Macon mayor testifies as defense witness for man accused of bribery, money laundering

Macon-Bibb County Mayor Robert Reichert took the stand as a witness for the defense Thursday in the federal bribery and money laundering trial of a local businessman and a prominent Tallahassee, Florida, attorney.

The criminal case revolves around the tenure of former Bibb schools superintendent Romain Dallemand and the Macon Promise Neighborhood plan, a widely-backed civic effort to acquire millions in federal grants to bolster education and living conditions in the city’s crime-torn, poverty-stricken Unionville and Tindall Heights communities.

Reichert has been in office since 2007, around the time that planning began for pursuing the Promise grant. Reichert said he then came to know Cliffard D. Whitby, who runs a construction firm and is the former chairman of the Macon-Bibb County Industrial Authority. The men toured the dilapidated and shuttered Ballard-Hudson Middle School near Henderson Stadium on Anthony Road.

“He and I had become allies,” the mayor testified, “in the struggle to change the course and future of Macon.”

Whitby, according to Reichert, hoped to acquire the building, later dubbed the Promise Center, and transform it into an educational hub at the southern edge of Unionville.

“He was thrilled as we were walking through this abandoned junk heap,” Reichert testified. “I thought he had lost his mind.”

The abandoned school, prosecutors say, was eventually purchased by one of Whitby’s interests, a nonprofit known as the Central Georgia Partnership for Individual and Community Development (GCPICD), which is also a defendant in the criminal case against Whitby and Knowles.

Renovations later transformed the school building into a gleaming focal point of the Promise Neighborhood project.

The mayor’s recollection of it came on the eighth day of testimony here in U.S. District Court, which sits directly across Mulberry Street from Dallemand’s former office at the school district headquarters and next door to the Macon-Bibb County Industrial Authority.

The government’s attorneys contend that Whitby enlisted Dallemand as a maestro to direct the county’s school board to support and to, in January 2012, send $1 million of a $10 million, 10-year commitment to GCPICD to lease the Promise Center building.

The prosecution rested Thursday morning after calling to the stand a financial-crimes analyst and former FBI agent named Raymond Kyle.

Kyle detailed the path of an alleged flow of money from Whitby and into Dallemand’s bank accounts, deposits which, from 2012 until early 2017, totaled $337,400.

But exactly what that money may have been for is a matter of dispute. Prosecutors say it was bribe money. Defense lawyers have suggested it was for investments in Dallemand’s companies or, at times, money for Dallemand who was struggling financially after losing his superintendent’s post.

An attorney for one of Whitby’s business interests, Positiventures Initiative, said to the analyst, “You’re just following the money. You don’t know what conversations occurred.”

“That’s correct,” Kyle said.

It was Reichert’s time on the stand, however, that perhaps stood out the most. His appearance was a jolt of personality to a trial steeped in bank documents, lease transactions and contractual gobbledegook.

Though the mayor at times drifted off on tangents and had to be reined in by the judge to just “answer the question,” Reichert was animated and easily heard. His voice boomed with the zeal of a stump speaker’s, his resonating, trademark twang comparable to Col. Sanders channeling Foghorn Leghorn.

He even invoked a reference to chicken. It came in his description of Whitby’s skills as a builder who was adept at renovating even the foulest of eyesores.

Reichert said Whitby could “make chicken salad” out of, as he phrased the expression for decorum’s sake, “chicken poop.”

“Whitby,” the mayor went on, “was able to make chicken salad out of almost anything. ... He could do it and has continued to do it in rehabilitating houses. ... It’s incredible what he’s able to do.”

One of Whitby’s defense attorneys showed Reichert a letter the mayor wrote to Promise Neighborhood organizers in August 2011, six months after Dallemand took office. The Promise Neighborhood effort required school-system support to qualify for federal funding, and Dallemand’s blessing was essential.

The letter Reichert wrote said the superintendent was on board and, in fact, “a strong champion” of the plan.

The defense’s reason for introducing the letter was fairly clear: If Dallemand was already in favor of the effort, why would he need to be bribed?

Defense attorney Nicholas A. Lotito also played for jurors a video from around that time of Dallemand giving a speech and endorsing the plan at a public gathering.

Though Dallemand is not charged criminally in this case — he was allowed to plead guilty to a tax crime in exchange for his testimony against Whitby and Knowles — the defense has, in essence, put Dallemand on trial and made him out to be an unscrupulous bad guy.

Dallemand, who testified over parts of four days, faces up to three years in prison for underreporting his 2012 income.

Whitby and Knowles — the Florida lawyer accused, in part, of being a middleman to funnel payoffs to Dallemand — face far lengthier prison terms if convicted of all charges.

When the defense asked Reichert about Dallemand on Thursday, the mayor said the former superintendent, while “brilliant” and well-educated, was, as a man, “guarded, closed, short, abrupt” and “not very conversational.”

Reichert said Dallemand’s tenure became “increasingly toxic.”

On cross examination, Reichert acknowledged that Whitby had backed his mayoral campaign, and Dallemand was not a supporter of his.

Assistant U.S. attorney Elizabeth S. Howard asked the mayor if he had been with Whitby “around the clock,” implying that the mayor was not privy to conversations Whitby may have had with Dallemand during the years in question.

Reichert said he had not.

Howard asked the mayor the same thing about Dallemand, pointing out that the mayor was not with Dallemand all the time, either.

“I would certainly,” Reichert said, “agree with that.”