Bribe-trial testimony reveals genesis of probe into Dallemand — and a bag of cash

Six days before Christmas in 2016, two federal agents knocked on Romain Dallemand’s door in Naples, Florida.

The agents were from the FBI and the IRS. They had been looking into Dallemand’s financial records in the wake of his embattled tenure and 2013 departure as superintendent of Bibb County’s public schools.

Upon leaving Macon, Dallemand had moved to southern Florida’s Gulf Coast. An initial examination of his bank records, according to the authorities, unearthed a $100,000 deposit into his account from the law firm of a prominent Tallahassee, Florida, lawyer named Harold Knowles, with whom Dallemand and the Bibb schools had connections and prior business dealings.

In federal court here Wednesday at the bribery and money laundering trial of Knowles and former Macon-Bibb County Industrial Authority chairman Cliffard Whitby, testimony from one of those federal agents, James Langdon of the FBI, revealed that investigators traced that $100,000 check to its original source: the Bibb County School District.

One of the crimes Whitby and Knowles is accused of — conspiring to pay off Dallemand for his support of and influence for their business ventures — centers on how that first $100,000 flowed to Dallemand’s bank account.

The details are complex and circuitous, and prosecutors have their work cut out for them.

Though their case involves an alleged bag of ill-gotten cash handed over at a south Georgia truck stop, as well as clandestine meetings and surreptitious recordings, explaining the case’s more mundane backbone — its institutional and bureaucratic machinations — may not be so easy.

The alleged wrongdoing centers on the Macon Promise Neighborhood, a multi-million dollar, federal grant-supported collaborative effort with origins nearly a decade ago. It involved more than 30 Macon organizations, which joined forces to improve life in the city’s impoverished, crime-torn Unionville and Tindall Heights areas.

Whitby, who in part on the merits of his community connections, was named executive director of the Promise Neighborhood. Sometime between mid-2011 and mid-2012, he allegedly offered Dallemand $100,000 a year for 10 years for Dallemand’s continued support of the program, which involved annual $1-million payments to the Promise Neighborhood from the school system.

In early November 2012, days after that first million-dollar check was sent, prosecutors contend that a $100,000 check — siphoned off the school system’s initial payment of $1 million — was routed to Dallemand through a company of Whitby’s that had ties to the Promise Neighborhood and then sent on to Knowles’ Tallahassee law firm.

In total, Dallemand is said to have received nearly $500,000 in alleged financial kickbacks.

After agents in late 2016 confronted Dallemand with their findings, he later agreed to cooperate and to arrange recorded phone calls with Whitby and to secretly tape an in-person meeting with Whitby.

While on the witness stand in the trial’s second day of testimony, Langdon, the FBI agent, told how in April 2017 he and an IRS agent traveled with Dallemand from south Florida to a Denny’s restaurant at a truck stop just across the Georgia line.

Whitby, who lives in Macon, had agreed to meet Dallemand there, Langdon testified, and at the end of the meeting Whitby allegedly gave Dallemand four bank envelopes containing a total of $24,000 cash.

Why Whitby may have done that is among the matters for jurors to decide.

Prosecutor Elizabeth S. Howard on Wednesday had Langdon hold up the cash, which was sealed in a plastic bag, for the jury to see.

Recordings of the Whitby-Dallemand meeting may bolster the government’s case, but some of what was said in the noisy restaurant is in dispute.

The tapes are expected to be played when Dallemand is called to the stand, likely by week’s end.

This story was originally published September 26, 2018 at 5:34 PM.