A decade ago, Atlanta rapper T.I. was busted and sentenced to a year in the slammer for trying to buy a machine gun.
But someone had shot at the young millionaire, so I guess in his head he had a legit reason.
Counter that with Jim Beard, former chief financial officer of Atlanta, a career bureaucrat who fought his battles not on gritty streets, but in plush offices.
Last month, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Channel 2 Action News reported that Beard falsely used the Atlanta Police Department as a way to obtain a couple of fully automatic rifles, as in machine guns.
Why the city's money man would want to get his hands on all that firepower is the $1,301 question, which is the cost of each military grade M4 carbine (a sexier version of the AR-15) that Beard ordered.
That price is actually low — for a civilian, that is — because Regular Joes aren’t supposed to get their hands on machine guns manufactured after 1986 at any price. So there is no ready formula to determine the worth of such deadly devices.
But it seems Beard possessed them for two years until he left his city post in 2018, according to city documents federal agents subpoenaed in June as part of an ongoing corruption investigation.
Beard's lawyer, Scott Grubman, disputes the contention that his guy ever laid his mitts on the guns, saying that "at most" Beard signed for their delivery "in his official role" as CFO.
The APD apparently did not know one of Beard’s “official roles” included being an arms purveyor. (Beard also used city money to order a couple of semi-automatic Glocks during his time.)
The city documents show that in late 2015, Beard started corresponding with Daniel Defense, a gun manufacturer near Savannah, to get two automatic rifles.
In December, the gun company’s law enforcement sales manager wrote to Beard: “We will have these rifles hopefully built by the end of January,” adding that the processing of paperwork by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives would take another four to six weeks.
Three documents list the name of an Atlanta police officer, along with Beard's, as the purchaser of the guns. The officer worked in former Mayor Kasim Reed's executive protection detail. You remember them. They're the guys who ran the blue lights on the SUVs so Hizzoner didn't have to wait in traffic.
Last month, the city released a statement about the officer listed in Beard’s documents: “The detective was interviewed by the authorities, and he attested to the fact that his name was used without his knowledge.”
Once the order was made, Beard grew excited about the prospect of those armaments. In late February 2016, Beard emailed the gun guy to ask, “Are we still on for mid-March?”
Beard, who served in the Coast Guard, signed off the email with “semper paratus,” which is that service’s motto of “always ready.” The Daniel Defense rep always signed his “Semper Fi.”
In mid-March, Beard wrote back, “Anything?” A day later, the gun rep responded that the paperwork was done. Beard quickly e-mailed, “OK, can you expedite the shipping so they’ll arrive by Friday?”
In time for the weekend.
The paper trail then goes cold for three years until March 2019, when an Atlanta cop cut the locks off a carrying case and found two automatic weapons inside. The officer wrote a report saying Beard, while still with the city, asked police to hang onto his guns because he was “in between houses.”
Beard left the city shortly after Keisha Lance Bottoms became mayor. Four times in the report, the police officer wrote “his” property or weapons, as in Beard’s. Not the city’s property, or the APD’s weapons. But Beard’s.
Later, a police spokesman said, “We don’t do business with Daniel Defense.”
The FBI now has the guns.
Roger Mustian, from Daniel Defense, told me, “We only do legal transactions. We do things the right way. By the law.”
Matthew Kilgo, a former prosecutor who wrote “Georgia Gun Law, Armed and Educated,” read the documents and said it looks like Daniel Defense thought it was selling the guns to APD’s executive protection detail.
“Nothing unusual about the purchase, except (the guns) didn’t go to where they were supposed to go,” Kilgo said. “The only way Jim Beard could have put his hands on those weapons is the way he did it.”
Again, Beard’s attorney says his client never possessed them. In that scenario, however, Beard presumably ordered the guns, had them sit on a shelf for a couple of years, and then turned them over to the cops, where they sat on a shelf for another year.
It’s uncertain where Beard is these days. Beard, who holds an MBA from Northwestern University and sat on the national Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, was loyal to the former mayor and is one of those ex-officials whose image is tarnished because of the way they once rolled at Atlanta City Hall.
According to my colleagues Stephen Deere and Dan Klepal, the feds, in their corruption investigation, requested "Beard's credit card statements from the city after the AJC and (Channel 2) reported that he covered a $10,000 Paris hotel bill with his card." Beard repaid the city after the AJC started snooping around the matter.
“Beard also used his credit card to cover an $8,000 tab at American Cut, one of the city’s finest steakhouses where he hosted a going-away party for Reed and all 32 members of the mayor’s Cabinet in December 2017,” Deere and Klepal wrote.
It smacks of classic hubris — of blue lights, trips to Paris, living the high life on the public dime, and hefty bonuses.
The former administration touted a narrative of lowered crime rates, increased development and financial success. All true. Officials who were part of that story should now work at big law firms or high-powered consulting firms. But several are not.
Perhaps buying machine guns because they are just awesome is another symptom of an attitude that prevailed.
“Most of the time it’s because they can,” said Kilgo. “It’s ‘Why not? I’m the man, I can do what I want.’”
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