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Former county workers indicted in ticket racketeering scam
by Jonathan Cribbs
jonathan@dekalbchamp.com
A DeKalb County grand jury indicted a group of former Recorder’s Court employees and their associates in a racketeering scheme involving traffic tickets.
Three former employees and five non-employees were named in the indictment. It claims the former employees canceled traffic tickets in exchange for cash and retail credit – a scheme that lasted about eight years, DeKalb County District Attorney Gwendolyn Keyes Fleming said at a June 25 press conference.
Investigators are unsure how much money the county lost in the scheme, Fleming said, and the statute of limitations – five years – has already expired on some tickets that were found.
The three employees – deputy clerks – erased or got rid of traffic offenders’ tickets for half the cost of the fine, according to the indictment. Some tickets were deleted from the court’s computer system, others were listed as “dismissed” within the system, and the clerks would occasionally tell judges the police officer who issued the ticket had asked that it be dismissed.
The clerks also worked with two DeKalb County businesses to find people who wanted tickets to disappear and were paid a 25 percent “finder’s fee” to those who brought additional people to them, Fleming said.
The three clerks in the indictment are Charlene Nettles Johnson, Stephen Bruce Roberts and Adrian “Tony” Andrews. The suit also named associates Andrea Arlean Sinclair, Marlene Findley, Reshonda Counts, Sonia Williams and Tameka Shrone Johnson.
Findley and Counts worked at Fidel’s Salon on Memorial Drive, solicited tickets from customers and turned them over to Johnson, who was also a salon customer, the indictment states. Williams owns a clothing store, Glitzy Dazzle in Stone Mountain, where people dropped off tickets they wanted erased. Williams also gave Johnson store credit for her voiding tickets or those of her customers.
The indictment comes about seven months after an independent audit found the Recorder’s Court to be in complete “chaos” with a terrible filing system. As much as 40 percent of each day’s ticket payments were not registered into the computer, according to a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
All have been arrested and released on bond, Fleming said. Each person named in the indictment could face up to 40 years in jail, she said.
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