His church sits at the top of Rabbit Hill Road, just up from a yard littered with hand-painted come-ons for honey, spring onions and greens. A white steeple rises from a modest brick sanctuary whose campus includes two more buildings, a covered picnic area and a cemetery.

Development has crept in — a subdivision is staked out across the street — yet this tiny corner of Gwinnett County still looks like a lush leftover from its rural past.

LOUIE FAVORITE/AJC Staff (ENLARGE)

Ron Sailor Sr. now leads a Gwinnett County church congregation. At one time, he was a prominent African-American voice in Atlanta media.

"I wanted a place where I could be at peace and stay away from controversy," says Ron Sailor Sr., a homegrown Atlanta media star before serving the past 15 years as minister at Christ the King Baptist Church in Dacula. "So I chose here. For me to get my life where God needed me to be, I needed quiet."

In less than a decade, Sailor, 55, went from being one of the most prominent African-American voices on Atlanta TV and radio — the whole city once chattered about his possible run for mayor — to what he calls his "self-imposed exile" after years of high living, dubious decisions and bankruptcy.

Tumult has returned to Sailor's life, through the high-profile crimes of two of his sons, including his disgraced state legislator namesake. It has prompted Sailor, members of his church and many who knew him in his Atlanta heyday to wonder, often in Biblical terms, if aspects of his past have been revisited on his sons.

A kind of hustler journalist in the Geraldo Rivera mold, Sailor was once so close to the city's low streets and halls of power — from Ben Hill to Buckhead — that his rise, fall and family tragedies have become their own kind of local morality tale.

Andrew Young, who while mayor spent a night with Sailor for a story walking Atlanta's streets disguised as a homeless person, likens it to "the troubles of Job."

"It's like all the human tragedy he's covered has come back to haunt him," says Maynard Eaton, one of a handful of black TV reporters who competed against Sailor in the 1980s. "He covered a lot of pain and could tell stories as poignantly as anybody. And now, unfortunately, he's haunted by his own story."

His oldest son, Ron Sailor Jr., 33, pleaded guilty in March to laundering $375,000 for a federal undercover agent posing as a drug dealer. A four-term Democrat and Baptist minister like his father, he has resigned his seat and has been fired by his church. He promised to cooperate in a public corruption investigation in exchange for a more lenient sentence.

During his negotiated plea in court, Sailor Jr. said he was "desperate for money." Records show a string of failed real estate deals and at least nine loans in default, totaling almost $1 million.

Another son, Antony Sailor, 29, pleaded guilty four years ago to the strangulation murder of his girlfriend. The 19-year-old victim was the niece of Ron Sailor Sr.'s current wife. Antony is serving a life sentence in state prison.

"Life comes to where you are. You can't run from life," Sailor says one recent morning inside his church office. "What happened here is life has come into Dacula and found me."

Up from the bottom

Sailor learned life in Atlanta from the bottom up. Raised poor in Summerhill by a single mother, he remembers the neighborhood now occupied by Turner Field as "a lot of dead-end streets — physically, emotionally, educationally, materially."

The family moved whenever his mother couldn't make rent, but Sailor found his footing at Frederick Douglass High School and started a radio station there. At 19, he pastored a country church in Paulding County.

He went to Emory University, where his mother cooked for a sorority house. He left his junior year, by then married and working at black-oriented WAOK radio — making "too much money," he says, to stay in school.

His breakthrough came during the "Missing and Murdered Children" case in the early 1980s. With Atlanta gripped by the killings of 29 African-American children and young men, Sailor co-hosted on WSB-TV a kind of must-watch local "Nightline." He was not yet 30.

"At a time when the white community was horrified and the black community was traumatized, Ron Sailor was a reassuring and steadying voice," says Rick Allen, former political columnist and author of "Atlanta Rising: The Invention of an International City 1946-1996." "That cemented his place in the media firmament here. He was the town crier in a time of dread and near panic."

Hired afterward by WSB full-time, Sailor ran around town like a bespectacled, wide-body, caped crusader — at turns dogged, charming, plugged-in and funny, with a gift-of-gab delivery he calls "the King's English with a Southern black clip to it."

"He was the first 'black' guy [on TV]. He wasn't the Maynard Jackson hue ... not 'light, bright and damn near white,' " Eaton says. "That meant he worked a little harder, had a little edge. A little, 'I'm black and going to make my homeboys proud.' "

His stories and commentaries won local Emmys, and he hosted WSB's highly rated political talk show, now called "The Georgia Gang," on WAGA. It aired then on Sunday nights, the panelists viewed as minor celebrities and agenda setters.

"He was a burgeoning superstar," recalls WSB colleague Marc Picard, now at WXIA.

Then Sailor caused a stir when he floated the notion of running for mayor when Young's second term expired.

The idea was short-lived. Sailor says former mayor Maynard Jackson, who also planned to run, summoned the 34-year-old newsman into his office "and said, 'If you run for mayor, I will defeat you.' He said it another way. It was very clear."

Recalls Young: "Ron was a media star until he started getting ideas he could be the mayor. He completely misjudged it and ended up losing almost everything."

Sailor's financial world unraveled even as he rode atop it. He lived in a $500,000 Alpharetta house near Deion Sanders, yet bounced a $76.24 check for champagne. He raised more than $100,000 to rebuild a church destroyed by fire that he pastored in Carrollton, then had the Cadillac the church leased for him repossessed. He filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy in 1986 and spent the next decade in court.

Money woes seeped into his work. He got a $2,000 loan through Fulton County Sheriff Richard Lankford, a close friend. After Lankford was indicted in 1989 for extorting a jail vendor, Sailor became a prosecution witness at the trial, embarrassing himself in the eyes of many when his court testimony appeared to contradict what he'd told the grand jury.

He was gone from the station a week later.

There was a sense, some former colleagues say, that Sailor would say anything to save himself.

"I don't think he was ever out of debt," says Tom Houck, a panelist on Sailor's talk show. "I always thought there was something deceptive about him."

Sailor resurfaced in 1992, at WXIA, opposite Neal Boortz on a kind of televised radio shout-show. It bombed. He returned to radio as WAOK news director, then ran a station, with an agreement to buy it, before another broadcasting company took it over.

"He seemed determined to be an entrepreneur," recalls the Rev. Joseph Lowery, who officiated at Sailor's marriage to his current wife. "Maybe he wanted to spread the butter over too big a slice of bread. That always leaves the butter exhausted and the bread unsatisfied."

Sailor finally drove out to Rabbit Run Road to become pastor of a 200-member mom-and-pop church then called Appalachee Baptist.

Bankruptcy court ordered $752 a month garnished from his paycheck.

A father's lament

"If people want to connect my sons to me — are these the sins of the father visited upon the son? I don't know," says Sailor from a leather chair behind his desk, surrounded by framed commemorations for his church work and shelves of Biblical texts.

The room's carpeting muffled his footsteps when he entered, despite his 287 pounds, down from 351.

"At first I wondered, is this the result of something I did? Some example I set or didn't set? My problems were minor, compared to the problems we're talking about today. But if we are what we eat, then our children can model after how they're parented.

"I can be critical of myself," he adds, "but what adults do is the result of what adults do. Ron's decisions were Ron's decisions. Tony destroyed a life and ruined a life — the life he ruined was his. I didn't produce that. I didn't spawn that."

Sailor has done well in Dacula. He remarried seven years ago and helps raise his new wife's daughter and son, ages 14 and 9.

He renamed the church and has overseen its growth to about 2,500 members. The 800-seat sanctuary that replaced the original is already too small. Sailor plans a bigger one.

"We'll hold off until we get out of debt," he says. "That's another thing I've learned."

Yet he still wheels and deals. He and his wife, through his company Sailor Media, opened a restaurant that went bust, he says, after his son's murder arrest.

He also bought and sold a religious radio station in Moultrie and wants to produce documentaries about people across Georgia from another company with an office on Auburn Avenue.

Sailor describes his family, which also includes a 26-year-old son, as "shell-shocked" and watching events of the last few years "in silent horror."

He doesn't make excuses for either of his troubled sons; he gave investigators a lead after the murder that helped track Antony to Florida, where they believe he was about to flee the country with another woman.

"I love Ron so much and Tony so much," he says. "I accept where they are, but I love them."

After Antony's arrest, his second marriage nearly imploded, and he wound up in the hospital for three months with a blood clot, close to death.

"Whenever you have adult children who are in trouble — real adult trouble — there's no way you can't feel like your heart's broken 10,000 times," he says.

He's determined not to let Ron Jr.'s problems affect him the same way.

"For 15 years I've been at a delightful church, and I'm married to a good woman who has two kids who tolerate me," he says. "So even with the horrible situation involving Tony and the situation involving Ron, I won't complain.

"That's a song, by the way," he adds. "A black gospel song. 'I Won't Complain.'"

His hands are folded on his desk. Nearby are photos of Antony and Ron Jr. in happier days.

Then he says, "I might sing it Sunday."