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A crucial witness for the prosecution of DeKalb County CEO Burrell Ellis continued to insist Friday that Ellis leveraged his power to lean on county contractors for political contributions.
The witness, DeKalb Purchasing Director Kelvin Walton, said in his fourth day on the stand Ellis punished companies that wouldn’t donate. Walton also said Ellis’ insistence that companies return his phone calls was less a measure of responsiveness than it was a pretext for extorting political funds. Testifying after Walton were two DeKalb employees who said drafting lists of contractors for Ellis superseded other work.
Walton, who covertly recorded Ellis after prosecutors caught him lying under oath, concluded his testimony. Defense attorneys could call him back for more answers.
Jurors have listened to two weeks of testimony so far in the case against Ellis, who has pleaded not guilty to charges that he extorted county vendors by threatening to pull county contracts from businesses unless they pitched in to his 2012 re-election campaign. It’s the largest corruption trial in metro Atlanta since former Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell was convicted in 2006.
In response to questions from Ellis’ defense attorneys, Walton said Ellis ordered him to create lists of vendors who had recently won contracts with the county, and then the two of them went over whether those companies had made campaign contributions.
Walton said Ellis told him to “dry up” county business relationships with companies that wouldn’t give.
Walton said vendors ignored Ellis’ calls because they knew he was after one thing: money.
“Vendors know who should be calling them from the county, and it’s not the CEO,” Walton said. “He will beat them down until they return his calls.”
The lead defense attorney for Ellis, Craig Gillen, attempted to introduce evidence about other businesses that Ellis didn’t cut off even though they wouldn’t donate. But Superior Court Judge Courtney Johnson said Ellis’ behavior toward other contractors wasn’t relevant to the pending charges.
“What is being left with this jury is the incorrect perception through this witness … that if you don’t give, you won’t get business, and that’s absolutely not true,” Gillen said. “The truth is exactly opposite of Mr. Walton’s self-serving narrative.”
During one recording played in court, Ellis said he expected contractors to return his phone calls as a way to show they’re responsive to the needs of the county.
“We’re just not going to have situations where people are non-responsive,” Ellis said. “They can not give. But they can’t not be returning phone calls, hanging up on me.”
Once Walton had been released from the witness stand, prosecutors called a series of others to show that while Walton was an admitted liar, he was truthful in court this time — two investigators and four low-level county employees who, for the most part, resented having to spend hours, sometimes into the night, putting together detailed vendor lists.
One of them claimed she was fired last week because of county government restructuring in response to the investigations of corruption, but not necessarily because of the case against Ellis.
“They did a reorg because of county corruption,” said Natascha Crenshaw, a 10-year county employee who worked with new contracts in the Department of Purchasing and Contracting “They hired an interim director who made it clear he was going to do things different. In the interview I was asked, ‘given the grand jury (investigation of) corruption, why should I keep you?’ I believe I was terminated because of that.”
Her former co-workers echoed Crenshaw’s testimony about how work on the vendor list for the CEO took precedence over the demands of their tax-payer funded jobs.
“The list was the priority,” Crenshaw testified. “We could not do anything until the list was prepared. … It was the priority. You don’t go home until the list is created.”
Sometimes she would have to sort through 500 to 700 pages to find names, phone numbers and email addresses for contacts at companies that had contracts with DeKalb.
Imani Marley-Husbands testified she and others required to work on the list resented the task, especially knowing why they had to set side everything else when the bi-weekly job was due.
“It felt like he was campaigning,” Marley-Husbands said. “It was more important than anything I had to do. Whatever I had on my plate had to be put on the back burner. I could not go home. I had to complete the task. I did not want to work on the list.”
Clay Nix, a former DA’s office investigator, said they brought Walton into the investigation a few days after he lied to a special purpose grand jury.
Nix told jurors that investigators knew they had to find a way to back up what the star prosecution witness said because he had already lied at least once to a special purpose grand jury investigating the county’s Department of Watershed Management.
Nix testified that investigators confronted Kelvin Walton a week after he first appeared before the grand jury on May 2, 2012.
“We told him to think about his actions. He could possibly be charged with a crime. We were going to offer him the opportunity to work with our office,” Nix said.
But investigators needed to be sure they could trust Walton.
“Since he had been untruthful, we knew any information he provided to us we needed to be able to independently corroborate it,” Nix said.
So they gave Walton a digital recorder.
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