‘Shadow mayor:’ As Keisha Lance Bottoms rose to power, one adviser was close by

As Keisha Lance Bottoms rose through Atlanta’s power structure in the 2010s, Alvin Kendall followed close behind.

When Bottoms was appointed executive director of the Atlanta Fulton County Recreation Authority in 2015, Kendall emerged as a consultant for the agency, which owns State Farm Arena and once owned Turner Field.

After Bottoms was elected mayor, Kendall was hired to help negotiate the multibillion-dollar redevelopment of the Gulch, a downtown expanse of parking lots and train tracks now replaced by Centennial Yards, a minicity of high-rise apartments and hotels.

At the recreation authority, observers mused that it seemed like Kendall was running day-to-day operations. In City Hall, one of Bottoms’ rivals called him “the shadow mayor.”

Bottoms makes no secret of her relationship with Kendall, the East Point attorney she’s described as a mentor and adviser. Kendall has said the former mayor is like family.

Bottoms’ run for governor has renewed scrutiny of her relationship with Kendall, who earned some $1.9 million from the city while she was mayor and whose past includes a 1998 criminal conviction that, for a time, cost him his law license.

A paid surrogate of her opponent, Rick Jackson, recently used the Republican’s campaign email account to ask: “Why has Bottoms tethered herself so closely to (a) convicted felon?”

Long before she became a Fulton County judge or gained notoriety as mayor and an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump during the pandemic, Bottoms’ career took shape at the Kendall Law Firm, where she worked as a young attorney.

In her memoir, “The Rough Side of the Mountain,” Bottoms described the law office as a place where her colleagues “had to be both self-sufficient and collaborative and, above all, scrappy.”

“I often tell people that everything I learned professionally about fighting giants, I learned from Alvin Kendall,” Bottoms wrote in her book.

Kendall’s mentorship has shaped both her personal and professional life. The attorney became a close family friend when Bottoms was in high school and gave her first job as a lawyer.

“I know Keisha like she’s my own daughter,” Kendall told interviewers from a Harvard University program on local government who were writing a case study on Bottoms’ administration.

Atlanta journalist Maria Saporta wrote in 2021 that Kendall was “intricately involved in almost everything going on at City Hall — without an official job or title.”

Kendall did not directly respond to requests for comment, although the Bottoms campaign referenced his understanding of past events in their responses for this story.

Legal trouble

Kendall came under the microscope of federal prosecutors in the 1990s.

Federal authorities charged Kendall, whose law practice included criminal defense work, in 1997, accusing him of tipping off one of his clients about an upcoming raid by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. When agents executed the search warrant, prosecutors alleged, “very little evidence was found.” The client, who worked in nightclubs, was suspected of selling cocaine.

A jury later acquitted Kendall of giving his client the tip, but found him guilty of two counts of conspiracy. A judge sentenced Kendall to five years in prison, and he later lost his license to practice law.

Kendall returned to the public eye in 2015, more than a decade after he completed his prison term.

The Georgia Supreme Court made the rare decision to reinstate his law license, so long as he passed the bar exam. He rejoined the State Bar the next year.

Kendall’s application for readmission to the bar is sealed, court officials say. But the court’s review panel wrote that Kendall had rebuilt his life by working as a paralegal and a management consultant for small businesses, according to a report obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

He’d also set up a nonprofit aimed at preventing childhood obesity by educating children and their parents on the importance of diet and exercise, the report noted. Records show he told the board that his checkered record had been the product of immaturity.

His application included more than two dozen letters of recommendation, including references from a federal judge and a former federal prosecutor. The review panel wrote that they “attested to his integrity, value to the community and diligence in reestablishing the requisite character and fitness for a member of the State Bar of Georgia.”

The Supreme Court ultimately agreed. In a written opinion, the justices unanimously found that Kendall had “accepted responsibility for his actions, has committed himself to making amends therefore, and has volunteered extensively in his community.”

“We are convinced of his candor, credibility, and rehabilitation,” the court wrote.

Resurgence

Kendall’s revived career soon converged with Bottoms’ rising stature in Atlanta politics.

He was hired to be a consultant for the recreation authority while Bottoms was its director.

It was a busy moment for a small agency: It was negotiating the sale of Turner Field, navigating the departure of the Atlanta Braves and planning a renovation of State Farm Arena.

Bob Ellis, a Republican Fulton County commissioner and a member of the recreation authority board, said he had concerns about the agency’s arrangement with Kendall. The scope of his work didn’t seem to be clearly defined, he said, and Kendall seemed to step into more of a management role.

“I do think it’s a fair statement to say that it felt like there were two executive directors — that there was him and her,” Ellis said.

From the time he was hired in late 2015 until 2018, Kendall billed the recreation authority nearly $300,000, the AJC reported at the time.

In response to questions from the AJC, Bottoms’ campaign said Kendall did not have a management role at the authority and that he was initially hired to audit the agency’s finances.

In her memoir, Bottoms described Kendall as the cornerstone of her success in the stadium sale.

The pair pored over thousands of documents, she wrote. “I learned there was nothing I couldn’t conquer,” she wrote in her memoir, “even selling a stadium.”

They celebrated when they resolved a public fight over who owned a prominent statue of Hank Aaron, determining it belonged to the recreation authority and not the Atlanta Braves.

‘Who your friends are’

Opponents have again questioned Bottoms’ connections to Kendall as she seeks to become the first Democrat to hold the Governor’s Mansion in more than 20 years.

Democrats and Independents for Rick Jackson, a Jackson-linked group run by Democratic strategist Billy Linville, sent an email blast this month highlighting Kendall’s federal conviction and posing questions about their ongoing ties.

“There is an old saying: ‘Tell Me Who Your Friends Are, and I Will Tell You Who You Are,’” it began. It ended with, “PAID FOR BY JACKSON FOR GOVERNOR INC.”

A Jackson-affiliated committee has paid Linville’s firm, Lexicon Strategies, more than $10,000, records show.

“He had vast responsibilities when she was mayor,” Linville said. “Who you associate with professionally and personally is a reflection of who you are. And it is very relevant to this campaign.”

Cameron, the Bottoms spokesperson, dismissed Linville’s message as a “ridiculous attack from the Jackson campaign.”

Bottoms’ Democratic supporters see the attack as an echo of past, racially coded attempts to paint Atlanta as a bogeyman.

“For decades, Republicans have played on tropes and imagery of Atlanta as a Black-led city, thus a corrupt-led city, thus unfit to lead the state of Georgia,” said Fred Hicks, a Democratic strategist.

He pointed to neck-and-neck polling between Bottoms and Jackson.

“Any time a campaign engages in attacks against advisers for their opponent, that is a sign that they are worried, very worried,” Hicks said.

‘Shadow mayor’

Even so, Kendall’s prominent role in City Hall drew attention while Bottoms was mayor.

Early in Bottoms’ tenure, the city named him “special counsel” to help negotiate the multibillion-dollar redevelopment of the Gulch. Records show the city agreed to pay him $400 an hour.

Kendall’s dual roles at the city and the recreation authority, which both had interests in the Gulch property, raised questions among two elected leaders and independent ethics observers about a potential conflict of interest, the AJC reported at the time.

Bottoms’ campaign said the interests of the city and authority were not in conflict and that Kendall was not the only attorney to advise both. The campaign said his hourly rate was the lowest on the legal team.

Kendall’s hiring also raised eyebrows among City Hall insiders, given Kendall’s lack of experience with major real estate deals and his past conviction. The once-derelict section of sunken parking lots has since transformed into a new district of restaurants and hotels near State Farm Arena. The Bottoms campaign said the deal produced longstanding benefits for the city.

“People were a bit surprised when the mayor picked me to negotiate the deal,” Kendall told the Harvard program in 2021. “I don’t know anything about a $5 billion deal, but then again, no one in the government of Atlanta had ever negotiated a $5 billion deal, so I knew just as much as anyone else.”

Bottoms also appointed Kendall to task forces she created to decide what to do with the old city jail and evaluate the police department’s use-of-force policies.

And he emerged as a key intermediary between the mayor and an agency established to redevelop Fort McPherson. When Bottoms first attended one of the authority’s meetings in 2019, Kendall was among those who joined her, the AJC reported.

Text messages released that year showed Kendall met with the redevelopment authority’s director to relay Bottoms’ wishes to sell the rest of the shuttered Army post to filmmaker Tyler Perry.

In one message obtained by the Saporta Report, the authority’s director told Bottoms: “Just met with Alvin. Got the message loud and clear.”

City Council member Mary Norwood, who ran against Bottoms for mayor and recently endorsed Jackson for governor, once described Kendall as “the shadow mayor.”

Legal work

Records show the city turned to Kendall’s law firm for legal work, big and small.

The city hired his firm to run title searches for the code enforcement department and to advise the city on the process of issuing bonds worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to investor disclosures.

Former Atlanta City Council member Howard Shook, who chaired the city’s finance committee, called the bond engagements “plum roles.”

“Mr. Kendall was recommended by the administration as lead bond counsel successfully many times,” Shook said, adding: “I don’t think he was ever far away from (Bottoms) as a trusted adviser.”

All told, Atlanta paid Kendall’s law firm some $1.9 million during Bottoms’ term and paid it hundreds of thousands more after she left office, according to the city’s Open Checkbook data.

Bottoms’ ties to Kendall since leaving City Hall aren’t well documented, but records indicate the attorney is still in her orbit.

Records from the Georgia secretary of state’s office show that Kendall filed papers in recent years to incorporate two of Bottoms’ businesses and a family foundation she and her husband manage. Kendall serves as those entities’ registered agent, meaning he can accept court papers on their behalf.