What caused Tim Madison’s downfall?
BY MIKE BUFFINGTON
Editor, The Jackson Herald
ANALYSIS
The prosecution of former District Attorney Tim Madison, his wife Linn Jones, and a former ADA is over. Madison has given up his law license and is in jail on a six-year sentence for theft. His wife was sentenced to serve 180 days in a detention center and former ADA Brett Williams got a fine and probation.
Although the charges have worked their way through the legal system, many wonder how a district attorney could have gotten so far off track. A year ago, Madison was among the elite of the state’s prosecution community, a position he’d held for a quarter-century.
Now he’s sitting behind bars.
I cannot fully answer the “why” questions. Nobody can. But having spent weeks researching and writing the investigative articles we published last spring about Madison’s questionable financial dealings, I did get a sense about some of the surrounding events that led up to his fall from grace.
DISTANT RELATIONSHIPS
Madison’s career began with a lot of promise. He was considered a bright, rising star when he took the DA’s seat in 1983. He had a gift for public speaking and his closing arguments seemed to carry weight at jury trials. His advocacy for victims of domestic violence won him supporters in a judicial circuit where family violence is epidemic.
But over the years, a darker side emerged in Madison’s professional demeanor. The sometimes combative nature of our advocate judicial system is always difficult on professional relationships, but Madison seemed to be more distant than necessary. Although not a loner, his professional aloofness toward the local bar reportedly rubbed some in the area legal community the wrong way. Efforts to mend that rift were reportedly rebuffed.
That strained professional demeanor eventually grew outside the local community. A former DA in another circuit told me Madison came to be viewed as “sleazy” by some of his colleagues around the state.
That opinion was amplified when Mr. Madison apparently became obsessed with winning the annual volleyball tournament held at the state DA convention each summer. While most other DAs viewed the volleyball tournament as nothing more than a fun social occasion, Madison reportedly approached it as a competitive, must-win event.
Several former employees told me he would have “mandatory” volleyball practices for his staff to get ready for the summer event, even having one staff member miss his child’s birthday party to practice volleyball. Madison’s hypercompetitive, win-at-all-costs mentality was apparently met with disdain by his peers. He reportedly became known as the “Volleyball A------e” by some of his colleagues from around the state.
That same distant, strained relationship also evolved between Madison and many in local law enforcement agencies. Although the two groups should be natural allies, many local law officials came to mistrust, even detest having to work with Madison.
Part of that was due to Madison’s aggressive stand toward prosecuting law enforcement officials; he seemed to relish prosecuting cops. On several occasions, he launched high profile investigations into leading law enforcement officials, only to see those probes fail to prove any wrongdoing.
Some officials told me his disdain for law enforcement officials was so obvious that they wondered if something had happened in his background to make him dislike cops.
STAFF DISSENSION
Despite these professional tensions, many of those I spoke with who worked under Madison said that until the mid-1990s, they considered him to be a “straight arrow” prosecutor. For example, one former ADA said Madison had a rule that employees in the circuit who wanted to drink alcohol should go outside the circuit to partake. Madison didn’t want his associates seen drinking in local establishments.
Most of those I spoke with traced Madison’s current problems to the late 1990s as his first marriage dissolved and he took up with Linn Jones, whom he would later marry. Madison helped Jones get employment with several area law enforcement agencies and later hired her in the DA’s office.
But that relationship became divisive inside the DA’s office. Although Jones worked for several other law enforcement agencies, at least some of the time she was actually being paid through a victims’ assistance grant administered by the DA’s office. Madison reportedly helped to find her jobs with area law agencies.
Not surprisingly, hints of favoritism began tearing at the fabric of the DA’s staff as Jones received what many considered special treatment by Madison. One staff member apparently became so upset about the Madison-Jones relationship that Madison reportedly prayed with the staffer about his personal life problems and asked for spiritual guidance from the employee.
But if the personal relationships were troubling, so was Jones’ financial relationship with the DA’s office. Several former employees said that at one point in 1998 or 1999, Madison was questioned by staff members about allegations of questionable time cards Jones submitted under a grant funded position.
“When confronted, Mr. Madison said Linn (Jones) would make up the time. She did not. Several senior staff members left during 1998 and early 1999 over issues like that,” one source close to the situation told me during our investigation last year.
Staff turnover even before Jones entered the picture had already caused problems. Madison reportedly became angry at the short tenure of some newly-hired staffers and instituted contracts calling for “liquidated damages” to be paid if staffers left the DA’s employment before their contract was up.
Although Madison was never charged with having diverted those “liquidated damages” payments, our investigation last year never found where the funds had been turned over to any of the county government, as they were supposed to have been.
Many of the people who left the DA’s office during this time stayed in touch with each other over the years. It was as though they had become an underground fraternity of former Piedmont ADAs. Many had heard rumors about ongoing problems in Madison’s office and weren’t shocked that we were investigating some of Madison’s financial dealings.
Still, none of the former staff members I spoke with seemed to really know the depth of the problems, or the details of what was going on. Many staffers said they didn’t like what they saw and they didn’t like how Madison treated his staff, so they found jobs elsewhere and left.
MONEY FROM THE SKY
About the time Madison began a relationship with Jones and the staff problems accelerated, another event happened that seems to have played a key role in Madison’s eventual downfall. In the late 1990s, the state created an add-on fee to fines for “victims assistance” programs. Those funds flowed directly to the DA’s office. For a time, they were relatively small amounts.
But around 2001, the funds began to grow as several towns in Jackson County began aggressive road patrols. It was like money falling from the sky into the DA’s office. (At one point, the state shifted the payments to the clerks of court, but then changed it back the next year to the DA’s office.)
Those funds amounted to a lot of money over the years, but there was virtually no state or local oversight of that money. In 2002, Jackson County auditors accidentally found that Madison had made some payroll payments to an employee from one of the accounts. Those wages had not been included on the employee’s W-2 form. The auditors issued a “finding” and Madison said he would stop the practice and turn the funds over to the county to handle.
But that didn’t happen and as late as 2007, he continued to make payments out of the victims’ assistance accounts for extra wages to employees.
It was also those funds Madison began to use for trip expenses and entertainment, sometimes for staff members, but often for himself and Jones. Although he was not charged with theft in those expenses, they were clearly an abuse of discretion.
CLOUDS GATHER
After Madison divorced his first wife, he and Jones eventually married. Rumors that they were driving government vehicles on personal trips began to circulate. One story alleged that Jones drove a Jeep that had been confiscated in a drug bust and had a ski rack mounted on top for a trip to Colorado.
Whispers that Madison was drinking heavily and gambling also circulated, vices that he later blamed at his sentencing hearing for having led him to lose his “moral compass.”
Staff turnover continued, but Madison apparently became more distant from the day-to-day operations. Law enforcement officials began to grumble about the quality of the DA’s staff work. They also complained that Madison was often gone from the office and they couldn’t reach him to discuss important cases.
After our articles were published in March 2007, a number of people contacted me — both crime victims and those who had been prosecuted by Madison — and complained his office had treated them unfairly. I never found evidence he mishandled criminal cases, but many people apparently believed their case had not been dealt with correctly.
What no one knew at the time, however, was just how far Madison was reaching into the public trough to support his private lifestyle. He put Jones on both the Banks County and Jackson County payrolls at the same time with a total of 60 hours pay per week. Since he often moved people around the three offices in the circuit, he knew that the three counties didn’t compare notes on his office staff or payrolls.
But having Jones on two payrolls did create an unmistakable paper trail, a trail uncovered last year after we shifted through a mountain of payroll documents from the three counties in the circuit.
In addition, Madison created a scheme to have a young ADA staffer doubled-paid, once by the state and again by Banks County. Part of the Banks County money ADA Brett Williams received was then kicked-back to Madison, although Williams apparently thought the funds were being used for a training fund.
To his credit, Williams owned up to the payments when I called last year and asked him about his financial relationship with Madison. He seemed to honestly believe Madison was using the funds for a legitimate purpose. That Madison could manipulate an ADA to that extent seemed implausible at the time, but in the end, the courts also indicated a belief that Williams had been used and manipulated.
ATTEMPTED TO STOP THE STORY
When we began our newspaper investigation into Madison’s handling of public funds in January 2007, we had no idea where it would lead. A confidential source contacted us and based on that, we began asking questions and making open records requests. (We eventually made some 22 open records requests to local and state agencies during our investigation.)
When Madison heard about our asking questions and the records requests, he secretly attempted to have a lawyer pressure us to back off.
At the time, the state probe into former Jefferson Police Chief Darren Glenn was in full swing and we had been openly critical of the state’s handling of that investigation. Ironically, it had been Madison who started the Glenn investigation way back in 2005.
When he learned of our questioning about his office finances, Madison contacted Glenn’s attorney, former state attorney general Mike Bowers, and asked him to pressure “the newspaper” to back off our investigation of the DA’s office. Madison reportedly told Bowers he would make the Glenn case go away if Bowers would convince us to stop asking questions.
We knew nothing about that at the time. Bowers never contacted us about Madison’s call. We only learned about it months later after Madison had been indicted.
But in retrospect, it fits. Madison attempted to get the state to give him back the Glenn case in January 2007, about the same time we began making a number of open records requests to the DA’s office. And he told one of our reporters at the time he didn’t think the Glenn case should go forward.
In the end, the state refused to hand the Glenn case back to Madison and the matter became moot. Still, his bid to play politics with the case is troubling. Why Madison thought Bowers would go along with such a scheme, or why he thought we would acquiesce to such a deal, isn’t clear. In hindsight, it appears to have been an act of desperation by a man who had something to hide.
DOWNFALL
After our investigative series was published in March 2007, and Madison resigned in May, some in the judicial circuit expressed amazement, questioning if Madison had really done anything wrong. Indeed, I was a little shocked at some in the legal community who expressed strong support of Madison in spite of the serious allegations he was facing and the nature of the evidence.
And that was our biggest concern. When we began our series of investigative articles, I was doubtful about follow up. Although Madison had irritated many of his colleagues, he was still part of a tight fraternity that doesn’t like one of its own coming under a microscope. Lawyers may fight among themselves over cases, but they tend to circle the wagons when one of their own comes under fire from the outside.
That reluctance to believe a district attorney would steal from the counties he represented was a major consideration in how we presented our stories about Madison’s financial dealings. We knew we would have to show what had happened, or people just wouldn’t believe what they were reading.
That was why we published copies of checks and printed a long list of expenditures from DA office accounts. The details of what had happened were important to show the serious nature of what we were writing about.
Of course, Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker did quickly launch an investigation into Madison’s office. Our fear that no real investigation would follow proved to be unfounded. AG Baker and his office stepped up and quickly did the right thing. For that, they are to be commended.
LESSONS LEARNED
But none of this really answers how or why Madison got so far off course. Was it arrogance? Was it having stayed in office so long he believed himself to be invincible? Was it greed? Did alcohol abuse dislodge his “moral compass” as he claimed in court?
Perhaps it was a little of all of those things. But I think the biggest part of the problem was a simple lack of accountability inherent in the DA’s position.
DA offices operate as independent islands. Because of what they do, they have to have a large measure of political independence. They don’t answer to their local county governments since they are a state agency. But they don’t answer to the state, either, because they are elected independently and aren’t part of a “real” state agency.
In addition, DA political races are rare unless there is an open seat. Incumbent DAs seldom have opposition at the ballot box, which leaves them almost totally unaccountable to the public.
For the most part, DA offices self-regulate. Local bar groups could apply pressure to the office, but most lawyers don’t want to be openly critical of a DA with whom they have to do business in representing clients.
In short, being a DA is almost like being a local king.
It is this lack of oversight and accountability that I believe is the biggest lesson to be learned from Madison’s downfall. Whatever the condition of his internal “moral compass,” he stole public funds because he could. There was no institutional accountability, either locally or at the state level, to make sure it couldn’t happen.
Every public agency, including the DA’s office, should get independent financial auditing every year and all public funds mandated by the state should be audited.
None of this is to excuse Madison’s actions. He didn’t have to steal or abuse public funds. Most DAs across the state don’t abuse them.
But as this sad story shows, even our top prosecutors are subject to temptation. They are human, with all the moral frailties that implies.
But DAs are also granted immense power over the lives of other people. Without oversight, that can become a bad combination.
For their protection, and ours as taxpayers, prosecutors should be held to the same level of financial accountability as any other public official.
Such safeguards, had they been in place, might have prevented Tim Madison from compromising his oath of office.
