Last week, while pleading for mercy for convicted Atlanta educators, Andrew Young brought up a chunk of Atlanta history that still rankles in some quarters, apparently including his.
He talked vaguely about a wide-ranging investigation gone haywire when he was mayor, one in which he was called before a federal grand jury and advised by Griffin Bell, who once was Jimmy Carter’s attorney general, to invoke The Fifth.
Young said he ignored Bell’s advice, testified and was cleared of any wrongdoing. Then he noted that one of the investigators who spurred that long-ago episode also “investigated the teachers” on trial in the APS cheating scandal.
Young, the former mayor, ambassador and Atlanta civil rights icon, was referring to an incident nearly three decades ago that was to become known as “The Bond Affair.” The unnamed investigator he mentioned was a one-time Atlanta cop and later scourge of Georgia judges, Atlanta teachers and now officials in DeKalb County. His name is Richard Hyde.
On March 19, 1987, Alice Bond, the estranged wife of civil rights leader Julian Bond, walked into an Atlanta police station and dropped a hot case in the laps of two young narcotics officers, Hyde and Lance Alford.
Mrs. Bond had been beaten up by her husband’s alleged girlfriend and came in to drop a dime on her spouse. She alleged he was doing cocaine (which he denied) and so were other prominent Atlantans. The cops’ supervisor told them to keep digging. On March 31, they prepared a memo for Chief Morris Redding. The next day they were transferred out of narcotics and put on midnight duty. Their captain, too, was transferred.
Soon, there was an investigation about who leaked the memo to the media, accompanied by competing accusations: Black police higher-ups were trying to shut down an embarrassing investigation; white officers were trying to embarrass black superiors and politicians.
Then, hard-charging U.S. Attorney Bob Barr (yes, that Bob Barr) started an investigation to see if Young was part of an effort to obstruct justice. It turns out Young called Mrs. Bond just minutes before she was to meet with FBI agents and police. Young said he wasn't calling to stop her from talking; he was simply calling as a minister and friend to urge her to not spread rumors.
During that meeting with investigators, she started backing off her claims. She later called the AJC to retract her allegations.
It was all this long-ago history that Young was referring to last week in a Fulton County courtroom before Judge Jerry Baxter as the judge was getting ready to sentence eight educators to prison for their part in a test cheating conspiracy.
I called Young this week to ask why he brought it up. He said investigations often have cascading effects, and that the 1987 affair was one that split the city into sides and competing versions of reality, kind of like the current cheating affair.
Young recalled ignoring his attorney’s advice and walking into the grand jury to testify.
“I testified on the basis that the grand jury would be half black and they would know me,” Young told me. “When I got in there, there was only one black grand juror, and he was in the back and slept.”
Still, they believed Young. Or at least they didn’t think he had committed a crime and obstructed an investigation.
Later, police higher-ups loaded up Hyde and Alford and a host of others with administrative infractions, many that could end careers — or at least keep them on extended midnight duty. But by December 1987, Young had had enough. He called in police leadership and told them to ease up on the officers.
The city rented some space at the Marriott Marquis, called in several of the officers for a secret meeting with Young, Atlanta Public Safety Commissioner George Napper and Chief Redding, and let everyone vent without fear of reprisals in what the mayor called a “no-fault analysis.”
Young this week told me he was hoping Judge Baxter would similarly end the cheating trial with a similar exercise. Young quoted South African activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “there is no future without forgiveness.”
Young has always matched his idealism with pragmatism. When he ordered an end to the Bond Affair, the 1988 Democratic convention was on the horizon and the city had recently entered a bid for the 1996 Olympics. A nasty, racially tinged police investigation would have undermined the narrative of A City Too Busy To Hate.
All these years later, Hyde, now an investigator for a silk-stocking law firm, is appreciative for what Young did.
“In the final analysis, Andy Young figured out what was happening and ended it,” Hyde said. “All through his career, Andy has negotiated and mediated. That’s what he did here.”
By contrast, Hyde said he has always been a trouble magnet. “I was snake bit,” he said. “Trouble found me.”
Hyde once reported that certain cops were getting paid off by strip-clubs owners. He once shot a chimp that had attacked people. He once got Chief Redding so peeved that he made Hyde report for special duty — sitting on a couch in the chief’s office each work day for a month.
Of the Bond case, Hyde said, “We just did our jobs and it turned into a firestorm.”
Hyde said the infamous memo, the one that got him and others transferred, shouldn’t have been written. He said not enough evidence had been collected, that a lot of it was hearsay. But, he said he was doing as he was ordered.
He also takes Young at his word that he didn’t call Alice Bond to obstruct justice. In part, that conclusion might be based on gratitude. “Andy saved my career and Lance’s career,” he said.
Hyde’s career didn’t last long. A couple years later, he went on to become an award-winning TV producer and then shifted back to a career as a pain-in-the rear sleuth. Alford retired in 2004 as a lieutenant and works for another big-time law firm as an investigator.
The Bond Affair toughened the two and forged a friendship. “We went through the fire together,” Hyde said.
They talk to each other each March 19, the anniversary of Alice Bond walking into the station.
And last month, when DeKalb County’s interim CEO, Lee May, called for Hyde and former Georgia Attorney General Mike Bowers to dig into corruption in the county, Hyde got on the telephone: He called Lance Alford and asked him to be his partner in the investigation.
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