Suspended DeKalb County CEO Burrell Ellis adjusted his chair Thursday and looked directly at the 12 men and women who will determine his future — whether he will be convicted of corruption or cleared of felony charges so he can resume the job.
Through eight days of testimony, he waited to give his side of the story. When his turn arrived, he started by telling jurors how he became a lawyer, then a county commissioner and then chief executive officer of Georgia’s fourth largest county.
Ellis is charged with nine counts of extortion, bribery and perjury. Prosecutors say he threatened to end vendors’ contracts with the county when they resisted his telephone calls to ask for donations so he could pay off his re-election campaign debt. Prosecutors say Ellis then lied to a special purpose grand jury when he was asked about the extent of his role in awarding county contracts. He has maintained that he’s guilty of nothing more than aggressive solicitation for donations.
This is the second time Ellis has gone on trial for the charges. A judge declared a mistrial in October when that jury failed to reach a verdict after 11 days of deliberations.
Thursday, most of the jurors scribbled notes as Ellis introduced himself, but looked directly at him when he started answering questions about the vendors he is accused of strong-arming.
Ellis’ versions differed from that given by company officials and employees who have already testified.
Joann Wise, who is a lobbyist for the IT company Ciber, testified last week that Ellis threatened to end Ciber’s contract with DeKalb and to tell her bosses she was to blame after she said the business would not make a campaign contribution.
But Ellis said that Wise was the one who linked campaign contributions to Ciber’s county contract.
“She said they had an open procurement and she was waiting to see if they got the contract (with the count) before they would decide (if they would make a campaign contribution),” Ellis said. “I told her I did not know they had an open procurement and my call had nothing to do with it.”
Defense attorney Craig Gillen used the notes Ellis took on campaign calls to walk his client through conversations with two of the four vendors named in the indictment.
To make his calls, Ellis testified, he used a list of contacts that came from his head of county procurement and contracts, Kelvin Walton, who secretly recorded Ellis to avoid being charged with lying to a special grand jury. The jury heard hours of the secret recordings of conversations with Ellis.
Brandon Cummings, co-owner of Power and Energy Services, testified last week that Ellis left several messages for him and that, when they finally spoke, the conversation was “uncomfortable.” On recordings played in court, Cummings was heard trying to avoid answering Ellis’ questions and asking the CEO why his Cobb County business should give to a politician in DeKalb.
Ellis wrote in his notes, however, that they had a “nice conversation.” According to testimony, Ellis told Walton to stop calling Cummings’ business to perform maintenance on generators for the Department of Watershed Management.
But Ellis told the jury that the reason for that was that one of Cummings’ employees told him that Cummings was not interested in his “services.”
“My services are the services of DeKalb County,” Ellis told jurors.
Much of the testimony on Thursday was from character witnesses, including Ellis’ wife of almost 14 years. They all said he was trustworthy and that they would believe anything he said under oath.
Ellis testified for only an hour Thursday afternoon, but he will resume his testimony Friday.
Judge Courtney Johnson told jurors she expects they will start their deliberations Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest. “We’re in the home stretch,” the judge said.
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