Open records fight reveals Olympic misdeeds in Atlanta

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Nov/Dec 2001 by Turner, Melissa

Up until a newspaper columnist was handed a revealing memo in February 1999, Atlanta was prepared to believe Billy Payne's assertions that he never did anything like those guys in Salt Lake City who were accused of buying the 2002 Winter Olympics.

Payne was a local hero. He had led the campaign to bring the 1996 Summer Olympics to Atlanta. And he went on to head the organizing committee that staged the biggest Games in history and left behind a half-billion dollars worth of sports arenas and college dormitories.

A bronze statue of him even stood in the new downtown Centennial Olympic Park.

Ever since the Salt Lake City bribery scandal had broken, Payne had insisted publicly that his team didn't buy votes for Atlanta. They didn't give expensive gifts or provide extravagant favors to International Olympic Committee members.

"We ain't perfect," Payne repeated again and again, "but we didn't bribe anybody." But after reading several stories of Payne's protestations of innocence, a former Olympic staffer, never identified publicly, contacted a Journal-Constitution columnist and turned over a copy of a memo he had saved for years. The two-page memorandum, written by Payne on Aug. 20, 1990 - one month to the day before the IOC's vote to award the 1996 Olympics - was a list of last-minute "gifts" the bid team should wrap up.

Extensive pampering

Among the gifts: a college scholarship for the daughter of the IOC member from Hungary and free medical treatment at the Emory University Clinic and airline tickets for the fellow from Libya. The list went on. It was the first evidence Payne even considered gratuities for IOC members that he said in earlier interviews about the Salt Lake City scandal were "out-of-bounds."

Payne had freely acknowledged extensive pampering of visiting IOC members during the bid effort. That pampering included firstclass air travel, luxury accommodations, dinner in private homes, chauffeured tours, escorted shopping trips and countless small gifts.

But he scoffed when Salt Lake City bid leaders hinted that Payne and his bid team chairman, former Atlanta mayor and United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young, had created the "model" for their tainted bid campaign that followed on the heels of Atlanta's.

The memo, which Payne acknowledged he had written only after the original was found in a search of Olympic records, couldn't be ignored. It proved that Payne's team at least considered the same kind of shenanigans that landed Salt Lake City's team in hot water. But more important, it proved written documentation that would either verify Payne's claims of innocence or debunk them still existed.

So began my effort to gain access to some 1,400 boxes of memos, letters, meeting minutes and handwritten notes compiled by Atlanta's Olympic officials over their decade-long campaign to win and organize the Games. Those boxes would eventually lead to my eight-part behind-the-scenes look into the inner workings of the Olympic organizing committee.

Official records secreted

From my first request to review the Olympic records, Payne's lawyer asserted the boxes were private property and, at the very least, "too disorganized for public scrutiny."

In fact, the same source who turned over the memo also delivered an inventory of about 1,000 of the boxes stored in a locked climatecontrolled vault at the Atlanta History Center. Inside was a treasure trove of documents that would detail the historical record of the Games.

A public relations consultant was brought on board; the Olympic legal team at Atlanta's silk stocking King & Spalding was revved up. Payne's position was unwavering: The Olympic bid was a private endeavor by private individuals, who were not subject to Georgia open records laws.

Payne, a former University of Georgia football star and suburban Atlanta real estate attorney, had formed in 1987 a nonprofit Georgia Amateur Athletic Foundation to pursue the Games. He had recruited a handful of friends, mostly lawyers and affluent housewives, to join him in what he deemed a Quixotic effort. These were not public figures. These were "volunteers," who had embarked on a heroic civic mission, contended his attorney, Joseph Bankoff. At that time, there was still a great deal of public sympathy for that view.

John Walter, then-managing editor of the Journal-Constitution, wrote Gov. Roy Barnes explaining the newspaper's position and seeking his high-powered influence.

"Recent disclosures about the bidding process for the Olympic Games raise serious questions, questions that cannot be answered in an environment where official records are secreted and the public nature of the quest for the Games is denied," Walter wrote.

Barnes, who helped craft Georgia's open records law, said he would release the documents if they were in state custody, but he would ask state Attorney General Thurbert Baker for a legal ruling. "The intent of the law was clear," Barnes said, offering his own preemptive opinion. "If there is a private group that performs public functions, then that private group is subject to the Open Records-Open Meetings Act."