1.30 a day—and they were about to go out of business. I promised the community we would drop that fare to fifteen cents each way immediately,” Massell says. The daily fare would plunge from $1.30 to thirty cents. Not everyone believed him. City Councilman Henry Dodson cruised the city in a Volkswagen with a PA system that blared, “It’s a trick! If they can’t do it for sixty cents, how are they going to do it for fifteen?”

Massell countered the VW with higher visibility, chartering a helicopter to hover over the Downtown Connector, congested even then, while he called through a bullhorn, “If you want out of this mess, vote yes!”

“This being the Bible Belt, they thought God was telling them what to do,” Massell quips today. Still, to make sure Atlantans voted his way, he rode buses throughout the city, passing out brochures to riders, and he visited community groups with a blackboard and chalk to do the math on the sales tax. Voters approved the plan by just a few hundred votes.

Another of the blunders that crippled MARTA at the outset—and haunts it to this day—was engineered behind closed doors by the segregationist Lester Maddox, according to Massell, who believes Maddox’s intervention was even more devastating than the vote not to extend MARTA into the suburbs.

After the Georgia House of Representatives approved funding MARTA through the sales tax, Massell had to approach the Georgia State Senate, where Maddox held sway. Maddox told the mayor he would block the vote in the senate unless MARTA agreed that no more than 50 percent of the sales tax revenue would go to operating costs, Massell recalls. “He called me into his office and told me that was it. Either I swallowed that or he was going to kill it and it would not pass.”

That has meant that whenever MARTA needed more money for operating expenses, it had to cut elsewhere or raise fares. As a result, MARTA has raised the fare over the years to today’s $2.50, making it one of the priciest transit systems in the country.

Although the 50 percent limit has resulted in higher fares, few people realized the ramifications of the so-called “Maddox amendment” at the time, Massell says. In fact, it actually was viewed favorably by DeKalb legislators because they were afraid MARTA would spend all its money in Atlanta before extending rail service to DeKalb, according to a thirty-six-page history of MARTA written by former State Treasurer Thomas D. Hills.

Hills’s MARTA history also illuminates why the state never contributed funds for MARTA, despite that 1966 vote that would have allowed it to. One early plan was for the MARTA sales tax to be three-quarters of a penny, with the state chipping in up to 10 percent of the cost of the system as approved by Georgia voters. But early in his administration, according to Hills’s history, then Governor Carter called MARTA attorney Stell Huie—who was on a quail-hunting trip—and said the state couldn’t afford its $25 million share for MARTA. Carter offered to raise the sales tax to a full penny if the state didn’t have to pay, and Huie agreed. The lawyer said the 1 percent sales tax plan came out of the House Committee on Ways and Means and “there was a tag end, not even part of the act, that just said the state won’t put any money in.”

Hills wrote that the events help to “explain why some representatives of state government and others in the community understand that the state’s support in allowing the local option sales tax for MARTA was a bargain in exchange for a reprieve for the state from future funding for MARTA.”

The 1965 and 1971 votes against MARTA by residents of Cobb, Clayton, and Gwinnett weren’t votes about transportation. They were referendums on race. Specifically, they were believed to be about keeping the races apart. Consider the suburbanites voting back then. The formerly rural, outlying counties had exploded with an astonishing exodus of white people fleeing the city as the black population swelled during the civil rights era. This mass migration came at a time when Atlanta was known through its public relations bluster as “The City Too Busy to Hate.”

The 1960 census counted approximately 300,000 white residents in Atlanta. From 1960 to 1980, around 160,000 whites left the city—Atlanta’s white population was cut in half over two decades, says Kevin M. Kruse, the Princeton professor who wrote White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. Kruse notes that skeptics suggested Atlanta’s slogan should have been “The City Too Busy Moving to Hate.” “Racial concerns trumped everything else,” Kruse says. “The more you think about it, Atlanta’s transportation infrastructure was designed as much to keep people apart as to bring people together.”

In the early 1970s, Morehouse College professor Abraham Davis observed, “The real problem is that whites have created a transportation problem for themselves by moving farther away from the central city rather than living in an integrated neighborhood.”

The votes against MARTA were not the only evidence of the role of race in Atlanta’s transportation plans. The interstate highways were designed to gouge their way through black neighborhoods. Georgia Tech history professor Ronald H. Bayor, author of Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta, says the failure of the 1971 MARTA referendum in Gwinnett and Clayton was the beginning of the region’s transportation problems because of the lack of mass transit in the suburbs. Yet his research goes back to the racial reckoning behind the route of the interstate highway system that began construction in the 1950s.

The highway now called the Downtown Connector, the stretch where I-75 and I-85 run conjoined through the city, gutted black neighborhoods by forcing the removal of many working-class blacks from the central business district. It could have been worse. The highway was first designed to run smack through the headquarters of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, the city’s major black-owned business. “The original intention was to destroy that black business,” Bayor says. A protest by the black community saved the structure and moved the highway route a few blocks east, where it still managed to cut through the black community’s main street, Auburn Avenue.

Interstate 20 on the west side of town is a particularly egregious example of race-based road-building. Bayor wrote: “In a 1960 report on the transitional westside neighborhood of Adamsville . . . the Atlanta Bureau of Planning noted that ‘approximately two to three years ago, there was an “understanding” that the proposed route of the West Expressway [I-20 West] would be the boundary between the white and Negro communities.’”

The strategy didn’t work, of course, as whites fled by the tens of thousands. One of the unintended consequences of the race-based road-building is today’s traffic jams. “What happened didn’t change the racial makeup of the metro area but led to congestion within the metro area,” Bayor says.

Aside from political vengeance and racial politics, another enormous factor was at play in transportation policies of the 1960s and 1970s: Atlanta’s love affair with the automobile. The great migration out of the city started in the late 1950s—just as workers at General Motors’ vast Lakewood assembly plant in southeast Atlanta put the finishing touches on one of the most iconic cars in history: the 1957 Chevy.

The allure of roaring around Atlanta in cool cars took over and never let go. Once MARTA started running, who would ride a bus or subway when they could drive a sleek, powerful car and fill it with cheap gas? Only the people who couldn’t afford the car. MARTA became an isolated castaway, used primarily by poor and working-class blacks. Racist suburbanites brayed that the system’s acronym stood for “Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta.”

While MARTA was struggling to crank up the bus and rail system, the State of Georgia and its powerful highway department had other, bigger ideas.

David Goldberg, a former transportation reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, says the road-building binge that led to the gigantic highways that course through metro Atlanta—some of the widest in the world—diminished MARTA’s potential. “It’s not a single mistake but a bunch of decisions that add up to one big mistake—the failure to capitalize on the incredible success we had in winning funding for MARTA by undermining it with the incredible success we had in getting funding for the interstate highways,” says Goldberg, now communications director for Washington-based Transportation for America. “We were too damn successful—it was an embarrassment of success. Like a lot of nouveau riche, we blew it before we knew what to do with it.”

As metro Atlanta’s geographic expansion grew white-hot, developers had to move homebuyers—those fleeing the city and others moving South from the Rust Belt—in and out of the new subdivisions they were carving from the pine forests and red clay. Georgia started “building highways expressly to enrich developers,” Goldberg says. “A whole lot of land owners and developers who knew how to do suburban development had the ear of state government and the money to buy influence. They took all that money we had and put it into developing interchanges way out from town. A lot of what was new suburban development back then is now underused, decaying, and part of an eroding tax base in the older suburban areas.”

The vast highway system sucked up billions of federal dollars while the state refused to put a penny into MARTA—until the past fifteen years, during which it helped buy some buses. “The sick joke of it all is that we built the place to be auto-oriented and designed it about as bad as we could to function for auto use,” Goldberg says. “The highway network we did build was designed in a way almost guaranteed to produce congestion—the land use around all that development put the nail in the coffin.” He refers to the neighborhoods full of cul-de-sacs that force cars onto crowded arterial roads lined with commercial activity, then force them to merge onto the freeways, which eventually funnel down to one highway through the heart of Atlanta.

More than forty years later, what does the failure to create MARTA as a regional system mean for Atlanta? Christopher B. Leinberger, a senior fellow of the Brookings Institution and professor at George Washington University, has been watching Atlanta’s growth—and decline—for decades. In January he declared, “Atlanta is no longer Hotlanta.” He cited the free fall from the number eighty-ninespot on the list of the world’s 200 fastest-growing metro areas to ranking at 189 in just five years. Not to mention the plunge of 29 percent in average housing price per square foot between 2000 and 2010. Not to mention that Atlanta has the eleventh-most-congested traffic of 101 metro areas in the country.

“The big mistake was not taking advantage of MARTA,” Leinberger says. “Atlanta was given by the federal taxpayers a tremendous gift that they squandered as far as MARTA. It’s not just that Atlanta did not take advantage of it. They didn’t expand it and they didn’t recognize that it could allow them to build a balanced way of developing.”

Leinberger agrees that part of the region’s blindness toward MARTA’s potential was the belief “that the car was the be-all and end-all forever. The other part was the basic racism that still molds how Atlanta is built.”

The most maddening realization is that the once virtually all-white suburbs that voted against MARTA years ago are today quite diverse and reflect Atlanta’s evolution from a biracial city to a multiracial, multiethnic one. Today’s suburbs are not only home to African Americans, but also Latino, Asian, and Eastern European immigrants. The city’s diversity is projected to increase over the coming decades (see page 68). Many of the people who voted against MARTA decades ago are dead or retired. The suburban lifestyle they were so eager to defend has lost much of its cachet as gas prices soar and houses don’t sell. Smart young people up to their necks in college debt don’t want to spend their money and time driving cars back and forth; they want to live in town. Atlanta’s only neighborhoods to gain inflation-adjusted housing value in the past decade, Leinberger notes, were Virginia-Highland, Grant Park, and East Lake.

The Georgia Sierra Club’s opposition to the July 31 referendum on a regional transportation sales tax—on the grounds that the plan, despite including a majority for transit, was a sprawl-inducing road expansion—troubled Leinberger. “That’s a dangerous strategy. From what everybody tells me, this is a one-off.” He says the state legislature has traditionally treated Atlanta like a child, and is saying, “Finally, one time only, children, are we going to let you decide for yourself. This is it.”

The July 31 vote is “an Olympic moment,” he says. “If the vote fails, you have to accept the fact that Atlanta will continue to decline as a metro area.” Forty years from now, will we look back at failure to pass the referendum as a mistake as devastating as the 1971 MARTA compromise?

Atlanta faces a classic problem. It boomed in the go-go decades at the end of the twentieth century when everyone zoomed alone in their cars from home to office to store. Now it must move beyond what worked in the past to a new era that demands a new way of building, with up to 70 percent of new development oriented around transit, Leinberger says. “Atlanta has a lot of catching up to do, but it’s hard for old dogs to learn new tricks.”

The never-ending ramifications of a race-based transportation infrastructure, built to accommodate a suburban driving lifestyle that has started to die off in a state that has traditionally refused to embrace mass transit, could doom Atlanta to a future as a newer, sunnier Detroit.

“It only takes a generation-plus of yinning when you should have yanged to wake up and say, ‘Oh my God! How did it happen?’” says outgoing MARTA General Manager Beverly A. Scott, who watched from afar the decline of her hometown, Cleveland.

Atlanta’s failure to build out MARTA looks even more shameful when compared with what happened with similar transit systems in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., which started at the same time as MARTA, she says. “The reality is, this region got stuck. We have about half the build-out of what it was planned to be.” But San Francisco and Washington “kept building and moving . . . they had plans regardless of whether folks were red or blue. They had a vision and the fortitude to make purple and keep moving. We just got stuck.”

MARTA was born out of Atlanta’s giant ego in the days when the city was entering the major leagues across the board—baseball, football, international airport—bolstered by a racially harmonious reputation unmatched in the South, deserved or not. “You said to yourself, ‘We’re top-notch. Everybody’s got to have a rail system,’” Scott says. “But it was built as a manifestation of ‘we have arrived’ without a bigger vision of ‘what do we want to do for our region?’ You built it like a trophy.” Indeed, some of the Downtown MARTA stations were built on a scale that would please a pharaoh.

Yet Scott says she is no doomsayer. During her tenure at MARTA, she has seen marked progress in forging the civic-
political infrastructure necessary to build an integrated transportation network. Her concern is that the region is at a critically urgent juncture in the process and can’t afford to lose focus or momentum.“There’s still much work to be done,” she says.

Word about Atlanta’s transportation muddle has gotten around. Scott says she’s been privy to meetings during which corporate relocation experts tell Chamber of Commerce members: “Hey, Atlanta is not only not at the top tier anymore, we’ve got companies saying, ‘Don’t put the Atlanta region on the list.’” It’s not just the congestion and pollution—“they’re not seeing leadership or plans to get yourself out of the fix.”

Atlanta’s leaderless transportation fix is the ultimate example of the admonition, “Be careful what you pray for.”

“This is the irony: The majority of whites in Atlanta wanted to be isolated when they thought about public transportation,” says historian Kevin Kruse. “As a result, they have been in their cars on 75 and 85. They got what they wanted. They are safe in their own space. They’re just not moving anywhere.”

The 1818 Survey Snafu That Keeps Atlanta Thirsty
Surveyors in 1818 goofed when marking the border between Georgia and Tennessee. At least that’s Georgia’s story, and we’re sticking with it. Legislators still quarrel over the alleged historical cartography blooper that left all of the Tennessee River within Tennessee. Georgia claims surveyors set the boundary line too far south by more than a mile and should have included a sliver of the mighty river within our borders. During recent severe droughts, Georgia thirsted to stick a pipe into the Tennessee and route water to Atlanta, which now draws all its H2O from Lake Lanier and the Chattahoochee River, whose water is also lusted after by Alabama and Florida. Another mistake is our failure to build additional reservoirs —just being addressed now.

The “Grow No More” Edict of 1953
The city of Atlanta hasn’t extended its boundaries in the last sixty years, while the population and landmass of the surrounding counties has exploded. The last time Atlanta expanded its limits was 1952, when it took in Buckhead and went north—almost to Sandy Springs. Timothy Crimmins, who directs the Center for Neighborhood and Metropolitan Studies at Georgia State University, thinks Atlanta’s biggest mistake—bigger than the MARTA compromises—was a 1953 decision by the state supreme court that declared unconstitutional an effort by the local legislative delegation to annex additional parts of Fulton County. The court said only the General Assembly could expand city limits—and the referendum sought to preempt that power. It was a critical opportunity that would have set up a central government that could grow with our expanding population instead of the proliferation of regional governments.

The last major effort at annexation was Sam Massell’s “Two Cities” plan of the early 1970s, which called for Atlanta to annex unincorporated Fulton County north of the city, and College Park to annex unincorporated Fulton to the south. The plan passed in the House of Representatives and was set to pass in the Senate, but it was killed by Lester Maddox. Ironically, segregationist Maddox stopped annexation that would have returned Atlanta to a majority-white city. Adjusting racial allotments “was not the motivation” for the plan, Massell says. What he was after was a city with a greater population, and thus greater power. Crimmins says Maddox killed the bill at the request of black leaders and the City of East Point.

Our Sewer Woes—Dating Back to Reconstruction
In the years after the Civil War, Atlanta built a two-pipe sewer system: a separate but integrated network of pipes that collects sewage and storm water. During downpours, rainwater forced raw sewage into the Chattahoochee. As the population grew, the pollution became grotesque. In 2001 the city agreed to federal and state demands to fix the problem with giant underground tunnels to store the overflow and then send it for treatment. The Clean Water Atlanta program has cost $1.6 billion so far and will cost another $450 million over the next thirteen years. This is why Atlantans have among the nation’s highest water-sewer bills. The situation in the suburbs may be worse because so much wastewater treatment is the responsibility of private homeowners with septic tanks. “The pollution potential for that is gargantuan,” Crimmins says.

Anchor Woman

Richard L. Eldredge — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Monica Kaufman had just turned off the I-85 South exit for Newnan when the blue lights flashed in her rearview mirror. It was the fall of 1975, and the twenty-seven-year-old University of Louisville graduate was just months into her new position at WSB-TV. She had beat out a couple of women named Jane Pauley and Oprah Winfrey for the job. Riding shotgun was future NBC producer Patrice Fletcher, consulting a AAA map book on her lap. The two Georgia newcomers were on their way to a church speaking engagement.

Illustration by Stanley Chow

As the tall Georgia State Patrol officer approached, Kaufman—seated low in her baby-blue Porsche 914 convertible—was eye level with his service revolver and the hand positioned deliberately upon it. He ordered her out of the vehicle. "He looked like something straight out of Smokey and the Bandit," she recalls thirty-seven years later. "He saw a black woman and a white woman in a Porsche, and the black woman was driving. You could almost hear him thinking, 'What are they doing here? Is that Porsche even hers?'"

For a woman who had attended integrated schools in Louisville since the third grade, it was one of the scariest moments of her life. As Kaufman fumbled for her license and registration, she saw her passenger fuming. Kaufman shot Fletcher a look that said, "We are not in Chicago or Philadelphia right now. Hold it." After the trooper discovered he had just pulled over the brand-new six o’clock news anchor, he let the ladies off with a warning to "slow down." Kaufman, who had been clocked doing 52 in a 55, complied.

As Monica Jones Kaufman Pearson (the anchor changed her professional name following her 2005 marriage to police officer John Pearson Sr.), sixty-four, exits the WSB-TV airwaves this month—thirty-seven years, thirty Emmys, and more than 15,000 hours of television later—she is the city’s most recognizable media figure. "There is no king in Atlanta TV news," says longtime coanchor Wes Sarginson. "Only a queen. And our queen is Monica." Pearson’s debut on the six o’clock Action News in 1975 literally changed the face of Atlanta television. She has interviewed presidents and witnessed history, but Pearson’s biggest story remains her own.

In the summer of '75, when the South’s largest TV station called Pearson at WHAS-TV in Louisville to ask if she would consider coming for a job interview, Pearson had no idea that Channel 2 was seeking a minority hire for its prime newscast. WSB-TV station manager Don Elliot Heald was a white, progressive Southern transplant from Concord, Massachusetts, who was determined that WSB reflect the city it served. He had hired Lo Jelks as the station’s first African American reporter in the late 1960s. In 1973 he put Jocelyn Dorsey on air at noon as the station’s first African American female anchor. One of her initial reporting assignments was to cover white supremacist J.B. Stoner announcing his run for lieutenant governor at the Biltmore hotel. "When I walked in, the first thing I heard was 'Kill the nigger!'" Dorsey recalls. Dorsey knew she wasn’t in the running for the six o’clock job. "I was pretty rowdy and militant back then," she says. "I was too busy fighting with management about my afro."

"I didn’t know it, but I was the next step," says Pearson. "In 1975 there were no women and no people of color on the six o’clock. Don Elliot Heald was a Southern gentleman, but he was also a steel magnolia. WSB management stuck it out when they could have cut their losses. I put a lot of pressure on myself. I knew if I failed, it would be a long time before another woman of color had a shot at this."

Photograph Courtesy of WSB-TV: Wood Grain: Istockphoto

Southern Christian Leadership Conference cofounder and fellow Atlantan Dr. Joseph Lowery recalls seeing Pearson on his TV for the first time in 1975. "Monica was coming into the living rooms of white folks every night at a time when most white folks only encountered us as their waiters and maids," Lowery says. "And she was coming into their living rooms as an equal. More than an equal. She was a star. And they had to pay attention to her too, because she was telling them the news of the day. It was a tremendous turning point."

Not all white viewers welcomed Pearson into their living rooms. When she signed off the air, her phone routinely rang with viewer feedback like "Nigger, get off the air," and "Put a bone in your nose and go back to Africa." Pearson also caught hell from African American viewers. "I wasn’t black enough for them," she says. "They wanted me in an Angela Davis afro and a dashiki."

On set, luck landed Pearson next to John Pruitt, who had launched his career covering the civil rights movement, sometimes doing his own camera work. In an era when white male Ron Burgundys roamed the nation’s newsrooms, Pruitt welcomed diversity. "If Monica succeeded, we all succeeded," he says.

In 1978 Pruitt was lured away to WXIA-TV 11Alive. Ironically, Pearson says, it was one of the best things that ever happened to her career. "I was so in awe of John, I was trying to be him on-air," she says. "Suddenly John left, I was the senior anchor, and I needed to find me." WSB sent Pearson to news consultant Dick Mallory, who asked her to read a news story first, then just tell him the same story. "I didn’t know he was taping me," she says. "He played [both versions] back and asked me, 'Which reporter do you trust? Trust yourself. Let your personality come through. Viewers don’t like a phony. Stop trying to be John Pruitt.'" Pearson took Mallory’s advice and introduced a more conversational tone, casual asides, and even a few chuckles into the buttoned-up, Walter Cronkite–era news desk. Dorsey says, "I remember standing there with my jaw hanging open, thinking, 'Oh Lord, what is she doing?' But Monica knew exactly what she was doing."

Pearson met her next coanchor, Sarginson, in 1978. With the slickness of a polyester leisure suit, WSB-TV’s new hire from Detroit greeted Pearson early on by sticking out his hand and saying, "Hi, I’m Wes Sarginson. Wanna see my d--k?" Without missing a beat, Pearson shook Sarginson’s hand, smiled, and replied, "No thanks. I’m not interested in small parts." Thirty-four years later, Pearson laughs at the incident. "Most women would be shocked," she explains. "I’m not most women. I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, in Smoketown. My grandmother sold beer and wine on Sundays. Her name was Bow Leg Rose, and she could fight like a man. I had an aunt who killed a man. I don’t exactly come from good stock. Strong women, but not good stock. My mother is the first sane one. When you grow up in a neighborhood full of rough boys and you’re a tomboy, nothing bothers you. Wes and I became friends immediately."

"Monica’s response stopped me from ever saying that again," Sarginson recalls laughing. "Newsrooms in those days were pretty graphic and gross."

In 1987 Action News reporter Bill Nigut went out to cover a civil rights march in Forsyth County led by then Atlanta city councilman Hosea Williams. An estimated 20,000 racially mixed marchers faced down members of the Ku Klux Klan. Spotting Nigut’s WSB-TV microphone, one of the robed Klansmen excitedly ran up to him with a message for one of Nigut’s coworkers: "Tell Monica I love her! Tell her I said hello!" "I stood there stunned," Nigut recalls.

"When Bill came back and told me that story, I realized I had truly made it," Pearson says. "It’s like my mother has always told me, 'When people get to know you, they don’t fear you.'"

Monica's Headliners

As Pearson readied for July 25, her final day on-air at WSB-TV, and prepared to begin a graduate degree in telecommunications at the University of Georgia, the anchor took time to select for us the stories that have had the most impact on her own life.

June 21, 1981
The Arrest of Wayne Williams
From 1979 to 1981, nearly thirty African American children and young adults were murdered throughout the city. In the winter of 1981, with the story making national headlines, Mayor Maynard Jackson ordered a 7 p.m. curfew for the city’s minors. With an intense stare and flanked by a pair of uniformed cops, Jackson posed with a stack of $10,000 in reward cash. The theatrical AJC photo op was picked up by newspapers across the country. Nightly Pearson and Sarginson opened their late newscast with, “It’s eleven o’clock. Do you know where your children are?”

“It was a story that held the entire community in its grips,” Pearson recalls. “Any person who had a son, whether that son was black or white, felt that pain of losing a child. I can still see Maynard sitting there with that mountain of cash.” When twenty-seven-year-old Nathaniel Cater’s body was pulled from the Chattahoochee River on May 24, 1981, and WSB ran graphic footage of the recovery, Pearson and her coworkers balked. “It was gory, insensitive, and thoughtless,” she recalls. “Some in the newsroom thought it was okay for competitive reasons. I just asked, ‘If that was your relative, would you react that way?’ We had crossed the line.”

Action News scooped the competition when suspect Wayne Williams was taken into custody. Williams himself, a freelance photographer whose clients included WSB-TV, had called Action News reporter Marc Pickard to tip him that Atlanta police and the FBI had entered his parents’ northwest Atlanta brick home. “Williams had this crazy idea that he was part of our team, so he called Pickard when the cops showed up,” recalls Sarginson. “The guy had an ego that was just unbelievable. He thought because he knew us that we were his friends. But we weren’t complaining that night because we had the exclusive.” Remembers Pearson, “Of course, we were excited to get the interview, but there was this undertone of ‘If Wayne Williams is guilty, did he do any of this on our time?’”

September 18, 1990
Winning the Olympics, Tokyo, Japan
Sleep-deprived and anxious off-camera, Pearson and crew covered the Atlanta Organizing Committee—including Andrew Young, Billy Payne, Mayor Maynard Jackson, and Governor Joe Frank Harris—on their visit to Japan, until the Atlanta dignitaries clustered into the packed Grand Prince Hotel New Takanawa for the announcement. In oversized plastic-framed glasses and a shoulder pad–enhanced red blazer with brass buttons, Pearson opened her early-morning report with a shot of the sun peeking over the horizon: “In the Land of the Rising Sun, the sun rose on the final day of hope for the Atlanta Organizing Committee . . . ” In his interview with Pearson, Young appeared ready to accept Atlanta’s fate. “We said everything that was in our hearts,” he told Atlantans back home. “I hope that was enough.” It was.

“To [hear IOC president] Juan Antonio Samaranch say the words, [imitating Samaranch’s Spanish accent] ‘The International Olympic Committee has awarded the 1996 Olympic Games to the city of . . . Atlanta!’ was one of the most exciting moments I’ve ever had in this job,” says Pearson. As Samaranch paused a full fifteen seconds, an entire city held its breath, clutching coffee mugs, staring at the early-morning live Channel 2 coverage. Afterward, Jackson rubbed his hands through his hair as if he were still trying to work the information into his brain, while Young clasped his hands prayerfully over his nose and mouth to utter a brief thank-you to the Almighty. After a quick high five with producer Mark Engel, Pearson went to work.

February 1992
Gender Bias in the Georgia High School Association
One afternoon after soccer practice, Atlanta trial lawyer Charles Huddleston, Pearson’s twelve-year-old daughter Claire’s soccer coach, pulled Pearson aside to discuss the lack of girls college scholarship opportunities due to the antiquated practices of the all-male governing Georgia High School Association. In addition to having no statewide competitions for girls soccer and cheerleading, making it nearly impossible for participants to receive scholarships, the GHSA had never had a woman on its board in its eighty-seven-year history. After her two-part special assignment, “Fair or Foul?,” girls soccer and cheerleading qualified for statewide competition, and two women became GHSA board members.

Recalls Huddleston: “The GHSA was a good old boys club headquartered in Thomasville, Georgia. It was allowed to fly under the radar for years without media scrutiny until Monica showed up down there with her lights and cameras. They were so intimidated, they voted two women onto the board that night while she was in the room with the cameras rolling. Hundreds, if not thousands, of girls in this state have now had shots at scholarships they might not have gotten for another fifteen or twenty years if the GHSA had been allowed to operate on its own timetable.”

“That’s one of the stories I’m proudest of because it changed things in the state for girls,” says Pearson. “While most people think of me only as an anchor, I think of myself as a reporter and writer because that’s how I started at the Louisville Times newspaper. There is nothing like researching a story idea and formulating the questions to get answers you haven’t heard, finding out information that will help the viewer, that in-the-moment reporting.” The story earned Pearson the Women’s Sports Journalism Award for Local Television Reporting from the Women’s Sports Foundation.

July 27, 1996
The Centennial Olympic Park Bombing
After an exhausting day on-air, Pruitt (who had rejoined Pearson at the Action News anchor desk in 1994) was finally climbing into bed well after midnight when his coanchor suddenly reappeared on his bedroom TV. Even before the word “bomb” came out of his colleague’s mouth, Pruitt knew something was wrong. “Monica looked like hell,” recalls Pruitt. “She had no makeup on. I broke a speed record getting back to the station.” Pearson, who lived in Ansley Park at the time, was literally five minutes away from WSB when she got the call to come back.

“It was probably the only time in my career that I went on the air with no makeup,” she says. “It just didn’t matter. We were all watching the Olympics go from a dream to reality to a nightmare, all in one fell swoop. It was heartbreaking.”

Pearson and Pruitt stayed on the air all night, reporting on the casualties. “It was a tough night,” Pruitt says. “It was painful to have to cover that story, a painful episode for the city. I had grown up here, and Monica had spent the better part of her life here. Atlanta was on the world stage and now this terrible thing had happened. In a time like that, when you’re tired and you’re stressed and you’re feeling the story in a way that I guess a good journalist shouldn’t, you need a strong partner. I’m really glad Monica was my partner that night.”

September 11, 2001
On the morning of 9/11, Pearson was at her vacation home in Destin, Florida, when WSB-TV General Manager Greg Stone called to ask if her television was on.

“I remember saying to him, ‘No, I’m on vacation. Why?’ As I was turning on the TV, the second plane hit. I was standing in the kitchen, looking at the TV, and asking, ‘Is that real?’ It looked like a movie.” With the airports closed, Pearson hopped in a car and raced back to Atlanta. “I’m not proud to admit this, but what is normally a six-hour drive took me three hours that day.” When Pearson got to the WSB newsroom, she, Pruitt, and the rest of the Action News team marked time as ABC News went around the clock, with no interval for a local newscast.

“People were calling us, trying to find out more information on their loved ones, so the local angles just came to us,” Pearson recalls. “And then there was the ‘Can it happen here?’ question with all of Georgia’s military bases and the world’s busiest airport. We had a war room set up, for lack of a better phrase, and everybody was working the local ties.”

In a pew at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church the following Sunday, Pearson finally allowed herself to have an emotional response to the tragedy. “I cried because I was allowed to release in a safe place, in a holy place where I could lay that burden at the altar. I no longer had to protect myself so I could do my job the way I was supposed to.”

March 2004
Andrew Young Africa Special
For years Pearson and Young had discussed chronicling one of his African excursions. When he was invited to Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa for a summit, he asked her and WSB producer CB Hackworth to accompany him. Preparing for the trip, Pearson at long last traced her mother’s family history. Pearson’s grandparents had never been married, and her mother had told her, “I’ve always known who my heavenly father was but not my earthly father.” Pearson traced her grandmother’s family back to Cameroon.

“To travel with Andy Young all over the continent is like traveling with a rock star,” she recalls. “I saw things I never would have gotten to see without him.”

Hackworth remembers how surreal it was to shoot Pearson’s interview with Young, the former mayor of Atlanta “wearing a Falcons T-shirt and elephants sauntering by.”

Shooting inside the slave house on Gorée Island, a former transshipment point, the story got personal for Pearson as she squeezed into one of the holding cells inside the red clay–hued concrete-and-stucco fort.

She recalls, “When I tried to go into the holding cell where the unruly slaves were kept, a force I had never felt kept pushing me out of the cell as if to protect me. Once I got in, I could feel the spirits of those who did not walk out of that cell but probably died in there. It was the most upsetting position I have ever been in. I said a prayer and walked out, visibly shaken.”

“It was as if ghosts were talking to her,” Hackworth recalls. He kept the cameras rolling. Africa: A Continent of Possibilities won the 2005 Southeast Regional Emmy for Outstanding Achievement: Documentary Program.

August 28, 2008
Democratic National Convention
January 20, 2009
Inauguration of Barack Obama
An estimated 84,000 people crammed into Invesco Field, the home of the Denver Broncos, to witness history, as Senator Barack Obama became the first African American Democratic presidential nominee. As blue cardboard “CHANGE” signs and American flags were hoisted aloft, Obama marked the forty-fifth anniversary of Atlanta son Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Borrowing a passage from King’s text, Obama told supporters, “We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.” Pearson was in a skybox next to King’s sister Christine King Farris as Obama recited the passage. “It was truly magical to be with her at that moment.”

Five months later, on a bone-chilling day on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., surrounded by an estimated 1.5 million attendees, Pearson was seated nearby when Dr. Joseph Lowery gave the benediction at Obama’s swearing-in ceremony.

“Covering the inauguration of the first African American president of the United States, I knew I had to be balanced and focused when I really wanted to shout and scream,” Pearson reflects. “It had nothing to do with his politics. It had everything to do with the fact that a minority had broken that barrier and had become president of the United States.”

>> FROM OUR ARCHIVES: Read our 1986 feature story on Monica Kaufman from her heyday

Rich Eldredge is one of our editorial contributors.
Learn more about him | Follow him on Twitter | Contact him

There's Gold in Them Thar Hills!

Candice Dyer — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Digger Don disappears beneath the surface of the water, where it courses seven feet deep, to guide the three-inch nozzle of his dredge over the crenulations of quartz and granite, burrowing through silt and sand toward the hard-packed bedrock in Tesnatee Creek, a storied destination on geological maps of the "Gold Belt" arcing across northeast Georgia.

Photograph by Jamey Guy

The dredge’s racket scares away snakes but not the trout, which loiter nearby to feed on insects expelled with the tailings, or loose gravel. Digger Don, an athletic fifty-three, shrink-wrapped in a wet suit and diving mask, bobs to the surface from time to time, grins, and gives a thumbs-up to his prospecting buddy, "the Sheriff," who watches, hawkeyed, from the bank. Digger Don looks as sleek and carefree as the otters that play farther downstream near a berry patch.

However, with this virile vacuum cleaner, he is intent on cleaning up—really cleaning up.

With gold’s eye-popping ascent in the commodities exchange (it could exceed $2,000 per ounce later this summer if its current trajectory continues); flinty, flannel-friendly reality television shows such as Gold Fever, Gold Rush, and Prospecting America; and the availability of more efficient, high-tech gear, Lumpkin County, the site of this country’s first gold rush—and according to legend, the point of origin for every treasure hunter’s rallying cry, "There’s gold in them thar hills!"—is once again in the crick-churning throes of what folks around here simply call "the fever."

Digger Don is known by most as Don Minzey, a Cumming electrical contractor, but the secretive social code of gold mining values the discretion of nicknames almost as much as "color in the water." This is Minzey’s fourth season of prospecting. He belongs to the Weekend Gold Miner’s Club, a Dahlonega-based organization with 783 members scattered all over the country—sometimes trekking from the West Coast, where personal dredging is banned. "The monthly meetings used to be dominated by retirees just looking to socialize, but there’s been an influx of younger members who are serious about getting out there," Minzey says. The organization, which leases about 240 acres from private landowners, has grown by seventy-five hobbyists so far this year and expects to swell its ranks even more as the weather heats up and hopeful, if not desperate, treasure hunters wield pan, sluice, highbanker, trommel, and—this year’s must-have Father’s Day gift—the dredge.

Buoyed by a couple of pontoons and tied with ropes to birches overhanging the riverbank, Minzey’s dredge sucks up loose material from the riverbed and runs it through a sluice that traps the weightiest particles in its ridges, or "riffles." Because gold is twice as heavy as most minerals and nineteen times heavier than water—and possibly because the stuff virtually winks with a smug awareness of its maddening desirability—it tends to "hide," as miners say, by settling into loose but hard-to-reach deposits called "placers."

After four hours of dredging, Minzey carries the sluice box to the narrow shore, filters the contents through the mesh of two "classifiers" resembling kitchen colanders, and finally whips out that iconic old-timer’s tool: the pan. "No matter how much fancy equipment you use to mine gold, one way or another, you ultimately end up back at the pan," he says, swirling the contents slowly and methodically until the water and lightweight particles slosh gently over the sides. "Some people who are starting out will shake it really hard, as if they’re fighting with it, but that just wears you out because this is time-consuming. You want to find your own rhythm. There’s a sort of pleasant, Zen tedium to it."

Photograph by Jamey Guy

Finally a small but noticeable sheen of yellow flecks starts to illuminate the black sand in the pan, like a mouth-watering emulsion of butter.

"To make sure it’s not fool’s gold, you can hold your hand over it to block the light—gold glows even in the shade, while pyrite needs to be hit by the sun to sparkle," says Minzey, demonstrating with his palm.

This is what they mean by "pay dirt."

The Sheriff, also known as Benny Chester, leans over to squint at the find and casts a larger shadow. The mining club’s membership director and unofficial philosopher king, Chester looks the part of old-timey prospector with his galluses and feral, salt-and-pepper whiskers. "There’s an important distinction between 'gleam' and 'glitter,'" he says. "Don’t ever say the word 'glitter' to a gold miner. It’s one of those bad, unlucky words, as in 'all that glitters . . . '" He leaves the axiom unfinished. "But gold, well, gold always gleams, no matter where it is."

By the end of the day, Minzey estimates a gold recovery of about half a pennyweight, a standard measuring unit derived from the weight of a medieval coin—a haul adding up, roughly, to around $40, depending on market fluctuations and other variables, or "just enough to pay for gas, which is pretty typical," Chester says with a shrug.

"It’s enough to make me come back and try this spot again next weekend," Minzey says. Before moving to North Georgia twenty years ago, he grew up near a gold mine in southern California, where he failed to find much in the neighborhood creek. "Looks like today we have flour gold, a few flakes, and some wire gold. Georgia supplies most of the world’s wire gold, which looks the way it sounds. Most of our flakes are the size of sesame seeds, but some are a little bigger, like rice grains. An oatmeal-sized flake you can pick up with your fingers is called a 'picker.' A picker is a step smaller than a nugget; those are exciting to find, and you will get a few on a good day. Another definition is that if you can hold the piece six inches above the pan, drop it, and hear it hit the pan, it’s a nugget. The 'clink' that gold makes is its own sound, and some would say its own reward, and it’s one of the root causes of auri sacra fames, more commonly known as 'gold fever.'"

That nugget of Latin comes from Virgil’s The Aeneid, written between 29 and 19 BC. "Sacra" can mean either "holy" or "accursed." Both definitions are apt, since gold places a supernaturally powerful and potentially destructive hold on our collective imagination.

Gold, likely born in an exploding supernova, was forged in primordial volcanos about 500 million years ago. Abbreviated as “Au” in its number seventy-nine spot on the periodic table of elements, it is malleable and ductile, resistant to rust and corrosion, and undeniably beautiful in its purest, raw state. Next to pyrite and other less lustrous minerals, it evokes an aloof Scandinavian supermodel with naturally blond hair alongside someone whose cheap peroxide highlights have turned brassy and dull.

The Southeast’s Gold Belt stretches from middle Alabama to Virginia, widening into a sort of shiny buckle in the Georgia mountains, where the largest deposits have turned up in Lumpkin, White, and northern Cherokee counties—largely in the rivers and tributaries named Yahoola (pronounced “yay-hooler”), Chestatee, Tesnatee, and Etowah. “We have the purest gold in the world,” says Chester. “Ours is usually twenty to twenty-three carats—98 percent pure.”

As early as 1564, a French explorer observed that the Indians of Appalachia panned for gold, but the indigenous population did not exalt the metal with as much giddiness as their European trading partners. By the nineteenth century, most Cherokees had learned the hard way to stay secretive about this treasure—to no avail. In the late 1820s, legend has it, Benjamin Parks tripped over a rock while deer hunting and noticed its arresting color, which he later compared to an egg yolk. He arranged to lease that land from its owner, a preacher, who was skeptical until more nuggets were unearthed. Word spread.

“They came afoot, on horseback, and in wagons, acting more like crazy men than anything else,” Parks recalled decades later in a newspaper interview, summing up America’s first real gold rush.

As 10,000 miners or more, the so-called “’29ers,” along with their attendant service providers—prostitutes, tavern keepers, and lawyers—swarmed to stake claims, this area bustled with enough vice, violence, and general hell-raising to make Deadwood look like Pleasantville. The boomtown that arose dubbed itself “Auraria” and then developed with more density six miles to the north in a spot the Cherokees called “dalanigei,” meaning “yellow money.” That moniker eventually was anglicized, somewhat, to “Dahlonega.”

Rocks were the natural weapon of choice. “Residents liked to brag that you couldn’t find a single rock that didn’t have somebody’s skin attached to it,” says Kenneth Akins, a retired Department of Natural Resources historian who serves on a committee that is planning a gold museum in Auraria, to complement the one in Dahlonega’s courthouse. Even the preacher’s mother hurled a stone at Parks’s subcontractors in a fit of pique.

The downtown building that houses Dahlonega’s hipster music venue, the Crimson Moon, once functioned as one of many brothels during that era. (Today young baristas whisper about sightings of spectral “naked ladies” upstairs. In fact most of the area’s landmarks and waterways swirl with ghost stories involving tommy-knockers, or grizzled, subterranean leprechauns, and vigilante Indians, who sometimes get blamed for stopping a dredge’s motor, mid-dig.)

Ultimately the opportunistic landgrabs by miners resulted in the Trail of Tears, the brutal, forced exodus of the Cherokee Nation to Oklahoma in 1838, the same year the U.S. Mint opened a branch in Dahlonega to crank out coins. The state commandeered the land and distributed parcels by a lottery, and frenetic placer mining continued until the California strike of 1849, when most North Georgia miners saddled up and headed west too, founding Denver along the way. It was their migration that prompted an amateur geologist named Dr. M.F. Stephenson to plead from the courthouse steps: “Why go to California? In that ridge lies more gold than man ever dreamt of. There’s millions in it!”—a phrase Mark Twain echoed in The Gilded Age. The miners’ more colloquial version, “There’s gold in them thar hills,” has become even more familiar, as banter between Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam.

Many speculators eventually returned to Georgia, thwarted by the crowds and vaguely disappointed in the looks of raw California gold, which, for various reasons of composition, does not glow as vibrantly as its Southern counterpart—still a bragging point among contemporary local hobbyists. “Ours is so much prettier than theirs,” Chester says.

Technological developments enabled the returning prospectors, bankrolled by industrialists, to start hydraulic mining with explosives and water pressure that gashed the mountainside, revealing underground quartz veins coruscated with gold. Mercury proved an effective chasing agent in the sluices. So the miners had resources to dig harder and deeper—with greater toxicity. In the mid-1800s, they chopped pines, erected trestles, and built noisy “stamp mills” to crush ore to render the gold. These company-owned outfits ran twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, creating a nonstop, earth-trembling vibration felt in locals’ teeth twenty miles away—at least those few who had not yet lost chompers to mercury poisoning, mountain dew, rock fights, and poor hygiene.

One prospector found what remains, at twenty-two feet thick, the largest known vein of gold-bearing quartz in the world, with fifty-four pounds and nine ounces of treasure uncovered in one day, worth $1.2 million at the time. It lured Northern investors to snatch up 7,000 acres in 1895 and form the Dahlonega Consolidated Gold Mine, the first and largest attempt at systematic, deep mining east of the Mississippi River. The industry slang for a mother lode site like this makes today’s touring school groups giggle: the Glory Hole.

Dr. Stephenson, it turns out, was right about the hills and their millions. Eventually Dahlonega supplied, via mule train, the forty-three ounces of blinding gold leaf for Atlanta’s capitol dome. And a new generation of prospectors—most of them better-groomed—are working the land today.

"Gold is the only real wealth,” Chester says. “Franklin Delano Roosevelt made it illegal to own bullion because someone could’ve bought the whole country with it, and Nixon took us off the gold standard, but Jimmy Carter, bless his peanutpicking heart, helped us by loosening up regulations to allow private individuals to trade legally on open markets.”

As a general rule, the lower the value of the dollar and other currencies drops, the higher gold rises. In 2008, when the economic mood turned apocalyptic, gold-oriented enterprises boomed. “We’ve seen our equipment sales double in the past two or three years,” says Tony Ray, co-owner of the Crisson Gold Mine, the area’s only on-site vendor for Keene products, the John Deere of mining. “Our biggest seller is the four-inch dredge, which goes for around $3,600, but another hot item is the minihighbanker, priced at $350, which concentrates the material down so you don’t have to pan as much.”

Crisson, founded in 1847 and boasting the state’s only still-functioning stamp mill from the old days, is one of three history-rich venues to get beginning prospectors started with instruction, equipment, and lore. Bryan Whitfield, a fourth-generation miner from Harlan County, Kentucky, reopened Consolidated Gold Mine in 1991 as a destination for panning and touring parts of the labyrinth of four and a half miles of spooky, bat-inhabited tunnels and shafts, some 1,000 feet deep (expect tommy-knocker noises around the Glory Hole). “My family was in coal mining, so there’s just something about being underground that feels like home to me,” Whitfield says.

A few country miles away, Gold n Gem Grubbin serves as the state’s only commercial gold mine, processing forty tons of alluvial material a day on 100 acres of floodplain that was part of the lucrative old Loud Mine. Brian Devan, who purchased the rich bottomland in 1983, initially was running 300 tons through his plant but opted to slow production and share the bounty and experience with visitors, who can pan for a day—or stay longer—on the scenic campground, which offers dredging access to the Tesnatee River.

“If you want to become a miner, I recommend you go to one of those places and get some hands-on instruction in the basics and then practice,” says Minzey, who has accumulated nine ounces of gold since he started (do the math). “Join a club if you don’t have access to private land. But if there’s a stream on your property, try it. Based on the Gold Belt maps, there’s probably gold in the Chattahoochee River and Lake Allatoona, which is a public place where panning is allowed, as well as in the suburbs, all along Buford and Johns Creek, into Atlanta. It just hasn’t been found yet.”

Several clubs, such as the Weekend Gold Miner’s, lease private land. Members pay enough dues to cover property taxes, with a “finders keepers” understanding about the gold, which they collect in small vials and then sell discreetly to private assayers by word of mouth—not to the roadside vendors with hand-scrawled “We Buy Gold!” signs, dismissed by Chester as “rip-off artists,” and not on eBay, which he calls a platform for “pigs in a poke.”

The rookie’s first question: Hasn’t all of the gold been claimed by now?

No, it’s still thar. Think of surface gold deposits as wonderfully self-replenishing, with the earth constantly sloughing off loose sediments here and there, all the better to shine; that small placer had to have belonged to a large vein somewhere.

“Gold is an indicator of the passage of time, because it’s bound up in quartz and other heavy minerals deep underground, but the rivers wash it into placers in the processes of erosion,” says Joey Tamburino, who wears a T-shirt that says “I Got Mine.” His family owns Gold n Gem Grubbin, where he grew up and works today. “Instead of thinking, ‘This spot has already been mined, so it’s empty,’ you should think, ‘If somebody found something here, there is probably even more in a large deposit here or nearby.’”

Adds his mother, Susan Tamburino, who is Devan’s partner: “It all comes down to water, gravity, and patience—gold is as earthy and elemental as you can get.” Responsible mining simply accelerates and intensifies the sifting dynamics of nature. The old dynamite-driven hydraulic method, which left still-visible scars, is outlawed, as are mercury and other toxins.

“We have a policy of reclamation, of recycling the water in the plant and turning our dig sites into clean ponds for the ducks and using our tailings for landscaping,” Devan says. “The attitude used to be rape, rob, and ruin the land, but most miners now are environmentally conscious—in our case by conviction, certainly, but also because a whole lot of permits and DNR inspections make sure the processes don’t harm the land.”

Dredging muddies the waters, but not in an adverse way, says Chester, whose nickname is the Sheriff because he’s a stickler for club rules (leave the riverbanks alone and no firearms!), enforcing them with his imposing frame and don’t-mess-with-me aura.

“Dredging causes no more of a disturbance to the riverbed than a heavy storm,” he says. “The river washes and fills the hole right back up with sand. I’ve seen someone run a hot dog frank through the machine and have it come out unscathed, so wildlife isn’t getting caught up and killed, except for the bugs and tiny invertebrates that the fish eat all around us when we’re doing it. We’re helping by extracting trace amounts of that leftover mercury and effectively cleaning the rocks. We’re ‘green.’”

Lately he fields an average of six phone inquiries a week from potential club members, many of whom have just been laid off or suffered some other setback, but he is quick to note his group’s attrition rate.

“As soon as most people realize how labor-intensive mining is, and that you’re probably not going to pay your rent with it, never mind strike it rich, they tend to quit,” Chester says. “So I try hard to keep expectations realistic. Prospecting cost me a girlfriend or three because they thought I was going to get rich, and I didn’t—that’s a whole other kind of gold digger. All it takes is finding gold once, though, to get the fever. Then you never want to stop.”

He found flour gold on his first outing and since has recovered an enviable quarter-ounce piece from his stomping grounds. Minzey delights in the irregular, crystalline forms: “I have one that looks like Darth Vader’s head and another cool, round one that looks just like a soccer ball, inlaid with hexagons of another mineral,” he says. Devan displays a picker resembling a Catholic crucifix, but his showpiece “corker,” as he calls it, is a marble-sized ruby slathered by almost an ounce of molten gold—which singer Kenny Rogers, a passionate nugget collector, offered to buy for $50,000.

“Nuggets are like clouds—you can see different shapes in them,” Chester says. He chews on a hand-rolled cigarette and gazes at the river. “I’ve seen some people turn greedy and bad over gold. Me, I’m just not interested in the materialistic aspect of it.”

Then why bother panning?

“Like a lot of things in life, it’s the quest, the seeking of it,” Chester says, quoting Robert Service, the poet of the Yukon: “It isn’t the gold that I’m wanting so much as just finding the gold.”

>> DIGITAL EDITION: Read the full article in our digital edition

Photograph by Jamey Guy

Candice Dyer is one of our editorial contributors.
Learn more about her | Contact her

Sweet Dreams

Osayi Endolyn — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 12:00:00 GMT

First the governor arrived, aides in tow. Later came the mayor, riding in a black SUV with tinted windows. There were state officials, city council members, and local TV stations, illuminated in a dazzle of flash photography. But it wasn’t the dignitaries or the media that caused a traffic jam on Ottley Drive in Brookwood Hills. No, it was the giant flatbed bearing one of two sixty-five-foot, shiny, silver fermenters, each with the capacity for 1,000 barrels of beer (that’s 31,000 gallons), being delivered to the newly expanded SweetWater Brewing Company that morning.

Illustration by Oliver Hilbert

The March 20 ribbon-cutting made it official: Atlanta’s beloved brewery with the iconic rainbow trout logo and the laid-back image (“don’t float the mainstream”) is no longer the scrappy upstart it was sixteen years ago—back when two beer-loving buddies from the University of Colorado gathered up their belongings, packed their trucks, and took their knowledge of brewing beer to the unconquered Southeast. Today SweetWater ranks thirty-fifth in the top fifty breweries in America by sales volume. Among just craft brewers, it ranks twenty-fourth. Close to 77,500 gallons of beer gets brewed in SweetWater’s Midtown plant each week. This year’s expansion will enable the brewery to potentially triple its current output. SweetWater now employs eighty-three people, with plans to hire more. Tough economic climate? No wonder the governor wants to
hang out.

Amid the success and visibility (it was all over this season of The Office), SweetWater has held fast to the youthful spirit that brought it this far. The brewery’s tap handles still evoke carefree college days: Road Trip, Happy Ending, 420. Lines for SweetWater’s tours stretch down the street, bringing young singles and seasoned professionals to the same party. And even forty-one-year-old Freddy Bensch, a Californian who cofounded SweetWater with New Jersey native Kevin McNerney, still shows up to work in flip-flops and shorts whenever he can (he upgraded to a sport jacket on the day of the ribbon-cutting).

But don’t let the casual vibe fool you. The two men have been serious about making beer since scrubbing nasty kegs clean as college kids. Bensch went on to study at the American Brewers Guild, while McNerney took brewing positions in Colorado and California. Bensch was the first to arrive in Atlanta, and it was hot with Olympic fever.

Freddy Bensch, forty-one, cofounder, CEO, aka Big Kahuna. The Olympics were coming. This was early ’96, so there was an incredible buzz here. Everybody was amped—there was tons of energy, buildings were going up all over the place. The girls shaved their armpits and legs, which they didn’t do in Boulder, which was nice. That helped immensely. And you know, people were extremely nice, and I thought this town was really going someplace.

Kevin McNerney, forty-one, cofounder, former brewmaster; now brewmaster at 5 Seasons Brewing in Sandy Springs. The craft brewing industry was very much at the beginning stages here. The Southeast was kind of the last frontier.

Bensch There was Dogwood, Red Brick Brewing Company [then Atlanta Brewing Company], and Marthasville.

McNerney Only one of which still survives, Red Brick Brewing Company.

Bensch All my shit was in my truck, including my dog, Badger. You don’t think too deep when you’re that age. It was probably the shaved legs. Really.

McNerney We were only twenty-six years old.

Bensch Kevin was a ski bum in [California]. He was living pretty large; he was the man. Still had his ponytail. I called him up and said, “Hey Kev, we’re gonna do it in Atlanta. If you’re gonna get on, you need to come.” And I suckered [Matt] into coming down here.

Matt Patterson, forty-four, former sales director, aka Consumption Consultant; worked at Breckenridge Brewery in Denver—Bensch and McNerney met him while buying kegs for a party. I moved out right after the Olympics. I had never been to Atlanta at that point. My wife was six months pregnant. She quit her job, I quit my job, and we packed up. I think it was just cockiness on all our parts. Luckily we were as dumb as we were, because if we really had given it some thought, we may never have made that jump.

Bensch We raised under a million [dollars]. Friends, and family, and a couple of local people. We got an SBA loan, and we leased a space, the cheapest space we could possibly find in Atlanta. Off
we went.

Patterson I knew Freddy was going to put a good company together, Kevin was going to make awesome beers, and I knew I could sell it.

Before SweetWater’s first lease became a brewery, the warehouse off I-20 on Fulton Industrial was a 911 dispatch center. The friends did a lot of retrofitting to ready the space for brewing. There were drains to install, offices to clear out, and power requirements to meet. And then there were the neighbors.

Bensch Crack dealers, hookers, and beer. Good times.

Bob Townsend, beer columnist for the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, editor of Southern Brew News. It was just crazy. The first time I went to the brewery I was like, Oh shit, what is this out here? There’s [prostitutes] in the street and they’re waving down cars.

Bensch We did everything ourselves that we knew how to do. From installing plumbing to glycol [a refrigerant that controls the temperature in tanks] to the electrical.

McNerney We wanted to translate through the beer what our personalities were, and that’s where “SweetWater” came into play, because that definitely spoke to our outdoors nature.

Bensch We started brewing in January of 1997 and sold our first keg of beer February 17: ESB and Blue. 420 hadn’t come yet. Because it wasn’t 4/20 yet. Ding!

McNerney The beer thing we knew. The business thing and the marketing thing and all those other technicalities—that is what we were green at. We got several doors closed in our face.

Freddy Bensch, Steve Farace, and Nick Nock in tasting room; photograph by Caroline C. Kilgore

Patterson When we first came to town and started talking to the different distributors, most of them thought we were nuts. I had a distributor literally laugh at us, saying we’d never make it. I had a guy call me and he said, “I’ve heard a lot about those microwave beers and I want to try to taste yours.” Microwave was the word he used to describe microbrewery. That’s how the market was in those days. But there were a bunch of guys that bought into SweetWater on day one, and they’re still great customers.

Juanchi Vélez, forty-one, former controller, early volunteer; founder of 3 Cordilleras, a microbrewery in Medellín, Colombia. I had an MBA from Kennesaw State. I wanted to learn the business. So I went for an interview and Freddy was in shorts, without shoes. He said, “How can I give you a job? You don’t even speak English.” I said, “Look, I have an MBA in your country but you don’t understand me. But those professors understood me. So I don’t know, there’s something wrong with your English, too.” It was kind of funny. He said, “I can’t afford you.” I said, “I will work for you for free for five months if you teach me the business.” He gave me some boots and a shovel, and we started squeegeeing.

Sabrina McNerney, forty, Kevin’s wife; the two met in 1999 while she was working in sales for the Costa Rican beer brand Cerveza Imperial. Everything was a mess in the old brewery. It looked like a college apartment. But at the same time, I had a lot of faith in them. I felt like they had a good thing.

Bensch We’d load up our company car, which was an old Honda station wagon, with kegs. And this was illegal at the time and we didn’t know this—so, sorry. We’d load up our car with beer and go around to various bars in Little Five Points, Buckhead. With a growler of beer, we’d go in and say, “Hey, we just made this down the street. We’re starting this new brewery; would you like to try this?”

Patterson You’d walk in and every person in the bar has a Bud Light or a Coors Light in their hands. It was a shock to the system because it wasn’t what we were used to.

McNerney All we had to do was get you to pick up the beer, and once you took a sip of it you would be sold.

Bensch We sold seventeen kegs our first month. The first bar that ever put us on was Neighbor’s [in VirginiaHighland]. The pale was hoppy, the ESB was amazingly hoppy and bitter, and the fruit beer was for the girls with the shaved legs. Always workin’!

McNerney Manuel’s [Tavern] was one of our early places.
Taco Mac.

Patterson Virginia-Highland and Little Five Points got into what we were doing a lot earlier than some of the other places. It was pretty apparent that the farther away you got from Downtown Atlanta, the harder it was to sell. The Georgia Tech kids bought in right away. I think they eventually convinced their parents and that’s how we started making our way outside the center of Atlanta.

Sabrina McNerney Freddy wouldn’t do any advertising. He had a plan in mind and he got it done. It was all word of mouth. In the beginning, all their loyal fans were basically their salesmen.

Vélez At the university, the business cases they teach you are always Coca-Cola, Apple, the big ones. They never teach you how to run a small company. When I got [to SweetWater], I didn’t believe Freddy’s theories. Because Freddy was always trying to do things in a very different way than a big company would have done it. I was always like, “Man, why don’t you try this strategy that I learned in school?” I kept telling him that we were working too much at the plant, doing labor that was keeping us from more important work in the office—strategy or planning. He always said that we needed to do both, that helping in the plant was not optional. That gave everybody the sense of the importance of the beer. When we discussed the opportunity to get into important bars, sometimes they wanted free beer or big discounts. Freddy always said, “Why are we going to give away [the product] to a bar that did not trust us?” He was like, “Juanchi, keep your school out of this.” Two or three years down the road, I started seeing the results. SweetWater has been my best school ever.

Bensch, McNerney, and Patterson knew tours would be essential in building the SweetWater buzz. But would anyone make the trek to Fulton Industrial, twenty minutes from Downtown? And once they arrived, would they stay?

Bensch [We wanted] to get people in and be able to try our products. And to give the public a glimpse of who we were and show the authenticity behind the brand—that it really wasn’t just some marketing BS, but in fact it’s a bunch of guys really busting their ass trying to make the best beer possible.

McNerney We knew that there was a mystique for people to come and actually experience the breweries. We also knew that [a tour] was a cheap and effective way to support our product. They walked away with a good experience, they walked away with a visual that they could then go and talk up in the community. Before too long we had hundreds of people coming for tours.

Nick Nock, forty-three, current head brewer, first employee; started as a volunteer, fitting time in between brewpub gigs. Fulton Industrial, that was kind of like a frat house.

Mary Jane Nock, forty-three, Nick’s wife, tour manager; used to work in IT sales. It always had this really fun, exciting vibe to it. I was coming down there in my suit after my sales job to have a beer, and I’d be on the bottling line throwing bottles in the boxes. The tours used to be on Monday and Wednesday nights. It wouldn’t even cost you anything. Throughout the late 1990s to early 2000s, there were always twenty-five more people every time. And there were always hot women. These guys are always completely surrounded by hot women. And they still are, to this day! You think you’re hot and cute down at the brewery. But all of a sudden you start drinking, partying, and before you know it, you’re married and pregnant. I always tell these hot chicks at the brewery these days, this is how it starts.

Townsend They had bras pinned up all over the walls. Junky old couches.

Mary Jane Nock Girls would just take their bras off and they would want to donate it to the wall! Every tour there was another bra added to the mix. Eventually the bras went all the way around the trim of the room. [The guys] don’t want to come off like a bunch of horny twenty-year-olds, but they were! The only thing they did more than party was work.

Townsend I came from a place initially where I was sort of dubious about SweetWater—I thought, These guys are kind of wacky and not very serious—to being somebody who is an admirer with a lot of respect.

Patterson We’d have people just sitting there doing nothing but putting six-packs together and there’d be a huge mountain of [cases] as we were starting the bottling run. Without fail some pain in the butt would throw a tennis ball and [Freddy’s dog] Badger would go running through. You’ve just spent two hours putting six-packs together and Badger’s flying through the middle of it chasing a tennis ball. That epitomized what we were.

Bensch Badger’s real paw print is on every six-pack bottom. I got him right before I went to Boulder, and he made it all the way until our sixth or seventh year.

Steve Farace, thirty-eight, marketing director, aka Minister of Propaganda; started at SweetWater in 2002. At the brewery everybody did everything. You had brewers who ran the bottling line, and Juanchi would do the books, then run out back and drive the forklifts. Most of the time, I was outside of the brewery, but if I was there and the bottling line was running slow, I’d be back there packing cases.

Nock The big volunteer day would be [for] the Festive ale. Initially we’d hand-bottle that in the liter bottles. And that just turned into a crazy party. If you didn’t have a bottle, your cup tended to go under [the spout] to catch it just in case. Can’t have that beer hit the floor. Some people started doing some stupid stuff. We don’t do that anymore.

The SweetWater 420 Extra Pale Ale has what beer geeks call “poundability.” It’s smooth, drinkable, and golden, and it offered Atlantans more flavor than most mass-produced options, without pushing unsuspecting palates too far. Fans love 420’s bright bursts of citrus, but the not-so-subtle drug reference (420 refers to the time of day to light up) also made it a hit with a certain segment of SweetWater’s demographic. The beer solidified SweetWater’s presence in Atlanta and won it a silver medal from the Great American Beer Festival in 2002.

McNerney It was a given that we were going to do [an extra pale ale] as one of the beers in our profile. We thought we would be more successful if we just focused on two and let them gain some traction, and then follow it up with the third brand, the 420. 420 was one of those things that we stumbled upon. It was phenomenal. And that was the cool thing about 420—people that got the 420 reference, they attached themselves to it, they bought into it, they were fans from the get-go. People who didn’t get it were none the wiser.

Bensch [We were] three guys in a room with a batch of beer already in the tank, trying to name something. We knew what style we wanted this thing to end up like. This beer was already fermenting and we didn’t have a name for it. That’s how loose it was. We’re sitting there going around and around. We’re looking at our brewer’s sheet that says all the ingredients and at the top was the date that we brewed it on—4/20. “What do you guys think?” “Yeah, let’s do it.” There you go.

Townsend Super drinkable. Kind of a cool name. Kind of a cool image.

Crawford Moran, former brewer at Dogwood Brewing Company; now brewmaster at 5 Seasons Brewing’s Westside and Alpharetta locations. It just went gangbusters. It’s a very nice beer.

McNerney A lot of people think that we did these test batches and kind of fiddled around with it in the backyard. There was very little of that going on. By the time Freddy and I came out to open up SweetWater, if we didn’t have the confidence that we knew how to brew a batch of beer, then we had no business doing what we were doing. So we’d do some scratch work over a couple beers in an office and nail it down from the get-go based off of that.

Pam Ledbetter, former general manager at Neighbor’s Pub; now owner of Wahoo! Grill in Decatur. We were doing like seven or eight kegs a week. For a little place like Neighbor’s, that was pretty big. They would come in and say, “Who filled the most pitchers of SweetWater today?” And they’d hand them a $20 bill.

Within two years of opening, SweetWater was the host brewery for the World Beer Cup, an international brewing competition sometimes referred to as the Olympics of beer. In 2002 SweetWater won Small Brewery of the Year at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, where Kevin McNerney also took Brewmaster of the Year. And in 2004 the founders finally struck a deal with United Distributors, one of the largest volume beverage distributors in the U.S. Things with United hadn’t worked out the first time around—United, at the time, was already representing SweetWater competitors Marthasville and Red Brick Brewing Company (then Atlanta Brewing Company). But after Marthasville went out of business and SweetWater gained traction, United took notice. Still, the first sit-down in 1997 didn’t go as planned.

Paul Kirbabas, director of sales administration, United Distributors. This is a white-collar environment, [and Freddy] comes in wearing shredded shorts, flip-flops, and a T-shirt that looked like he grabbed it out of a Dumpster in front of the building.

Vélez And all of a sudden Freddy says, “Hey Paul, do you mind shutting off your air-conditioning? It’s freezing in here.” And the guy says something like, “Why don’t you dress [properly] for a meeting like this?” And Freddy said, “Man, don’t be stupid. You know that you’d rather be dressing like me but you can’t.” I was like, Oh man, this guy just killed the deal!

Kirbabas I said I couldn’t really represent him and do him justice . . . We were too busy because we represented the other Atlanta craft brands. Seven years passed by, SweetWater is starting to roll and has become Atlanta’s favorite microbrewery. We entered into a deal with National Distributing to acquire SweetWater, and we haven’t looked back since. [We] took the brand from 200,000 cases to 700,000 cases in six years.

Patterson Lo and behold, we were the host brewery for the World Beer Cup when we were two years old. There were a lot of ruffled feathers. Honestly we probably didn’t deserve to be hosting it as young as we were, but that was a huge feather in our cap. Kevin and Freddy just put a full-on blitz on Charlie [Papazian, founder of the World Beer Cup]. Michael Jackson, he was the beer expert of the world, he was in our brewery. He was craft brewing back in the 1990s and was standing in SweetWater Brewing Company. That was a cool thing
to see.

Townsend These guys had really done something. They’d done something that’s not only amazing for them but they’d done something that’s amazing for the South in terms of brewing. Because the South was considered kind of a wasteland of brewing.

By 2003 the brewery had outgrown its Fulton Industrial space. Operations were moved to a site on Ottley Drive, where SweetWater is today.

McNerney Once we started seeing the growth, we knew we wanted to come closer into town so people could experience the brewery. We bought an entire brewery that had gone out of business in California. Crews of folks had to go to California, dismantle, lower tanks onto trucks, travel to Atlanta on the road, stand up tanks, and install [at the new location].

Bensch Half our staff was continuing to produce beers and do the books, and the other half was over at the brewery soldering and welding and putting tanks together. We had the ability to build the new one while still being able to operate the old one. We had sold the old one, but there was no endgame on when we had to deliver it. Up until we got it running and felt we had the beers right, then we turned the other one off, packed up our gear, and split.

Sabrina McNerney I was shocked. I was like, this is way bigger than I thought it was going to be. Ever.

If a brewery has to pick a problem, it would probably choose the one SweetWater had, which is that its supply was always just shy of its ever-growing demand. The company went from producing less than 2,000 barrels per year in 1997 to more than 14,000 barrels by 2003. Expanding to a larger space to keep up with demand meant more time, more energy, and more hiccups.

McNerney Our struggles came when we started growing so quickly. It seemed like you could barely come up for air. That’s ultimately what caused me to resign [in 2008]. Growing as rapidly as we were, and having to achieve these goals and continue to satisfy orders for many, many years, wore me out. I’m the type of brewer that I will not ask anybody to do something that I won’t do myself. So that required me to micromanage quite a bit—to a fault, probably, because I’m always trying to make sure everybody’s on task and doing what they need to do.

Vélez I remember there was like 60 or 70 percent growth every year, in production and revenue.

Patterson I worked there for three years—I had a baby at home and another on the way. Four a.m. curtain calls were starting to drain me.

Bensch I’m not sure people understand how difficult it is to consistently make a good beer. I’m not just talking about flavor, but quality-wise. To even get the label on straight. In the beer business, you really have to be a student in everything from economics to math to biology to chemistry, and then you better be a good businessman on top. If you are deficient in any of those things, you’re toast. But that’s what really attracted the industry to me, is that every day is just a different challenge. It’s never the same.

Nock The troubleshooting was pretty tough. A lot of things just broke. Or you didn’t open up a valve at the right time.

Sabrina McNerney They relied on volunteers. You’d tape up the packages, and you’d stamp the date on the top and send ’em off. They needed you. If you were there just hanging out, you weren’t just
hanging out.

McNerney When we initially opened up SweetWater, we had to contend with the alcohol content law. It was a very limiting factor. [Until 2004, beer with more than 6 percent alcohol could not be sold in Georgia. When the law was changed, beers up to 14 percent were permitted for sale.] So we couldn’t go and bang out a big IPA or a barley wine. Happy Ending probably never would have been created if the laws hadn’t changed. It was a black mark on Georgia and some of the other Southern states for
a while.

Bensch I think Georgia is starting to understand that the craft brewing industry is positive for the state.

Success brought other challenges. In the early days, the brewery insisted that its product stay refrigerated, from the delivery trucks all the way to the grocery store coolers. But as SweetWater has become more ubiquitous, it’s often found stocked at room temperature in places like Costco or Your DeKalb Farmers Market.

McNerney Of course keeping the beer refrigerated at all times is ideal. It is refrigerated at the brewery as well as the distributor warehouse. In the event there is nonrefrigerated product on the floor, it is usually at a large-volume store such as Costco. [But] the brewery and distributor reps also take care of proper rotation of older beer.

Bensch Those beers you see on the floor are not on the floor for more than a week. We track how long that product is there. We feel like it can handle a week.

The change in Georgia’s beer laws ushered in a renaissance for beer drinkers throughout Atlanta. Competition for SweetWater stiffened. Nick Nock, as head brewer, began a special Dank Tank Series featuring more complex, higher-gravity beers in limited release. The brewery has become a major nonprofit contributor, donating more than $300,000 to protect the Chattahoochee River and raising more than $50,000 for Camp Twin Lakes. Bensch, McNerney, Nock, and Farace all have two children each. And there are no bras—visible, anyway—in the tasting room. But the tours are still happening, now four days a week, $10 a pop. This year they’ll aim to produce 120,000 barrels of beer, up from 94,500 in 2011.

McNerney Back then we had a portfolio to fill. So there was the Blue and the ESB and then we did the 420. We were a little bit shy on darker beers, so we [made] the Exodus Porter. We start adding the hop influence and getting that true West Coast style and we do the IPA. We were in a little cocoon so to speak. Back then craft beer was so brand new that, you know, if you went to a Kroger, you might see six or ten beers available. Now there’s sixty.

Bensch Folks that never really understood us ten to fifteen years ago are now starting to embrace what we’re doing.

Mary Jane Nock In the first few years, it was really all about the beer. Then it was like, wow, we can actually sustain ourselves with this place. Within the last five years or so, it’s been like, wow, this is a business.

Sabrina McNerney They have fiercely loyal fans. They’re customers, but they’re fans. The same people I met twelve years ago when I went there for the first time were showing up at the fifteenth anniversary party. I don’t think Freddy has an end
in sight.

McNerney A big achievement for me was knowing that SweetWater had become successful enough that the people that believed in us and initially invested with us and had given SweetWater the opportunity to be what it is were going to be secure. And that includes all of our family, a lot of our friends. Just to know that we got to a point where that belief had paid off. I think the biggest fear for me was not to let these individuals down. I took it real personally that I needed to be a steward of their beliefs [in us]. I’m impressed with our tenacity to just not take no for an answer. And I’m impressed with our community that has embraced us. The community is as responsible for our success because they really helped us.

Nock And we all think that we’re still twenty-something. It ain’t over.

Crime Pays

Candice Dyer — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Like most Anglo-Saxon surnames, Slaughter probably derives from an ancestor’s occupation: a butcher or someone else who got his hands bloody for a living.

So Karin Slaughter’s success as a crime writer seems like the uncanny outcome of some long-ago, genealogical foreshadowing, even though it would be too obvious a plot development for any of her unpredictable page-turners. Her bestselling novels, all set in Georgia, present some of the most indelible and visceral—in every sense of that word—scenes in the suspense canon, with victims flayed, tortured, and slain in theatrical Grand Guignol set pieces of extravagant but meticulous violence. Their fictive trace evidence would glow if sprayed with luminol.

Photograph by Jason Maris

Since publishing Blindsighted in 2001, Slaughter has written eleven more novels, totaling more than 30 million books in print, translated into thirty-two languages. The seven-figure advances for these consistent New York Times bestsellers place her among the highest-paid writers in the world, and her international sales figures for the past decade rank in the top hundred, along with those of William Shakespeare and J.K. Rowling. Two production companies, Entertainment One and Piller/Segan/Shepherd, partners on the Syfy series Haven, have teamed up to acquire the television rights to her early Grant County series revolving around a pediatrician sleuth in a small town, and they enlisted Slaughter to cowrite a pilot script for the show, which will be filmed in Georgia. It is expected to air later this year or in 2013. Another entertainment group in Europe—where her books often debut at number one—is negotiating for a project based on the Will Trent series, which stars an extraordinarily perceptive, dyslexic agent for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

The author’s evocative name itself has become an enterprise, with T-shirts, mugs, pet gear, and—a product that reveals her impish streak more than anything else—a plush teddy bear in a shirt emblazoned with “I Got Slaughtered” in a red, spattered typeface.

“Just for fun,” she says.

A blonde with a piercing, almost baleful gaze in photographs—like a haunted-house portrait, her blue eyes seem to follow you around the room from her book covers—Slaughter, forty-one, packs auditoriums at festivals, where she turns on the peachy charm for her cultish followers, often shaking her head during a Q&A and exclaiming, “It’s fiction, y’all!” Scary on the page but funny on the stage, she is credited with coining the term investigoogling.

“As big as she is in America, Karin is an even bigger rock star in Europe, where writers are revered and celebrated by so many avid readers,” says her longtime agent, Victoria Sanders, noting that Slaughter has sold 4 million books in Holland, a number that is one-quarter of that country’s population. “Part of it, too, is her presence, her warmth, her wit. Walking around with her at a book festival recently in Frankfurt, Germany, was like traveling with Elvis, with these gaggles of young girls spotting her and then screaming and jumping up and down and begging for her to autograph this and that. Seriously, it was wild.”

Slaughter is the only author to have been honored four times by Amsterdam’s Crimezone Thriller Awards, which recognize the international “popular author of the moment,” and she has received the Prix des Lecteurs, France’s prestigious literary prize, for Faithless.

Slaughter, much like Coca-Cola, enjoys global brand recognition but unmistakable, unshakable Georgia roots. While she relishes the adventure of book tours, she also can’t wait to get home and eat barbecue at Fat Matt’s, and she has no desire to live anywhere other than Atlanta. The author always has brought a detailed sense of place and local color to her writing. Her next book, Criminal, to be released in July by Delacorte Press, puts the city in sharper historical focus, flashing back and forth between the present day and the seedier, shaggier, unreconstructed boomtown of the 1970s to examine the embattled roles of the first women in law enforcement. “Kitty [Kathryn] Stockett did such a good job exploring racism in The Help that I wanted to do something similar about sexism,” says Slaughter, who named a missing hooker “Kitty” in Criminal to honor her famous friend. “There’s sort of a Cagney & Lacey feel to it.”

Slaughter immersed herself in the archives of the Atlanta History Center, scoured old photos of buildings, and read local and national magazines to get the era’s slang and “vibe” right. She also spent time with some seen-it-all, veteran policewomen and came away with a checklist of outrages—and triumphs—that are braided into the plot about a serial killer.

“At that time, a woman couldn’t get a car loan or a credit card without a man cosigning, and there had to be semen in a woman’s underwear to bring a rape charge,” she says. “Women working on the force were openly called ‘slits’ to their faces, and the men would go on ‘trim runs’ for sex. These women had their breasts grabbed by coworkers, and one was almost raped by her boss. These women had to take a polygraph, and the first question was: ‘Are you a virgin?’ Then: ‘How many sex partners have you had?’ And: ‘Do you want this job just to have sex with police officers?’ One woman shot back, ‘Depends on the officer.’ All of this was in their workplace—then they had to go out and face the streets.”

Slaughter, the youngest of three sisters, always has enjoyed strong female role models and a dad who “made sure we knew how to use a hammer—he didn’t restrict us based on gender roles,” she says. “He also enjoyed telling stories that scared the crap out of us.”

She grew up in the Lake Spivey area, south of Atlanta. Her father sold used cars, her stepmother managed a bank, and her stepaunt served as chief of detectives for Forest Park. Early on, little Karin displayed a morbid sensibility that rattled her elders.

“I taped the autopsy photos from Marilyn Monroe’s death to my lunch box in fifth grade,” she says, “and I would write stories in which someone inevitably died. My ninth-grade English teacher told me it might be a good idea not to kill off every single character, every time.”

She reveled in Quincy, television’s CSI precursor that influenced a generation of forensic detectives, and she became a familiar fixture at the Jonesboro library, where she gravitated to V.C. Andrews, Helter Skelter, and The Stranger Beside Me, about Ted Bundy. “Did you know that the first full-length detective novel in the country was written by a woman?” Slaughter asks, referring to The Dead Letter by Metta Fuller Victor. That 1866 mystery set a precedent for stories that not only outline the cat-and-mouse dynamics of a crime, but also explore its wider ramifications on relationships and domestic life—the sort of character-driven narrative that Slaughter has used to make her bones.

Slaughter attended Georgia State University for a few years and then buckled down to write, supporting herself by painting houses and doing odd jobs, including pest control. She became an entrepreneur, launching a signage company—Snappy Signs—that she built into a successful business with clients like HiFi Buys.

“I set the goal of getting a book contract by age thirty,” she says. “Having grown up here, I assumed it had to be another Gone with the Wind, so I wrote a historical fiction novel set in the antebellum South, called Spit in One Hand.”

Although never published, it caught the attention of the Victoria Sanders & Associates Literary Agency in Manhattan, which also represents the estate of Zora Neale Hurston. “It was a fine book,” Sanders says. “It was clear from the beginning that this writer had talent, had the chops of a young Harper Lee. At the time, the market just wasn’t very strong for historical fiction, so I had trouble selling it despite its quality. Thrillers were hot. So I suggested she try her hand at that, not even thinking about her last name.”

Slaughter wrote the first draft of Blindsighted in three months. She developed a heroine of sorts, Sara Linton, a nurturing, straight-arrow pediatrician who doubles as a coroner in fictional Grant County; gave her a police chief for an ex-husband; and trotted out a flinty female cop with a knack for causing trouble. “Every woman has wanted red hair at some point—including me once, with disastrous results—so I made Sara a redhead, and I made her tall.” Slaughter stands five foot four.

As soon as she finished that book, Slaughter did not turn off her laptop to rest; instead she started on another, Kisscut, and outlined a third, A Faint Cold Fear, to create a series involving the same characters. Pitched as a “cross between Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter series and Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta mysteries,” the trio landed a “sum in the high six figures” from William Morrow and Company, according to a story in Variety headlined: “Morrow, Slaughter Ink Killer Book Deal.”

The author was twenty-nine at the time.

Blindsighted came out the day after 9/11. “My publisher offered to let me postpone my first book tour, reasoning that people were not in the mood to come out and hear about more death, but I had worked so hard and was determined to go. So for those first trips out, I’d be the only one on the plane, just me and the stewardess eyeballing each other. I was surprised that I had a pretty good turnout, though, at most of my readings during that aftermath.”

Slaughter produced three more Grant County books and then introduced another, more urban series with a protagonist now beloved by readers: Will Trent, a GBI agent whose childhood was spent in an Atlanta orphanage and the foster care system, where he endured harrowing abuse, evident in visible scars from cigarette burns. So he knows how victims feel, and because of his dyslexia, he relies on unconventional cognitive approaches to solve cases. His developmental reading disorder ultimately works to his advantage in puzzling through criminal behavior, which defies most normal patterns, and his combination of woundedness and heroism (and, again, height) has inspired many a mash note from mooning female bookworms as well as a gay men’s fan club in Australia.

“Detectives talk all day with criminals who are hiding something, so I thought if Will had a secret, it would help him ferret out theirs,” says Slaughter, who has been honored by the American Association of People with Disabilities. “My sister is dyslexic, and she’s so smart, so intelligent in all of the ways that matter. But she was labeled as ‘stupid’ and had to put up with so much shit growing up, even from the teachers at the Christian school she attended—especially from them, actually.”

“I kept getting these Google alerts about one of our agents named ‘Will Trent,’ and he appeared to be incrementally traveling along out West,” recalls John Bankhead, director of public affairs for the GBI. “I finally thought, ‘Who is this guy, and what is he doing out there to get in the paper so much?’ So I checked our rolls and didn’t find an agent with that name, then realized he’s this made-up character in a book. I still know where Karin is on any given day during her book tours, traveling across Europe, by these Google alerts that pop up wherever she goes.”

Afterward, at the suggestion of Representative David Ralston, now the speaker of the house and a “friend of my daddy,” Slaughter says, the GBI began lending her some expertise from time to time, with interviews, fact-checking, and an observational perch on the sidelines of training exercises.

She also has fired off a few rounds at the GBI’s shooting range to get the feel of a gun, and she now owns a Springfield 9MM. In this firearm-fetishizing culture, every writer who has ever introduced a Glock into the story line can attest that readers will yelp loudest about those descriptions. Slaughter notes, “They’ll forgive killing off a beloved character faster than they’ll forgive a gun mistake.”

“Karin is a good shot,” says John Heinen, an inspector on the command staff of the GBI. “I read a lot of crime novels before I go to bed at night, and hers have this exhaustive depth of detail. I’m just really taken aback at the realism on the page. I also like that she doesn’t use some suave, debonair, 007 hero who always gets a neat, happy, Hollywood ending. You never know how her books will end, and sometimes they don’t end happily, which is more like real life.”

The past decade has been dubbed the “golden age of thrillers,” with suspense writing finally transcending the “genre” ghetto to enjoy literary prestige.

“I consider Karin the very creepy godmother of my writing; her dark imagination is boundless and inspiring,” says Gillian Flynn, author of Dark Places and Gone Girl. “She is so streamlined, but she slips in these wonderful character details—like the way someone reads a newspaper—that in one sentence relay a chapter’s worth of information.”

Slaughter, who has never been the victim of a violent crime (“my scooter was stolen once, but I hadn’t locked it up”), does not believe in “evil,” though, at least not as a supernatural, catch-all motive. “I think chalking up human behavior to evil lets us all off the hook too easily,” she says. “I try to examine what throws the switch, what happens to someone’s wiring to make him or her commit murder.”

And at every Q&A, the question of her darkling muse comes up. In what charnel house does Slaughter find her inspiration?

“Real life,” she says, clarifying, “not that I base my work directly on true crimes; I’m not comfortable with doing that, but I hear things from my friends in law enforcement and medical examiners’ offices, information that plants ideas, which is how most writers work anyway—an image or something overheard sets an idea spinning, and it goes off in an unexpected direction in my imagination and then on the page.”

Disturbingly, she often has to tone down the material.

“I heard about a woman who had twenty-seven trash bags stuffed into her vagina,” she says. “Well, the message is pretty clear: You’re trash. But I thought that was just so horrific that if I put it into a book it wouldn’t even sound believable. So I reduced the number to eleven.”

In Criminal she describes protracted torture with a needle and thread:

“Her eyes and mouth were sewn shut.” Pete had to use both hands to hold open one of the torn eyelids. They were shredded in thick strips like the plastic curtain inside a butcher’s freezer. “You can see where the thread ripped through the skin.” . . . “These lines along her torso, inside her arms and legs—a thicker thread was used to keep her from moving.” . . . Amanda said, “She must have ripped herself away from the mattress, or whatever she was sewn to, when he started beating her.” Pete expounded on the hypothesis. “It would be an uncontrollable response. He punches her in the stomach, she curls up into a ball. Mouth opens. Eyes open. And then he punches her again and again.”

Slaughter typically adheres to an end-of-year deadline and retreats for two weeks at a time to her cabin in Blue Ridge.

“I write fifteen hours a day, stopping at Oprah-o’clock,” she says. “By the time it’s finished, I collapse and never want to write again. Then I go on a trip, and when I get back, I’m ready to write.”

When she is not scribbling and touring, she exercises at an intown gym, spends time with her cats (“they’re shameless attention whores”), and hangs out at home. She confirms that she does have a “significant other,” but will not elaborate. “I have a few unusual fans, as you can imagine,” she says, “so I try to protect the privacy of my home life.” In Criminal’s acknowledgments, she writes, “And to D.A.—as always, you are my heart.”

Startled by statistics such as “80 percent of children in rural areas use their local libraries as their only access to the Internet and books,” Slaughter also lends her talent, celebrity, and largesse to the cause of endangered libraries. She established a national “Save the Libraries” movement, using the DeKalb County Public Library system for a pilot fundraising event. She is giving DCPL and other library groups all of the U.S. royalties from her short story “Thorn in My Side,” digitally released by Thomas & Mercer, and she also rounded up her fellow thriller authors—Michael Connelly, Lee Child, Mary Kay Andrews—to donate signed copies, first editions, and even future character names for a charitable auction on eBay. Conceivably, for the right donation, you could become one of Slaughter’s butchered victims.

In 2010 Slaughter wrote an editorial for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that has become a galvanizing manifesto for librarians all over the country. In “Fight for Libraries as You Do Freedom,” she recalls the poverty of her father’s early life and writes: “When your kids are starving, you can’t point with pride to a book you’ve just spent six hours reading. Picking cotton, sewing flour bags into clothes—those were the skills my father grew up appreciating. And yet, when he noticed that I, his youngest daughter, showed an interest in reading, he took me to our local Jonesboro library and told me that I could read any book in the building so long as I promised to talk to him about it if I read something I didn’t understand. I think this is the greatest gift my father ever gave me. Though he was not a reader himself, he understood that reading is not just an escape. It is access to a better way of life.”

And with talent and persistence, that kid with her nose in a book at the library might grow up to make a killing.

Candice Dyer is one of our editorial contributors.
Learn more about her | Contact her

Eddie's Attic Turns Twenty

Tony Rehagen — Tue, 01 May 2012 12:00:00 GMT

UPDATE: On May 14, Eddie Owen announced that he had been fired from Eddie's Attic. Read Rich Eldredge's blog post about Owen's departure, Owen's response, and Alex Cooley's take on the situation.

Shut up and listen.

You can drink your beer and scrape the last bits of mac and cheese from the bottom of the bowl. You can even leave your cell phone on to illuminate the menu—just be sure the ringer is switched to silent. If you don’t have the patience to read the entire seventy-five-word mission statement hanging on the stage backdrop, just focus on the first two sentences: Eddie’s Attic is a music venue concentrating on the performing and touring singer-songwriter and acoustic musician. We encourage a listening atmosphere. “We need you to eat and drink as much as possible,” announces the Attic’s namesake, fifty-six-year-old Eddie Owen, before the opening act. “But please, hush up.”

You can’t smoke, either. Owen, a longtime pipe-smoker himself, banned the practice when he first opened the Attic in 1992. Just one less distraction.

If you, the paying customer, are feeling put upon, you’re probably not alone. The Americana band you paid to see tonight, Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors, left their electric instruments on the truck. Instead they lugged a half dozen acoustic guitars and a man-sized stand-up bass along with the drums to the second floor and have crammed their five-piece unit onto the tiny corner stage. They stripped down their songs so as not to overwhelm the confines with distorted guitar, booming bass, or crashing cymbal. The band has played 800-seat theaters, but tonight will put on two shows to two capacity audiences of around 180 people in this room.

So why are we here? Why do we pay to be treated like children in church? Why do established artists agree to take the Decatur detour on their tour of theaters and arenas? And why does management discourage patrons from buying another round in the name of quiet, a business model that has kept this venue teetering for twenty years?

John Mayer, who started out at the Attic fourteen years ago and has since moved 20 million albums and sold out Madison Square Garden four times, explains why he comes back to the Attic for surprise shows: “When a room is making noise—let’s say on a scale of one to ten, it’s a four—you lose all the music you can make from one to four,” he says. “You lose so much touch and nuance. There’s so much beautiful music that happens between a pin dropping and the first bit of chatter. That’s where some of the best music in the world came from, and that’s why Eddie’s has that magic.”

Owen, a failed musician and lover of whiskey and baseball, lives for that ethereal space, the space between pin-drop and chatter, and his devotion has attracted like-minded acts such as Mayer, Shawn Mullins, Sugarland, and the Civil Wars, who launched their careers from this stage. It has also provided thousands of moments between listeners and artists you’ve never heard of, songwriters selected by Owen himself. Attic regulars show up without even knowing who’s on the calendar. “It’s like having someone picking your Netflix queue for you,” says Sugarland’s Kristian Bush, who played here on the Attic’s second night, twenty years ago. Owen’s ear for talent and his dedication to the idea of a listening room have enabled the Attic to celebrate two decades of national renown in Decatur this month, while music venues around the country sit shuttered and silent.

But despite the Attic’s artistic success, the struggling business has become more of a distraction for its founder. Twenty years on, Owen’s search for the perfect place to hear live music has taken him miles away from his Attic.

"My respect for songwriters is built out of a failure to be able to do it myself,” says Owen, who grew up singing in the church choir and around his grandma’s upright Baldwin piano. He fell in love with the Beatles and the way John Lennon crafted poetic lyrics with complementary chords. But then he picked up the guitar in high school and started writing his own songs, compositions he never even titled. “I sucked,” he says. “They weren’t good enough for names.”

In 1981 Owen was twenty-six, tending bar at the Trackside Tavern, a rowdy brick and wood-paneled joint along the railroad less than half a mile from Decatur Square. Back then the music scene was built around bands like R.E.M., which was drawing national attention to Athens. The only places to see live music in Atlanta were loud bars, clubs like Hedgens in Buckhead, Rumors in Decatur, 688 on Spring Street, or the Moonshadow Saloon on Piedmont Road, and the singer-songwriters were lost in the ruckus. To Owen acoustic music was pure and clean; he could hear every note and savor every word. “But there was no place to just sit and listen,” he says. “It drove me crazy.” Owen persuaded the Trackside owners to let him book acoustic acts in the middle of the week.

But Trackside was like any other bar, with TVs, dartboards, and high-backed booths. It was hard to see where the singer and his beat-up Taylor guitar fit in. “It was a drinking bar,” says Matthew Kahler, who played for Owen at Trackside. “It was pretty interesting that he wanted to put something that delicate in that setting. Where a drunk could fall off a barstool and wreck the entire thing. It wasn’t perfect. But we were there because the guy behind the bar was crazy about music.”

“I was trying to nurture songwriters at a point where most folks were trying to nurture their next beer or joint,” says Owen, who sometimes had to personally quiet the audience, shushing people while serving drinks from behind the bar. “But once the word and the vibe spread, it sort of took care of itself.” Trackside became home for not only local folk luminaries like Caroline Aiken and Kodac Harrison, but also budding singer-songwriters like Shawn Mullins, Emily Saliers, and Amy Ray, whom Owen had first spotted playing in a Decatur pizza parlor before she joined Saliers to form the Indigo Girls. In a business where it’s almost impossible for a young artist to be heard, Owen listened. In the late 1980s, an underage Kristian Bush sneaked into Trackside and did his Emory homework at the bar, just to be close to the music. One night, Bush says, Owen handed him a guitar and a Budweiser and asked to see what the young man could do—the bartender recognized potential. “I sucked pretty bad for years,” says Bush. “But he let me play. He protected us. He allowed us to write what we wanted to write.”

But at Trackside, acoustic music was still the sideshow. One night in the spring of 1992, Owen took Kahler and Bush to Conversations, a bar at 515 North McDonough Street where Owen worked a second job, and led them to an empty upstairs storage room with hardwood floors, a high ceiling, and a giant palisade window that looked out on downtown Decatur. Here, Owen told them, he was going to lease the space and build a place where they could play, and people would be quiet and listen.

“When he called me with the idea, I said, ‘How can I help?’” says Saliers. Fresh off the success of the Indigo Girls’ eponymous major label debut, she and bandmate Amy Ray were two of the Attic’s initial investors (some of whom, Owen says, he is still paying back). Saliers and Ray also donated a pair of speakers for the sound system. Mullins, Bush, and Harrison helped paint the walls. Meanwhile Owen, who still lived alone in a Decatur apartment, threw everything into the project—his savings and his passion. At the time, he didn’t really know what a mission statement was, but he wanted to reiterate to everyone what the music room was about. He composed the seventy-five-word message and a coworker stenciled it onto a folded-over king-sized bedsheet.

The sheet was hung onstage, with a half dozen plastic Budweiser banners that simply read Shhhh on the walls. And on May 7, 1992, Eddie’s Attic opened its doors. There was no bar in the listening room, the drinks being dispensed solely from the patio. There were only stools, chairs, and tables packed with eager fans focused on the stage. “It’s just you and your guitar,” says Bush, whose band Billy Pilgrim was one of the first acts booked. “And at the end of the day, it’s all about your songs.”

The Lovely Drifters are setting up. With their guitar and cello, Amy Andrews and Alex Sia, who relocated from Baltimore a year and a half ago to Atlanta’s more nurturing music scene, are Owen’s fill-in for a last-minute cancellation. Owen is a sucker for the cello, which, he says, is the closest instrument to the human voice.

Standing in front of the sound booth in the back of the room with a coffee cup of bourbon, Owen surveys the forty or so people scattered throughout the room—not a bad draw for a Wednesday night and just ten days’ notice. The lights go down and Attic chatter yields to simple strings. But as Andrews’s soprano washes over the room, Owen winces, as if his whiskey has been replaced with day-old coffee. After a few bars, he turns and leaves through the swinging kitchen door and strides back to the patio bar. Something is wrong with the sound in the room. “I can’t tell you exactly what it is,” he says. “And I love this song and I love her voice, but I just couldn’t stand it in there.”

He joins three patrons sitting at the bar, watching the live feed through the monitor. The man seated next to Owen is an aging musician, evident by the receding line of his long, dishwater-blond coif, which seems to be gradually sliding off the back of his head.

“I’ve been in Decatur, playing Eddie’s Attic with various bands for fifteen years,” he announces. “I remember Jennifer Nettles before she talked with a Southern accent. John Mayer took money at the door for my band. He was a tool back then, too, acting like he was too good for that . . . which, I guess he was.”

But the man only gets Owen to engage when he brings up the Red Clay Theatre, Owen’s latest project, a 14,000-square-foot theater in downtown Duluth that Owen believes could match—and even surpass—the Attic, in terms of a pure “listening environment.”

“I’ve heard it sounds awesome,” says the man. “Like Symphony Hall.”

Owen pats the man’s back. “And I didn’t pay him to say that,” he says.

“And I’m not going to ask him to book my band here in a second,” says the man with a wink.

The chuckles subside, and the musician returns to the Lovely Drifters on the monitor hanging above the bar. Owen turns away and just above a whisper says, “This is a very important part of my job. Because I don’t know this guy, but I have to pretend that I do.”

In the weeks and months after the Attic’s grand opening, cafe tables and chairs were set out, and a standing bar was built in the middle of the room. Later came oversized carpeted stairs for people to climb and sit on like the studio audience of an old afternoon TV kids show. The official seating capacity has always been about 150, but they often cram in an extra twenty or thirty.

In the early days, there were pool tables in the back room. One night in the mid-1990s, Saliers was shooting pool with Owen and singers Uncle Mark Reynolds and Andrew Hyra, when local songwriter Pierce Pettis came bounding up the steps and threw his guitar case on the felt in the middle of the game: You have got to hear this. Pettis broke out a driving ballad called “You Move Me,” which was eventually recorded by Garth Brooks.

Stories like this drew young musicians to Eddie’s. “You don’t know who is in the back of the room,” says Bush. “This industry is pretty impossible. At Eddie’s, it seems like it is possible.” Billy Pilgrim got picked up by Atlantic Records—they signed their contract at the Attic. Even when major label A&R guys weren’t at the bar, Eddie’s was a place where connections were made. It was there that Bush met a singer named Jennifer Nettles, who fronted folk-rock act Soul Miner’s Daughter and the Jennifer Nettles Band before joining Bush in the country megagroup Sugarland.

But often, the best connection a young act could make was with Owen. In 1994 he started the Songwriter’s Open Mic Monday, a weekly contest where artists could perform two original songs for one judge: Owen. The winners were invited back for the biannual shoot-out, a single-elimination tournament for $1,000 toward recording an album. Ten to twenty hopefuls were signing up every Monday. By the mid-1990s, Owen was fielding twenty to thirty CDs—many containing full-length albums—each week. Owen enlisted help from Bush and Mullins and other trusted ears to pare down the stack, but the owner always had the final say. He looked for energy and chemistry, but in the end only one thing mattered. “They all work their asses off, and they’re all talented,” he says. “But if you don’t have the songs, you can’t get there.”

And once he found a songwriter he liked, there was little he wouldn’t do to help—even if it meant grooming him to outgrow the Attic. Bush remembers Owen standing at the bar, listing the other clubs Bush should be calling. In the late 1990s, Owen met a twenty-year-old guitar player who had just moved down from Boston. John Mayer’s first gig ever was a Monday night open mic. He won. “I remember asking Eddie how to get booked there for a show of my own,” says Mayer. “He told me to send him a demo packet, which was a folder you’d mail with a photo, a CD, and a bio—he had to explain that to me.” Owen gave Mayer a regular gig and hired him as a doorman for $40 a night, and whenever there was a cancellation or a twenty-minute opening, Mayer was Owen’s go-to guitar. Mayer went on to play South by Southwest in Austin and was later picked up by Columbia Records, recording 2001’s "Room for Squares," which won a Grammy and sold 4 million copies. Mayer gave Owen framed versions of the platinum records, which now hang above the Attic door.

“For a little bitty shithole, we book pretty far out,” says Owen, phone to ear, sitting by the Attic window in the waning March daylight. The spectacles that usually dangle on a lanyard around his neck are balanced on the tip of his nose, magnifying his foggy blue eyes. On the bar is a calendar of May, boxes marred with names and numbers. But the voice on the other end doesn’t seem to understand. “Any date between now and June is going to be booked,” says Owen.

The voice belongs to a network producer from Los Angeles, calling to schedule a film session with Jennifer Nettles for an upcoming TV special. “We don’t have a greenroom,” Owen continues. “And we’re on the second story with no elevator.” Pause. “A lot of the time, the TV grips say, ‘Oh, shit!’” Pause. “Well, I sold it to Jennifer and her husband, so she knows the space better than I do,” he says, and then he grins with an overbite. “Now I just work here.”

In 2002, after ten years of being the first one in and last one out six days a week, Owen was torn. His family was growing—a brand-new baby girl to join two boys, five and six—and he felt like he was missing their lives. For years he had thought about selling. So when his good friends Nettles and her husband, aspiring nightclub owner Todd Van Sickle, called to ask Owen’s advice on getting into the business, Owen saw a way out. “Emotions were very mixed,” he says. “I was losing a part of me. But my family is the most important thing.” And he was leaving the Attic in trusted hands. In the spring of 2002, Owen sold the place and found a regular job as an events coordinator at the Ritz-Carlton in Morgan County, where he moved his family. Over the next three years, he hardly set foot in the Attic.

Meanwhile Van Sickle made the mistake of trying to run the Attic as a viable business. While Owen had given 98 percent of the door to the artist, keeping only enough to pay the soundman and doorman, Van Sickle cut it to 80 percent, which he saw as closer to par with the industry (a split the Attic still applies). He hired Shalom Aberle, a soundboard maestro who had worked clubs in California and has become an Attic institution known for recording live stereo mixes that sound studio-made. Van Sickle also informed staff that they should no longer silence people. He took down the Shhhh banners and the mission statement. He thought he was liberating the customer. But some regulars and artists became resentful. “It was still a good place,” says Kahler. “But it was too loud for me.”

In May 2005, Van Sickle sold the Attic to Bob Ephlin, a former exec with Wolf Camera. One of Ephlin’s first moves was to ask Owen to return to run the bar and booking. “In a brief fit of insanity,” Owen says, he accepted. But he made sure he had a set schedule and made it a point to eat breakfast with his kids every morning at 6.

The mission statement returned to the stage. “It just seemed like the place was reconnected with its legacy,” says Aberle, who was working with Owen for the first time. “The Indigo Girls and John Mayer magically reappeared. Musicians and fans so wanted to reach out, hug him, look him in the eye and tell him how happy they were and what he meant to them.” Over the next four years, attendance doubled. The Attic expanded its email database to more than 9,000 addresses. In 2008 Georgia Public Broadcasting launched "Eddie’s Attic Presents," a weekly radio show featuring Attic performances interwoven with Owen spinning the stories behind the artists and songs from a script he wrote himself. Ephlin even recorded an "Austin City Limits"–style TV pilot to shop to the networks. Owen interviewed the acts.

Magic still happened at the Attic. In the age of iTunes, artists submitted a couple of songs instead of albums, enabling Owen to handle the talent search alone on his seventy-minute commute from Morgan County, listening to CDs, and eventually MP3s and links through his iPhone. Today he receives more than 500 emails a day.

In 2009 Owen booked a young Nashville songwriter named John Paul White to open a Friday night show. At the last minute, White wanted to bring along a new singer, Joy Williams, whom he had just met. Owen agreed. It was their second show together. But during sound check, Owen says, “every head turned and every jaw hit the floor.” The Civil Wars recorded their nine-song Attic set and made it available for free on the Internet—an album on which you can hear silverware clanging in the background and which was eventually downloaded by more than 100,000 people. The duo has since won two Grammys.

To fans and artists, it was as if the founder had never left. But from behind the bar, it was clear that the Attic was no longer Eddie’s. Owen felt pressure to book acts that would bring in more customers. “When it was my money, I didn’t give a rat’s ass if three people came, as long as I was one of those three,” he says. “I had to reshift that thinking,” taking into account what will sell as opposed to just booking acts he liked.

Shut up and listen.

You can drink your beer at the Red Clay Theatre, but there is no long-winded mission statement on the wall, no signs shhhh-ing you. In fact, aside from a gentle reminder to silence your phone, Owen’s preshow spiel from the Red Clay stage is devoid of lecture. “I don’t have to,” he says. “Here, when the lights go down, the people know to hush up. This is a theater.” The only interruption is the horn of a nearby freight train that rumbles by thirty-five times a day.

Last fall officials from Duluth approached Owen about starting a concert series in a downtown church that the city had bought and spent $800,000 converting into a home for a performance theater company. The theater company went under in 2008, and the building, with its stage, seats, and industrial-grade sound system, had sat vacant and unused ever since. “This building has the capability of being the best listening house anywhere,” says Duluth Economic Development Manager Chris McGahee. “And if it is associated with Eddie Owen, you know it doesn’t suck. Especially now, when iPods and iPads enable anyone to make music, Eddie is the filter. These days, his talent is even more critical.”

Owen was smitten. Here was a building tailored for music. With 257 seats, it was bigger than the Attic, but still small enough to be intimate. And since the note had been paid for by the city, the private-public partnership made the bottom line work, theoretically. The city would provide the building in exchange for 40 percent of the proceeds. Owen would take care of operating costs. Owen quietly left the Attic in October 2011 to pursue the Duluth concert series, “Eddie Owen Presents,” full time. But he quickly ran short of capital. Meanwhile, Ephlin announced he was selling the Attic to legendary concert promoter Alex Cooley and his partner, Dave Mattingly. They just needed someone to run the place. “I agreed to help them, if they helped me,” Owen says. After a two-month hiatus, Owen was back at the Attic—but with Cooley’s and Mattingly’s investment, “Eddie Owen Presents” was now a reality.

You still can’t smoke at the Red Clay Theatre—law of Duluth, not that it stops Owen. The billiard pipe hanging from his lips leaves a locomotive trail of sweet tobacco smoke throughout the Red Clay corridors, down the stairwell, and into the artists’ dressing room, where Owen is laying out the hummus, Triscuits, and trail mix that he fetched from a nearby Publix for Shawn Mullins, tonight’s headliner. That’s right, there’s a dressing room. Two, actually—complete with light-lined mirrors. Down the hall, there’s a greenroom, a kitchen, and two other empty rooms. That’s just the basement. Upstairs the stage alone is as big as half the entire Attic.

Tonight will be the fourteenth show in five months, but the goal is to fill the theater’s calendar as full as the Attic’s. Then Owen can set his sights on the other half of his Red Clay dream: using the two vacant basement rooms as classrooms for a music and songwriting school, where artists can teach children the craft. “The school is bigger than Eddie Owen,” says Owen. “So much of the Attic is all about Eddie, my personality, my relationships with agents and artists . . . there’s definitely a different feel to the Attic when Eddie’s not there. And that’s not a good thing. I wish I had known that I would need more than Budweisers and hamburgers and that I’d need to monetize what we were doing there. I wish I could be certain that Eddie’s will keep doing that after I’m gone.” The Red Clay offers Owen a new beginning.

The doors open at 6:50 p.m. Owen slides on a gray blazer over his navy Nike mock-turtleneck and rushes out to shake hands with every person who walks through the glass doors. He asks each one of them where they are from. He wants to get an unofficial tally of how many people are Attic folks from intown and how many are from outside the Perimeter. In order for the Red Clay Theatre to work, he says, he needs to show that there are two audiences. As the auditorium fills, the theater’s fifth sellout, Owen’s estimate is about 80 percent OTPers.

Once Mullins is onstage, Owen continues his ambassadorship by giving a tour of the theater to Mullins’s entourage. Even when the ambience is broken by the train horn running within a hundred feet of the building, rattling the floor, Owen just smiles. It reminds him of his days at Trackside. “I don’t think I’ll ever leave the Attic,” he later says. “But there is an energy and a feeling when I’m in this place that I haven’t felt in a long time.”

The next day, Owen is back at the Attic for a Shawn Mullins double feature—Owen tries to get a lot of Attic artists to play in Duluth while they’re in town. But of course, Mullins is an old friend. The shows are to celebrate the singer’s forty-fourth birthday.

The Attic is packed—both shows sold out—and Owen wends his way to the stage. His face is sunburnt, his mouth dry from six packs of sunflower seeds, having come straight from watching his sons play a baseball doubleheader. “When I first met Shawn,” he tells the crowd, “I was a bartender at Trackside Tavern. Shawn wasn’t of drinking age—he was fifteen. But even then, he was a talented, talented singer and songwriter . . . ”

Owen finishes the quick bio. And then: “For those of you who haven’t been here before, we do something a little weird for a bar. Now thank God for Budweiser and hamburgers and we want you to partake heavily. But please, hush up. Just shhhh!”

The room of regulars answers with enthusiastic applause.

As Mullins starts his show, Owen slips back to his post in front of the sound booth. The set kicks into gear, and Owen gradually gives in to the music—first a head bob, then the long body begins to sway, eyes close, fingers snap, and eventually he sings along, adding harmonies in a high Irish tenor. Right now, he’s not dreaming about Duluth, or fretting about the Attic’s future. He isn’t thinking about anything at all. He is caught up in the moment, lost in the song.

Photograph by Ryan Gibson

Tony Rehagen is our senior editor.
Learn more about him | Follow him on Twitter | Contact him

One and Done

Tue, 01 May 2012 12:00:00 GMT

By any measure, John Smoltz’s twenty-two-year professional career was remarkable. A Cy Young winner and eight-time All-Star, Smoltz is the most recent pitcher to join the 3,000 strikeout club and the only one ever to top both 200 wins and 150 saves. Yet on his way into the record books (and likely the Hall of Fame), his career nearly ended more than once.

After Tommy John surgery in 2000, Smoltz persuaded a skeptical Bobby Cox to send him to the minors for rehab as a reliever. He came back to Atlanta and spent four years as a closer, only to make an even more improbable return to the starting rotation. When his beloved Braves finally let him go in 2009, he had a short, disappointing run with the Boston Red Sox. Coming back to Atlanta that August, he writes, felt like “being sent home in a coffin with a toe tag.” Still, before the month was out, he would take the mound again, for the St. Louis Cardinals—throwing a debut five shutout innings against the Padres and pitching in the Cards’ postseason.

Smoltz shares these lessons of perseverance in his first book, "Starting and Closing." Not a complete autobiography, the book traces his career and touches on his childhood through the lens of his erratic final season, 2009. By his own admission, if the book had been about his ego, Smoltz would’ve chosen 1996—the year he went 24–8 and pitched in the World Series. Smoltz might be pitching still if Turner Broadcasting hadn’t tapped him to join its broadcast team in 2010.

Today Smoltz works with many nonprofits, including King’s Ridge Christian School, an Alpharetta college preparatory school that Smoltz helped found in 2001. A scratch golfer, he’s rumored to be mulling the Champions Tour when he turns fifty in 2017.

In this excerpt, Smoltz explains what it was like to face so much anguish in the postseason. —Betsy Riley

An excerpt from "Starting and Closing: Perseverance, Faith, and One More Year" by John Smoltz with Don Yaeger

When you Google “World Series champions” between 1991 and 1999, the name “Atlanta Braves” appears only once, listed as the 1995 champion. There’s no little asterisk next to our name reminding people, “Hey, the Braves went to the Fall Classic five times during that time span.” There is no small print at the bottom that explains, “Atlanta duked it out to the bitter end in some epic games that could have gone either way.” When it comes to the record books, you’re either a winner or you’re not. And the record books will tell you, we were losers more often than not. What they won’t tell you is why.

>> READ IT ALL: Buy the book

It’s something I’m asked about a lot, honestly, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me sometimes. When you play baseball professionally, dedicate your life to it, and come insanely close to achieving your ultimate goal so many times only to watch the Commissioner’s Trophy be handed to another team, it hurts. It sticks with you. It becomes more than just a game.

I lived and breathed our entire run of fourteen consecutive division titles, and I still can’t quite understand it, to be honest. I still look back on all those years in the playoffs and wonder. I mean, it is almost nonsensical how we didn’t win a whole handful of rings. Whether you’re a Braves fan or not, you can’t deny the odds; we should have won more than one championship, no doubt about it. But last time I checked, baseball couldn’t care less about random odds, or who is supposed to win or lose on paper.

It’s hard to describe in a few broad generalizations what happened and why we only managed to win it all once, because, like I said, it’s really hard to generalize fourteen years of baseball. The truth is, there isn’t one reason. There might be one reason for each year, but there’s not one reason for all fourteen. All I am offering here are a few opinions that might help make sense of something that is, generally speaking, hard to understand.

And honestly, while I may have strung together a few nuggets of wisdom here, at the end of the day, I’m also almost convinced that there may be no better or more complete answer than this: Baseball is a beautiful game, but it can also be brutally heartbreaking sometimes.

With those thoughts in mind, I offer you four observations about the futility that overtook us during our streak:

1. It’s not Bobby Cox’s fault. Bobby Cox has taken more bullets about this than almost anyone else, and it’s high time that credit is given where credit is due. If you aren’t a die-hard Braves fan, you might not realize how influential Bobby was in building the team that would start our historic run. He was actually the Braves’ general manager from 1985 to 1990, back when the only thing the Braves were competing for every year was the basement of the National League West. Bobby was the man responsible for righting our ship and turning things around. He made big, sweeping changes: revamping Atlanta’s minor league system; stocking a stable of young arms, including myself, Tom Glavine, and Steve Avery; and acquiring or drafting young talent, including David Justice and some guy named Chipper Jones. Bobby Cox had put together a talented young team, but it would take a few years to translate this into tangible wins on the field.

When June 1990 rolled around, Bobby moved to the dugout to serve as our manager and general manager until October, when John Schuerholz was brought in to be the new GM. It was the very next year, 1991, that our team notoriously went from worst to first and took the World Series into the tenth inning of Game Seven, before eventually losing 1–0 to the Twins in what is widely regarded as one of the best Series of all time. Bobby had helped build the nucleus of that team.

While Bobby helped lay the framework for our run, he also deserves a ton of recognition for sustaining our run. You don’t win any division for fourteen years straight without finding ways to win games that you have no business winning, statistically speaking.

You can always second-guess a manager’s moves: “Why pull the starter now? Hit and run here . . . are you kidding me?” Believe me, every player plays manager in his mind sometimes and you wonder what the real manager is up to. It’s easy to do. But trust me: Bobby’s moves were always calculated, made with the intention of preserving a lead, preserving his athletes, or generating some offense when the run-support well had run dry. He knew things the rest of us didn’t know, saw things even the best in the game didn’t see. This is what good managers do—they know the odds, they know the percentages, and they are always looking for opportunities to exploit another team’s weakness and put their own players in position to crack open games. And Bobby did that better than anybody, if you ask me.

2. Superior pitching wins baseball games, but power pitching is a bonus in the postseason. During our historic run, we enjoyed the best rotation in all of baseball, maybe even the all-time best. When you face a 162-game schedule with Greg Maddux, Tommy Glavine, myself, and Steve Avery on the mound, there’s no denying that you are going to have a better chance to win more games than any other team. The best rotation can get you to the postseason, as we proved year after year, but things change when you get to the postseason.

Playoff baseball is so different from the regular season. Everything becomes condensed and magnified at the same time. In a postseason game, every hit and every pitch matters. In playoff baseball, a man on first is a rally and the crowd knows it. Everyone is dialed in, on task, and sharp, and there are no free rides. Pitchers don’t throw away pitches and hitters don’t give away at-bats. This laserlike focus is only heightened by the fact that you never know when a moment might win or lose a game. When it comes to elimination games, there literally is no tomorrow.

What all this boils down to is that everybody makes adjustments to their strategies to survive and increase their odds of winning. Good hitters know that if they are facing finesse pitchers like Tom Glavine or Greg Maddux, a higher-percentage strategy is to take away part of the plate and settle for making contact. To put it simply, the more contact generated, the more chances a team has to be successful in the shorter format of the postseason. I, personally, am convinced that it’s harder to be successful with a staff full of finesse pitchers in the postseason because you have to be that much more perfect. I’m convinced that if you live on contact and throwing strikes out of the zone, you don’t always reap the benefit of it in the playoffs.

Hitters facing finesse pitchers during the regular season are much more likely to try to do more with the ball, like pull it down the line. This is precisely how Maddux and Glavine made their living; during the regular season, they won this battle more times than not.

Now, theories are nice and all, but the other thing I know is that when Tommy and Greg were on the top of their game, it didn’t matter what approach the hitters took; the pitchers were going to win.

It’s a different story for a power, or fastball, pitcher like me. The postseason gave me the opportunity to use other gears that would make it tougher on hitters. These extra gears allowed me to increase the velocity of my pitches and the sharpness of my breaking balls.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Why wasn’t I doing this over the course of the thirty-five-odd starts I would get in the regular season? The short answer is that there’s no way to do it. There’s no way to sustain this type of effort. This is reserved for the games that look like they could be your last.

I think that in theory, the fastball pitcher has a better chance to be successful in the postseason because he can be aggressive and challenge hitters and feed off the intensity of the postseason. It doesn’t do much good for finesse pitchers to try to feed off the intensity, because they aren’t going to benefit from throwing the ball harder; their finesse pitches and their command are their weapons.

Now, I used to think the more power pitching you had, the better chance you had to be successful, but that has obviously been disproved on more than a couple occasions. But with that said, in theory, I still believe it’s a great formula to have that go-to power guy, that guy who can strike out ten or eleven guys in a game when you need it, because it could lead to more wins when they count the most.

3. Starting pitching is great, but timely hitting can be better. Strong starting pitching often delivers you to the postseason, but in the playoffs you are all but destined to go up against other great starting pitching. I think our run all but proves that a lack of timely hitting can hurt you way more than a starter who can’t get you safely into the sixth inning.

The one thing I think you can say about our World Series appearances is that rarely did we get outpitched. Now, that may seem a little nonsensical because we lost way more times than we won, but the fact is, when you talk about getting outpitched, you have to look at the number of games that were decided by one run. We went to the World Series five times: 1991, 1992, 1995, 1996, and 1999. Over those five Series we played a total of twenty-nine games. More than half of those games—seventeen to be exact—were decided by one run, and we lost twelve of those. That means we lost roughly 70 percent of the time in extremely close games that could have gone either way. The year we won, 1995, was the lone year when we won more close games than we lost.

Our pitching kept us in games, but it clearly wasn’t always enough to deliver championships. What we really lacked almost across the board was some timely hitting. The fact is, when you lose World Series games by one run, you fall victim to that clutch hit, that one play coming in and costing you a game, and eventually the whole Series.

As starting pitching goes, so goes your organization, but to win it all you’ve got to have a combination of a team that’s hot and is capable of timely hitting. There were years when we just didn’t get that timely hitting, in 1991 and 1992 especially, and one year that we did, in 1995.

I’m telling you, sometimes all you need is that one run.

4. Sometimes fate just kicks your butt. I’m going to warn you in advance that I realize what follows is subjective. Surely there’s a more scientific way to explain our shortcomings, but I’m a simple man: I’ll leave the equations and acronyms to those with a proclivity for math and for the use of calculators. What I do know is that a few things about baseball can’t be explained Moneyball-style. You can’t define momentum any more than you can predict impetus. Things happen—things that don’t get recorded in the record books or official box scores—that can tip a game one way or the other. Call it a curse, call it fate, call it bad karma; it just seemed like more often than not, we were on the losing end of all of it, with the glaring exception, of course, being 1995. There are many, many examples that I can point to, but for the sake of brevity, I’m going to limit myself only to the 1996 World Series.

Now remember, it’s 1996, not 2006. The Yankees have really done nothing for years; the last time they were in the Series was in 1981 when they lost to the L.A. Dodgers. Meanwhile, we came into the World Series in 1996 not only as the defending champions, after beating the Indians the previous year, but we had also been to the Series in ’91 and ’92. If anybody looked like the Team of the Nineties at this point, it was us.

That year we had swept the wild-card Dodgers in the National League Division Series, but then somehow found ourselves down three games to one in the NL Championship Series against the St. Louis Cardinals. We proved to be down but not out, roaring back to win three games in a row in dramatic fashion and earn another trip to the World Series. We were returning to the Fall Classic for the second year in a row and we had momentum. We came in heavily favored to win another championship.

The Series opened in New York on Sunday, October 20, after the original opener was scratched due to rain. The delayed start did little to extinguish our bats, and two short days later the record stood at 2–0. We had manhandled the Yankees—in Yankee Stadium, no less—blowing them out and winning both games with a collective score of 16–1. We were headed back to Atlanta with what appeared to be an insurmountable lead.

But this is where things started to get a little screwy. We certainly had a nice lead, but everyone knows you never walk around like you’ve already won the thing. Well, someone should have told that to our local paper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which ran an article that basically claimed, “The Series is over, why even play the games?” Seriously. I still remember picking up the paper and just groaning. It was such a bad omen. I couldn’t believe they would run something like that. What were they thinking? Now, I’m not saying the AJC is entirely to blame for our downfall, but I certainly am pointing out that their fate-tempting article seemed to be the first omen that the tables were about to turn.

After the article, it seemed like we were fighting everything imaginable. The rest of the Series was one big train wreck for us. If it could go the Yankees’ way, it did. We couldn’t catch a break, let alone a foul ball, to save our lives. Here is a short—and incomplete—list of “random” occurrences that conspired against us in the next five days:

Accidental umpire interference: Through five innings of Game Four, we’re up 6–0. In the sixth, right field umpire Tim Welke inexplicably impedes right fielder Jermaine Dye as he charges in to snatch what appears to be an otherwise routine foul ball popped up beyond the first base line. The ball hits the deck. The batter, a certain Derek Jeter, gets a second chance at the plate and singles, touching off a three-run Yankee rally. The score after the sixth: Braves 6, Yankees 3.

Some guy named Leyritz: Later in the eighth, Rafael Belliard muffs what appears to be a routine double-play ball, only managing to get the runner out at second. With one out and two on, the stage is set for a rally, but the next batter due up, Jim Leyritz, a defensive sub brought in for Yankee catcher Joe Girardi in the sixth, doesn’t seem to be a likely hero. Leyritz improbably delivers with a three-run home run, tying the game at 6–6 and bringing the Yankees back to life in the game and in the Series. It was later reported that Leyritz, not expecting to play, had spent most of the game in the Yankee weight room.

No earned runs allowed, we still lose: Game Five. I pitch eight innings, strike out ten, throw 135 pitches, allow one unearned run, and still get the loss. The Yankees score their one and only run in the fourth, assisted by an error by center fielder Marquis Grissom. What should have been out number one results in Charlie Hayes on second, in scoring position. Two batters later, he scores. It was another error that would lead to yet another Yankee win.

Win one for Frank Torre: In between Games Five and Six, Frank Torre, big brother of Yankees manager Joe Torre, suddenly undergoes successful heart-transplant surgery, after waiting three months for a donor. He recovers enough to be able to watch Game Six from his hospital bed. The Yankees, obviously supportive of their manager and his family, are supplied with yet another reason to play hard.

On October 21, we appeared to be on a collision course with destiny in the form of repeat titles. Five days later, we had somehow lost the World Series and destiny belonged to the Yankees. Their incredible win was our incredible loss. Not only did we lose another championship, we lost the foundation of the team that had gotten us to the World Series four out of the last six years. If we had won, would our general manager have gone in another direction and been able to keep the likes of David Justice, Marquis Grissom, Terry Pendleton, Jermaine Dye, and Steve Avery? That’s the kind of thing we’ll never know. What we do know is what did happen. The Yankees went on to dominate, even today. Meanwhile, the Braves are still chasing their first winning World Series game since 1996.

Maybe to some people it sounds like we Atlanta Braves fans are crying in our spilled milk, but the fact is we were so close, it’s so hard to explain. It doesn’t make any sense, but the reality is a hit here, a pitch here, a run here, and I’m not writing a chapter about why there was only one ring. It’s like I said earlier: Baseball is a beautiful game, but it can also be brutally heartbreaking.

The Big Break

Justin Heckert — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

The teachers began to notice him at the beginning of the 2010 school year, the stranger in a red pickup truck and lizard-skin boots. He was in the hallways and in the classrooms of the school. He was in the principal’s office and in the lounge. He was even in the lunchroom, sitting with a food tray at one of the tables near the children, almost every day. So he became familiar over the course of a few weeks at Venetian Hills Elementary, in southwest Atlanta, but not familiar in a comforting way; the stranger’s presence set the teachers on edge. The school had a secret, and some of the teachers and even the principal would end up lying to protect it, and were encumbered with the reality of why he was there. He could appear inside their doorways startlingly, unexpectedly. He’d flash the credentials of his governor-issued ID, a smile on his face and his shirt tucked into his blue jeans, boots clacking against the floor. “Hi,” he’d say. “I’m Richard Hyde. I’m one of the governor’s special investigators, and I’d like to talk to you.”

Venetian Hills Elementary School; photograph by Christopher T. Martin

First he tried to put the teachers at ease. They were terrified of him, afraid they’d lose their jobs if they uttered a word. He had more than thirty years’ experience as an investigator, and approached them with his calming, almost hillbilly drawl, as though he were a friend stopping in from the cold. He pretended, at first, to know nothing about them, even though he’d read their files; to know nothing much about what might have gone on at the school, though he’d seen the numbers—75.4 percent of classrooms there flagged for wrong-to-right erasures on the standardized tests one year earlier. He handed out business cards and said, “If you decide to talk, call me.”

And he kept coming back. He kept parking his big truck in the school lot and eating in the cafeteria, and his reptilian boots kept clacking on the tile. He talked to secretaries and nurses, people, he says, who “knew what was going on, but had never been asked.” From the first day inside the school, when he knew he wouldn’t get a lot of cooperation, his gut told him the same thing that the wildly unbelievable standard deviations on the 2009 Georgia CRCT test erasure study had all but confirmed: There was something going on here; he could feel it, but couldn’t articulate exactly what it was.

The first person who confessed was a third-grade teacher named Jacquelyn Parks. She was a well-dressed woman with a voice loud enough to carry above the noise that spilled through the hallways of what Hyde observed to be a very loud school. When he first approached her, she wanted her students and whoever happened to be standing outside the room to hear her response, almost shouting at him cartoonishly, I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT, AND I CAN’T TALK TO YOU! In his experience this was a red flag, an embellishment akin to a wink, a silent plea for him to contact her anywhere but school. So he did.

He focused on her. He kept going back to her. She would see him in his sunglasses, see his truck, see him eating lunch, see him talking to the secretary. But it was at church, according to Hyde, where the Lord revealed that she should tell him what she knew. Hyde went to her home with a female lawyer from Balch & Bingham law firm (where he works), so Parks would feel more at ease.

On the big poster-board map of the Atlanta Public Schools system in his Downtown office at Balch & Bingham, after former attorney general Mike Bowers asked him to be the lead investigator on a case that would take them almost a year to complete, Hyde had circled the flagged schools with a red highlighter, looking for a place to begin, and had seen Venetian down in his old police territory. It had seemed little better than a shot in the dark.

A self-described “former bumblin’ beat cop who will never wear a Hickey Freeman suit,” Hyde had picked Venetian Hills because he had patrolled that area of Atlanta when he was a rookie police officer on the overnight shift. This was during the Wayne Williams case, when that part of the city thought the killer might’ve been a cop.

Parks confessed with her lawyers present in the Cumberland Room of Balch & Bingham. Bowers and Bob Wilson, the other two senior investigators called by then Governor Sonny Perdue to lead the case, were in the room, and knew this was the break they needed. They listened intently. Parks described being one of the “chosen ones” at Venetian Hills, a small group of longtime teachers trusted by the principal to gather together and change students’ test scores in a windowless room, sometimes wearing gloves. After she confessed, the investigators were able to coax her to wear a wire and record conversations. Venetian Hills was the test run of something that would turn out to be bigger than any of the three investigators imagined.

“I try not to get involved emotionally in stuff like this. I’m a hired gun,” Hyde said this past winter, in his first interview regarding the matter. “But this case really affected us all, especially the guys I worked with—Mike and Bob. I think it was much more emotional for them.”

And that’s basically how Richard Hyde cracked open the biggest school cheating scandal in American history.

If you haven’t been in a coma for the past several months, then you’ve either heard or read about the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal and, in turn, the Dougherty County Public Schools cheating scandal. Dozens of teachers in both school systems had been changing answers on a state standardized test for years, which precipitated a meteoric rise in scores. These districts were lauded for their numbers, even after the Atlanta Journal-Constitution began to question them. The paper’s local reporting would help raise questions that would lead to an investigation headed by Perdue. There were never any answers or adequate explanations, even when he ordered the two school districts to perform internal investigations—which were little more than whitewashes. A 2009 erasure study produced by the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement, in light of the paper’s reporting, concluded that on that spring’s CRCT test, a yearly exam given to all public elementary and middle school students, some external force operated to cause the wrong-to-right erasures in the subjects math, reading, and English/language arts.

The scandals made Georgia’s public education system a national joke. Maybe you’ve read some of the reports compiled by the three investigators, documents put together with the help of more than fifty Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents and eight lawyers and paralegals at two different firms. It is hard to read the reports without getting angry. The numbers and names within the text have become a matter of stark and almost unbelievable record. The narratives of each school are windows into crooked leadership and failed responsibility. Children were so harmed over such a time that it would not be a reach to wonder if there is a generation of Atlanta schoolkids who have really learned nothing, except that a handful of their teachers were willing to do anything to keep their jobs, and in some cases to bolster their reputations in regard to their peers.

There were the “chosen ones” at Venetian Hills . . . There was the principal at Parks Middle School, a man named Christopher Waller, whom Mike Bowers described as “the worst of the worst, an absolute scoundrel,” who, according to the report, recruited teachers to cheat and allegedly refused to give them raises if they weren’t “on his team”; he had a buzz phrase, “Time to go,” when it was time to change answers . . . There were teachers who wept openly when they confessed, who had cheated merely because it meant meeting the numbers, and meeting the numbers meant keeping a job . . . There were stories of students—sixth graders—who couldn’t read, who didn’t know what a lake was, a lake . . . There was the email exchange from a principal to a teacher, stating, “These children don’t really care because they don’t have parents who set standards and high expectations for them. Sorry to say this but it is true”. . . There were teachers giving students right answers by pointing or by putting check marks next to the correct bubbles; teachers tearing open plastic packets containing the tests, reading the tests, and then using a lighter to reseal the plastic; teachers having “cheating parties,” with pizza. The final impression left by the report? That students didn’t matter. Only data.

What you probably haven’t read is how the case affected the men who signed their names to the final documents, the men who wrote the report, who ultimately dismantled the two institutions by leading the investigation and dropping its findings like a batch of napalm onto the public.

Mike Bowers is one of those men. The former attorney general of the state of Georgia has been puttering around his farm on a green golf cart, driving along a limestone ridge near some cedar trees. It’s a weekend morning in late January a few miles outside Commerce, in Jackson County, and the sun brightens the silver hair on his head. He’s dressed in a green pullover and blue jeans, a ball cap. His face is a smooth, almost translucent white. A West Point graduate, his colleagues joke that he hasn’t gone a day in his life without shaving. He is seventy years old. Bowers stops the golf cart and sees his grandson, who is visiting. “Hey, can you pick up some of this shit?” he says, waving his finger at a big pile of branches. He’s not angry with the teenager—he’s actually in a good mood. He just swears a lot. That’s who he is, even at work. There are cedar branches down all over his fifty acres, because a storm blew in. His grandson is riding Bowers’s four-wheeler. His grandson’s friend is sitting on the back. They both smile at Bowers. The four-wheeler’s motor purrs like a large cat.

“Look at this place,” Bowers almost whispers. The golf cart’s wheels grind as it moves. “This is a boy’s Shangri-la. All this quiet out here . . . this is who I am.” Bowers, a wealthy man (“I make a shitpot of money; my dad would tell me I’m stealing”), a man of power (“I’m too old to give a shit”), and a lion in the Atlanta legal scene, can sort of terrify the younger lawyers at his firm, but can also come across as boyish and charming. He is prone to get those same young lawyers coffee, and to be as approachable as he is intimidating. He doesn’t really look that old. He has a collection of Black Knight footballs in his office and loves his wife’s cookies. He still hunts with his buddies. His four-wheeler isn’t exactly an aging man’s toy; he rides horses at least twenty miles a week. Bowers and his wife, Bette Rose, live in a house at the end of a gravel path here, the wooden railing on the second floor of the house draped in black-and-gold Army blankets. This is where he stays most of the week and on weekends; the couple also has a condo Downtown, three blocks from Balch & Bingham, where he is senior partner.

Bowers, a man who switched parties in 1994 and ran unsuccessfully for governor four years later and “could’ve been president,” according to Hyde, gets angry when he thinks about the investigation. His eyes narrow and he starts to talk rough.

“What we saw here, in terms of these teachers, who were primarily single moms, was outrageous, and it was sad. It was a tragedy,” he says. “We knew the children were being abused. We didn’t get to see that firsthand, but we heard about it from the teachers. I remember one, she went to the University of South Carolina, she had worked at the Board of Pardons and Paroles. And she said, ‘I cheated. I’m so embarrassed I don’t know what to tell you. If my daddy were alive, he would be so embarrassed, he wouldn’t know what to do. I have two children, I am the sole source of income for my home, I have got to keep this job. This is a big joke, Mr. Bowers. You know why it’s a joke? Because my children can’t read or write.’”

Bowers is known to lack patience, known for his penchant to want to solve problems in a short amount of time. This was the exact opposite of what the cheating investigation required. This meant his role in the investigation was not to be a “details guy.” He does not take direction well, from anyone. He is also not a terrific interviewer, because of the whole patience thing, and also his temper, which can catch fire as quick as raking a match—and perhaps even because of his cursing. “Once the train leaves the station with Mike, there ain’t no pulling it back,” said one of the other partners at his firm. During one APS interview, with the investigators and the lawyers present in the Wiregrass Room of his law firm, he slammed his hand down on the table and yelled, “This is bullshit!” He also has a hearing aid. During another interview, while one of the Balch & Bingham partners was in the middle of asking a question of a witness, Bowers turned to Wilson, and said, “Bob, LET’S GO!,” tapping his watch, thinking he was whispering—but he was actually talking loud enough for the room to go quiet and everyone to stare at him. And so he became a “big-picture guy.” He hates typing and physically can’t make a chart on a computer, so he’d sketch something out longhand and give it to one of the lawyers to actually create. There are a lot of charts in the documents. Some of those are right out of Bowers’s head. He is also good at managing people—not micromanaging them, Hyde says. One of his two stipulations when he accepted the job from Perdue (the other being to work with Hyde, his longtime friend) was that the governor’s office would not get a preview of the report. Bowers also helped rewrite the report, took the first drafts home to Bette Rose, and when she told him they weren’t good, he tore them apart.

“Everything was appearance with Atlanta Public Schools, and the focus became scores,” he says. “Move the children along, to hell with are they learning—are the scores right? As a result, children never were looked at for the need for remedial education. Hell, nobody gave a rat’s ass. And they just kept getting moved. I remember a conversation with [Fulton County DA] Paul Howard. He said to us, ‘I understand now some of the young folks that come in here charged with crimes. I’ve noticed they’ll come in here at twenty or twenty-one, and they’ve gone through the tenth grade and they can’t read.’ The boys go to prison, the girls become teenage unwed mothers. It’s real simple.”

Bowers’s father was a sharecropper’s son with a sixth-grade education. Bowers himself has four degrees. “Why do I have four degrees? I was scared to death not to get all the education I could. I was taught, ‘You’d better get it all, boy.’

“This pisses me off. Immensely. I mean, I’m a father, a grandfather. I have two sons in their late forties, a daughter who is forty-two; my daughter works in a school. If she was a teacher, and someone treated her the way these teachers were treated by the administration, you would be talking to me with bars between us. Because I’d kill somebody. I wouldn’t put up with it. What they did to those teachers is outrageous. These young women, who are very vulnerable, and they get treated like this? Good God a’mighty. We had teachers faint coming out of our conference room. They were under such stress. You can ask the GBI agents, we told the teachers, look—tell us the truth. If you’ll cooperate, we will not prosecute you, and if you’ll help us, we’ll do all we can and help you keep your license with as little sanction as possible.

“I’m worried about the future of education, public in particular,” he says. “I think the confidence of the public in public education has gone way down. Things like, we need to do away with public schools and go to charter schools. That’s what people were saying to me. I’ve heard that 100,000 times. In the state. That we need to just do away with public schools, they’re not functioning. This is a pretty good argument for it. That’s what bothers me. I believe that good public schools are essential; that’s probably the biggest impact it’s had on me. I don’t know how to fix it. Because what I saw was just a disaster. An unmitigated disaster. From the board to the bottom. If today I had children, and lived in Atlanta, I’d be very leery about sending them to public schools.”

The details guy is eating a huge bowl of brown-sugar oatmeal and shaking his head, chuckling, existential laughter. Bob Wilson is sitting by the window of Thumbs Up Diner in Decatur, just around the corner from his law office. He’s looking out and watching the traffic, the walkers, the town slowly waking up. The case became Wilson’s life. It became the thing in the room, growing larger in the corner, watching over him. It strangled his personal time, erased the routines of his regular life. He didn’t even think he could do it at first. He didn’t want to get into it—he didn’t want to sink his hands into something so thick, when his wife was about to have back surgery, and juggle the case along with the normal requirements of his firm. But the governor had called him. Would he lead the investigation? No, Wilson told him, even though the governor was calling at the behest of Bowers, who had recommended him. Then the governor’s office had called back Bowers, who was riding one of those horses on his farm near Commerce. Perdue asked Bowers if he’d do it, if Wilson somehow then agreed to work on the case as well; he played the two men against each other without them knowing.

Wilson, a self-described perfectionist, became what Hyde describes as “a perfect foil” for Bowers. Like, the antimatter version. He’s a soft-spoken man, or seems to be. He doesn’t yell, doesn’t really curse, doesn’t tap his watch to interrupt other investigators, doesn’t scream in frustration at the table. Wilson created an organizational chart at the very beginning of the process, with three levels at the top—suspected high-level cheating, middle-level, lower-level—listing the name of every flagged school. There were forty-four. He put the chart on a stand in his office.

Wilson began to read up on the case, which meant articles published in the AJC, before he did most anything else. Before he began to analyze the numbers. The stories went back several years. High test score increases, questions, no answers, etc. “Those stories asked, is it possible these scores are not really legit?” he says.

“If you look at the number of schools in the state, elementary and middle, 1,800 schools give the CRCT. High schools don’t. Out of those schools, I remember one third-grade class, the year those kids took math, they ranked 803 out of 1,200 in state. The next year’s fourth graders? Those same students were number one in the state. I’m old enough to remember when the Mets went from last to first in one sweep. But as I point out, they only climbed over seven teams. These folks climbed over 802 other schools in one year. How smart do you have to be to go, ‘WHOA, GOOD GRACIOUS! How did that happen?’”

The APS system invariably never questioned those rises, according to Wilson. They always attributed them to the good works of the administration. Wilson’s question was, if one school’s class can do that—if the teaching methods are that productive—then why can’t all schools do that, and what is it, exactly, that they’re doing? When he and the other investigators began asking upper-level APS employees, “Did you and your cabinet, your curriculum, did you ever say I want you to find out how the hell you’re doing that?”—he raises his voice and almost stands up from the table—“No. No! They just stood by the damn party line.”

Wilson and Bowers knew the grading wasn’t the problem, but they went to Indianapolis to the McGraw-Hill testing site anyway, just to understand how tests are graded, and ultimately to prove that any questioning the schools did about the numbers (“such as the schools insinuating the numbers were bogus”) was unfounded. The testing center was like a giant warehouse, full of boxes packed with Scantron testing sheets from classrooms across the U.S. The box for APS was huge, around 4 x 4 x 3, and inside was a solid mass of sheets of paper. The men stood near the machine, which was like a very fast paper processor, to watch it scan the tests. Then they took randomly selected tests (and some tests flagged with high standard deviations) into a room and went over those sheets, sometimes with magnifying glasses, to see if they could tell erasures had been clearly made from wrong to right. “Hell, we didn’t even need the magnifying glasses,” Wilson says.

“We sat there and looked at them. We found more erasures than the machines did, because the machines are calibrated to give you the benefit of the doubt.”

The reason Wilson has been laughing over breakfast is because he’s remembering what it was like to begin the investigation by interviewing former APS Superintendent Beverly Hall in his office, in what he calls a “benchmark interview,” to figure out if she and APS were going to cooperate. During the interview, Wilson asked her about principals at APS. About hiring them and firing them. What she expected of them. She told Wilson that principals had three years to meet targets, and if they didn’t, they were gone. No exceptions, no excuses. “I bet she regrets to this day she told me that during the first meeting,” he says. This stringent demand for success led to what the investigators describe as a “culture of fear” throughout the system—one that trickled down, from the top. A fear of losing jobs because of numbers not met. And so cheating was an effect of the desperation to meet unachievable targets, to remain employed.

Wilson and Bowers went to see Hall’s office. They discovered that when you went into the building, you couldn’t just go up on the elevator and get off on her floor. You needed a special pass to venture into her suite. She had a gatekeeper. “She had so many roadblocks,” Wilson says. “There was no such thing as someone in APS going up to see Dr. Hall. Hell no, she wasn’t accessible. The roadblocks became clear. Hall was nobody’s fool. She had developed a public persona for herself. And in doing that, she was setting APS apart from other districts; she created these additional targets that were above and beyond No Child Left Behind. Atlanta had its own standards. They would be a quantum leap if the numbers had been met for real, and these kinds of standards will catch national attention. And it did. Atlanta got held up as the poster child as to what urban systems could achieve. It was imperative for her to create insulation for herself. In her entire tenure, we never could find that she met with a single principal one-on-one but once. In her years.”

Her office was huge. It was a shrine. She would meet with APS principals, ten to twelve at a time, in a conference room that adjoined the office—mass gatherings. She would never eat lunch or meet with a teacher one-on-one. On the walls hung test scores in frames. “You could get humiliated,” Wilson says. “It was a room of comparisons. If you were up, great. Keep it there. If you were down, get it up. You know your job.”

One of the things Wilson will never forget is that one of her representatives said, “My primary responsibility is to give the superintendent deniability.”

“You could’ve heard a pin drop in the room,” Wilson says.

The men really could’ve killed eachother. The three of them were trapped in a conference room for weeks completing the investigation, poring over legal documents with the repetition of gerbils running on a wheel. They had been in the same room with each other so often, had been so focused in each other’s company, had so questioned each other’s points of view, knew each other so well that while they were tearing apart and rewriting one of the most important reports in the history of this state, they wanted to strangle the words out of each other’s throats.

That’s an exaggeration—but only a slight one. The men were exhausted. They were irritable. They had argued and fought over the placement of every word in the 813-page Investigative Findings: Atlanta Public Schools 2009 CRCT Cheating report that was submitted to Governor Nathan Deal on June 30, 2011.

For months last spring and summer, Hyde, Bowers, and Wilson had been working from 4 a.m. to midnight just to get it done, to get it right. They had buried themselves in its minutiae, had torn apart its legalese. There were so many drafts they could not remember the number. They spent so much time in the Wiregrass Room that its corporate workspace had developed its own aura, its own gerontocratic stain; the younger lawyers at Balch & Bingham joked that the three men might combust within the room’s walls and send plumes of testosterone curling from beneath its door.

There were no windows in the Wiregrass Room. There was nothing to soothe the men, like a painting, or a plant. There was only a big wooden table, two projection screens on the wall, a Dell laptop plugged into the projector, and the numbing clack of its keyboard as Hyde typed. Wilson’s wife called herself an “APS widow.”

This past January, two of the men sat on a bench outside the Sloppy Floyd building across from the state capitol, a few months after the reports were released. Bowers had just been quoted in the New York Times describing the cheating as “an American tragedy.” The men were waiting on Bowers’s secretary to pick them up and drive them back to the office, and so they had a few minutes to kill. During the Dougherty County investigation—which was a much smaller and faster task—they had driven down to Albany together and stayed in the same Marriott, passing the local paper back and forth, and ended up reminiscing on their lives. They have known each other for more than thirty years, since Wilson was chief public defender for DeKalb County and Bowers was attorney general. Once, in a case that went to the Georgia Supreme Court, Wilson defended Bowers and won a case for him, “kicking the bar’s ass.” There had been a hearing by the state personnel board. The hearing was closed to the public. Bowers, the AG, sued the state personnel board for closing the hearing. He said it violated the open meetings law. The governor filed a bar complaint against Bowers for “suing his client.” His contention: “My client is the people of Georgia.” Wilson was Bowers’s lawyer. The Georgia Supreme Court ended up changing the bar rules. In order to enforce the law, he could sue state agencies. “That’s kicking the bar’s ass,” Bowers says.

Beverly Hall, who was named Superintendent of the Year in 2009 by the American Association of School Administrators, resigned the same month the report came out. She denies knowledge of any wrongdoing. In February, according to the AJC, a state ethics committee declared that five educators accused of cheating have lost their licenses to work in a classroom. There is an ongoing criminal investigation.

Some of the investigators who oversaw this case are worried that APS might take the confessors and kick them out, and not deal with the other suspected cheaters, because it’ll be the easy thing to do. That is, they are curious to see the disciplinary action. The men are not convinced that those who’ve confessed won’t be punished more severely.

“Where does this fit?” Bowers asks. “Is it one of the most significant cases we’ve ever done?” Yes, of course it was, Wilson says. “We couldn’t escape it.”

The men moved on from the report. They purged themselves of it, reentered the routines of their own lives, drifted back into the world. Richard Hyde continues his investigative work for the state’s Judicial Qualifications Commission, a self-described “hillbilly populist” who puts the fear of God into local judges, investigating complaints against them. He bought a new house. He went on the Atkins diet. The fact that he’d broken open the case by spending so much time at Venetian Hills became nothing more than a memory, which made him smile as he propped his lizard-skin boots on his desk, just below a wall full of thousands of bound documents that he promised to never look at again.

Justin Heckert is our writer at large.
Learn more about him | Contact him