U.S. attorney: Mayor didn’t ‘pull strings’
May 14, 2007 at 12:23 pm by Mara Shalhoup in BMF, NewsContrary to testimony offered during an April federal court hearing during which the mayor’s former son-in-law was sentenced to life in prison, Mayor Shirley Franklin did not help get her daughter’s then-husband out of jail when he was bonded out in 2004, according to an assistant U.S. attorney.
Tremayne Graham jumped bond in the fall of 2004 on cocaine-trafficking and money-laundering charges, and he was a fugitive for seven months. While Graham was out on bond, his co-defendant, Ulysses Hackett, and Hackett’s girlfriend, Misty Carter, were gunned down in Carter’s bed. Testimony and court records allege that Graham ordered Hackett’s death because he feared Hackett would cooperate in the federal investigation against him.
At the time of the April 2004 bonding hearing, however, prosecutors in Greenville, S.C., where Graham’s enterprise had been shipping drugs from Atlanta, “didn’t have a lot of evidence against Tremayne,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Moore says. What’s more, Graham had little in the way of a criminal history at the time: a 1997 counterfeiting charge.
“Given who he was, we had no reason to believe he would flee,” Moore says, pointing out that his office didn’t push for Graham to be detained. “And there is no evidence that the mayor did or had anything to do with that bond.”
He adds: “Had we known at the time everything that we now know about Tremayne, I’m sure our decision would have been different.”
The company that bonded out Graham, Free At Last, allowed his then-wife, Kai Franklin Graham, to sign an unsecured $400,000 bond — meaning that when Graham skipped bond and Kai Franklin Graham filed for bankruptcy, it looked as if the company would be stuck with the debt. But a bounty hunter hired by the company was able to track down Graham in L.A. in the summer of 2005.
Free At Last did not answer CL’s request for an interview, and the mayor’s office declined to comment. The attorney who represented Kai Franklin Graham in her 2005 divorce also declined to comment.
To read CL’s story on the sentencing hearing, click here.
To read our cover story on Tremayne Graham, click here.
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