Cover Story: Curious George

George Anderson makes most of us wonder what the hell we’ve been doing with our time.
Anderson is proprietor of Booklover’s Den, a labyrinthine bookshop in Rome, a small city nestled in the rolling hills of northwest Georgia. Last year, his store cleared all of $5,100. But, fortunately for Anderson, it is not his profession that defines him, but his hobby.
Scratch that. His obsession.
“If I had a successful business,” Anderson says, “I couldn’t do what I do.”
What Anderson does is file ethics complaints against government officials. Not one or two complaints, or even a dozen, but 125 last year alone. Since 1997, he’s filed more than 200. The second-place filer, Cobb Countian Patricia Fuller, wheezes in with a paltry 56.
In just one year, the State Ethics Commission’s six-person staff saw the number of complaints it handles triple, from 65 in 1999 to 215 a year later. Teddy Lee, executive director of the commission, attributes the upward trend almost entirely to Anderson.
“He has increased our workload tremendously,” Lee acknowledges.
On Jan. 31, for example, the commission will review 10 complaints brought by Anderson against state Rep. Bob Irvin, R-Atlanta, the state Republican Party and eight PACs.
The commission has even developed a new disciplinary mechanism — the compliance agreement — to accommodate the swelling number of complaints filed by Anderson stemming from minor infractions.
To Anderson, no faux pas is too small to highlight. Forgot to put a date on your campaign finance disclosure? He’ll catch you. Is an address incomplete? He’ll spot it.
“When you run for office these days, you almost expect George Anderson to file a complaint against you,” says state Rep. Mark Burkhalter, R-Alpharetta, who has been the recipient of one of Anderson’s minor complaints. “It’s almost a prerequisite for running for office.”
On Jan. 24, the day this paper hits the racks, Anderson will stand in front of the City of Atlanta’s Board of Ethics for the second time in a month to press his case against Mayor Bill Campbell, a man who probably never dreamed he’d have to worry about a bookseller from Rome. Two weeks earlier, the board, acting on a complaint filed by Anderson, ruled that Campbell had violated the city’s ethics law by failing to disclose more than $150,000 in speaking fees.
TV news crews camped out at City Hall and interviewed Anderson for the umpteenth time, the deep horizontal crevice at the bridge of his prow-like nose showing darkly on TV screens around the state.
That night, John Schroeder and his wife, Tracey, friends of Anderson’s in Rome, were getting ready for bed when they saw him on the news. “What’s George doing getting involved with the mayor of Atlanta?” Tracey asked. “He lives here.”
When in Rome ...
Rome’s bustling downtown is jammed with art studios that sell pottery and shops that sell Birkenstocks. Patrons crowd the coffee shop in the lobby of the Forrest Hotel, named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan. (The hotel no longer rents rooms.)
Just down Broad Street, John Schroeder emerges from the kitchen of his cafe, wiping his hands on a dishtowel. He’s known Anderson since first grade. He knows his family and its tragic past. He’s torn between the need for candor and pangs of loyalty to his old friend. “A lot of people are embarrassed about George, but most are just puzzled,” he says. “We don’t necessarily understand why he does it.”
Pierre Noth, opinions editor for the Rome News-Tribune, says Anderson, 47, is who he is because of his family.
Anderson’s dad, George Robert Anderson, was a well-respected county attorney for more than a decade. In college, the senior Anderson was Gov. Carl Sanders’ roommate. Anderson’s older brother, Everett, became an attorney like his dad. Anderson grew up around legal briefs at a time when more open government was a battle cry.
“George came along at about the time of Watergate, or in its aftermath,” Noth says. “A lot of kids who would have otherwise gone to law school saw what Woodward and Bernstein did and they decided to become reporters instead. Journalism became glamorous.
“I think with George, there’s that same ‘Gee,-I-want-to-be-a-Watergate-reporter’ spirit.”
Anderson even has a journalism degree from the University of Georgia.
But instead of joining the fourth estate after college, he took a job in Rome selling carpet. In 1980, he moved with his wife and three children to Anniston, Ala., for another sales job.
A few years later, in 1983, Anderson’s father died. And three years later, a heart attack claimed Everett, just 38.
Sensing his mother’s desolation, Anderson moved his family back to Rome. He began selling policies for American General Life Insurance. He had a knack for the work. Noth thinks he knows why Anderson was such a good “closer.”
“He is so intense, when he locks onto something, even in having a conversation with you, he doesn’t let go,” Noth says. “I don’t think George ever has a casual conversation.”
Soon, Anderson was promoted to the company’s Jacksonville, Fla., territory. Life was good, but not for long. In 1987, faulty wiring sparked a blaze at his family’s old house on Cooper Drive. Anderson’s mother, Jean, escaped. His sister, Edie, was out on a date. But his 16-year-old brother William died of smoke inhalation.
William’s death hit Anderson hard. During his first year at UGA, when William was just 4, George Anderson had come home every weekend to see his little brother.
“He would hear my car pull up in the driveway, and he would come flying out the back door,” Anderson recalls. “He was so glad to see me.”
Over the years they had remained close, forming a little alliance within the big brood of eight siblings.
First his father, then his oldest brother, then his youngest brother. Three deaths in less than five years. For George Anderson, it was too much. There was no villain to incarcerate. Just the vagaries of life — and death. Reliable hearts can be ticking time bombs. Wires that sleep in the walls can strike like coiled snakes.
After William’s funeral, stunned by his family’s misfortune and wracked with grief, Anderson returned to Jacksonville and tried to recover. But his wife got a job and his marriage began to suffer.
It had been pretty good,” he says. “She was fine as long as she was having babies and staying at home. But after she went to work, there were problems.”
In 1989, they divorced. A year later, his ex-wife and her new husband left with Anderson’s three children. He couldn’t find them. Distracted and angry, he quit everything and moved back to Rome. He took a job selling office supplies, but his full-time occupation was tracking down his children.
It took two years, but he eventually found them in Gray, Ga. He sued to have his visitation rights enforced.
“That was a very difficult experience for him,” says his sister, Edie Tyler, who works for Korn/Ferry International, an executive search firm in Atlanta.
In high school, Anderson had been a prankster. Not any more. After the deaths in his family and the divorce, Anderson got serious. Yes, the universe was unpredictable. But there were still rules. Man-made rules. If you know the rules you can hold people to them. You can hold people to standards.
“I realized that you can make a difference,” Anderson says. “You can change things.”
He borrowed some money from his mother and opened his bookstore — something he’d always wanted to do. And then he set about using his knowledge of the law to make a difference.
He founded the Floyd County chapter of Fathers Are Parents Too and pushed for more divorced-dad-friendly legislation. He wrote letters to the editor of the Trib. He commented on so-called “deadbeat dad” initiatives. His name appeared in news stories. So did his picture.
In 1993, Anderson remarried. Today his children from his first marriage — Joe, 23, Jason, 22, and Meredith Margaret, 20 — visit him several times a year in Rome. Anderson says they don’t have much to say about the hobby he started in earnest about five years ago.
The ball gets rolling
In 1995, Floyd County was in a frenzy over the for-profit behavior of its not-for-profit hospital authority. The authority’s bond rating was in danger. Anderson started digging.
While going through county records, Anderson found a new deed tucked among the old documents. It seemed the county had quietly given the hospital authority a piece of land. He took his find to the Rome News-Tribune. The newspaper discovered that the authority had held a secret meeting. The paper asked the state’s attorney general, Mike Bowers, to step in. Anderson himself, having become deeply involved in exposing the escalating scandal, called Bowers to add his voice to that of the newspaper.
Bowers warned authority members that they had broken the law by meeting in secret.
“I was really proud of him for that,” Anderson says. “He even personally took my call. I couldn’t believe the attorney general of the state of Georgia was actually talking to me on the phone.”
But then Bowers inexplicably backed off the hospital authority, or so it seemed to people in Rome. A Floyd County grand jury found in 1995 that one particular law firm, King & Spalding, had done more than $500,000 of business with the authority. And Anderson found that many of the attorneys associated with that firm were also contributors to Bowers’ campaign fund.
“I was so disillusioned by Mike Bowers then,” says Anderson.
So in 1997, he filed a complaint, citing Bowers’ failure to list contributors’ occupations on his campaign finance disclosure forms. Bowers was fined $3,600.
It was Anderson’s debut as Georgia’s unofficial — and usually unwelcome — political watchdog.
In 1998, he complained that then-gubernatorial candidate Lewis Massey was receiving contributions from some of the financial-services companies he, as Secretary of State, was in charge of regulating. The Ethics Commission upheld Anderson’s findings and fined Massey $1,500. That same year Anderson filed a similar complaint against Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine, who was fined $750.
Anderson also zeroed in on then-Fulton County Commission Chairman Mitch Skandalakis, who was running for governor on the Republican ticket. Skandalakis was ordered to amend his reports to include occupations and to itemize expenditures. Skandalakis was also fined $1,250 for misuse of campaign funds (he had purchased tickets to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York).
Over the next three years, Anderson would file an astounding number of complaints, relying on an elderly friend to watch the store while he spent hours in Atlanta. He relied on his schoolteacher wife to bring home a paycheck and to listen to his travails and hunches.
“I’ve never been resentful of it,” says Marilyn Anderson of her husband’s hobby. “There’s so much of it he shares with me. Nine out of 10 times he finds something. I guess sometimes he does get really obsessed with one particular case, and I’ll hear about it a hundred times, and maybe it’s something we’ve gone over and over and he just can’t find anything. But, in general, I don’t resent it.”
In the past year, none of Anderson’s complaints have resulted in fines of more than $250 (and there were only a couple of those) mostly because they center on small omissions on financial disclosure forms. But they’re not small enough to escape Anderson’s eagle eye. He’ll drive his wife’s 1992 GMC van about 70 miles to the Capitol, a drive that in the best of traffic conditions takes nearly two hours. Anderson says it costs more than $30 to gas up the van, but once it rolls into the Capitol’s parking lot, the excitement builds.
“I get a good feeling,” he says. “I feel that I’ve accomplished something. I was up ‘til two in the morning last night working on this brief about Campbell, but I feel that I’m doing something for the public. And if they don’t appreciate it, I don’t care.”
Amid the piles of papers and reports, Anderson is in his element. Slowly, surely, tediously, he’ll inch through campaign disclosure forms looking for blank spaces, checking math, cross-referencing political action committees and lobbyists with organizations to which the politician belongs.
Anderson never gets bored. He works through disclosure forms, files complaints and prepares “briefs” — answers to ethics inquiries — with the voracious obsession of ants unloading a sack of sugar. He says he gets lost in the work. Of the politicians and lobbyists he’s scrutinizing, he speaks almost affectionately.
“They’re so cute,” he says. “They’ll come up with these cute little names for PACs that really don’t tell you anything and then you have to figure out that the PAC is just a way for special interest groups to funnel money to their campaigns.”
He believes he’s helping the media do its job because reporters — “y’all,” he says familiarly — are so burdened with deadlines they just can’t look for things the way he does.
He says he’s also helping out the overwhelmed State Ethics Commission — an assertion that prompts one critic to call Anderson a “hypocrite” since he’s the primary reason the perennially understaffed commission is overwhelmed.
Meanwhile, the politicians he targets are as befuddled as his neighbors are about what makes him tick.
In March 2000, Anderson lodged a complaint against state Sen. Eric Johnson, R-Savannah, for filing an incomplete campaign disclosure report. Johnson conceded that Anderson was correct. Johnson had, in fact, left off some occupations and some dates. He filed an amended report and that was the end of it.
He believes Anderson is a political tool.
“He has mostly gone after Republicans,” says Johnson. “I believe it’s because he’s a Democrat.”
State House Speaker Pro Tem Jack Connell, a Democrat, disagrees. His 32 years as a legislator from Augusta have produced just one ethics violation: He left off some dates and occupations on his campaign disclosure reports. Connell admits to the lapse, but he can’t help wonder why a man from the other side of the state would care.
“I’m not sure, but I believe he’s in the other party,” Connell says, lowering his voice almost to a whisper.
State Rep. Earl Ehrhart, R-Powder Springs, says he doesn’t know what Anderson is, but, whatever it is, he doesn’t like it.
“The guy was after me for incomplete addresses, for crying out loud,” bellows Ehrhart. “Yeah, and I went 55 miles per hour on the way down here too, Mr. Anderson. He asked me for the occupation of the Cobb County Republican Women, for God’s sake. That’s absurd. They’re the Republican women. Anybody with half a brain would know what that is.”
Which is?
“They’re the Republican women,” Ehrhart gasps. “Please.”
The Republicans are right about one thing: Anderson is a card-carrying member of the Democratic Party.
“I voted for Reagan, and I voted for Bush, but my daddy was a Democrat, my brother was a Democrat and I just went down to the Floyd County Democrats’ spaghetti dinner the other night,” Anderson says. “And I signed the card. But I’ve filed complaints against Agricultural Commissioner Tommy Irvin and Bill Campbell — he’s a Democrat — and others. I don’t care which party they belong to.”
Hizzoner’s turn
Atlanta’s dapper, cosmopolitan mayor never saw him coming, but Anderson remembers well how he got involved with Bill Campbell. It was a weekday last August. Anderson had just completed a news segment about ethics in politics for Fox 5. They’d shot him filing a complaint at the Sloppy Floyd Building, across from the Capitol. Anderson says it was “orchestrated.” He wasn’t actually filing a complaint against anyone that day. But he had to pick up some books in Kennesaw anyway so it wasn’t much of an extra trip to come downtown.
“I walked out of there and I thought, ‘I’ll go check on Fulton County while I’m here,’” he says. “So I walked over to the Fulton County government building.
“And I looked at the campaign contributions to (Fulton County Commission Chairman Mike) Kenn. I didn’t find anything. Then, on my way back to where I was parked at the Capitol, I passed by City Hall and I thought, ‘I might as well check on Bill Campbell, too.’ ”
In going through Campbell’s campaign finance disclosure forms Anderson saw thousands of dollars in contributions and expenditures that were not itemized. He did some digging and found that the mayor had been paid to give a speech to a company that was doing business with the city. And that same speech, Anderson intuited, was written by one of Campbell’s staffers on city time. Pretty sleazy stuff, Anderson thought.
The media was already all over Campbell about trips to casinos and chummy relationships with city contractors, but it was Anderson who filed the ethics complaint citing $150,000 in unreported speaking fees. Sometimes, he says, that’s the way it happens. The media reports something, and that sets Anderson to thinking.
Anderson believes he would have had a stronger case against Campbell if the city Ethics Board had used its legal power to subpoena witnesses — something he asked the board and the City Council to do repeatedly.
“I’m about to go check on Council President Robb Pitts,” he says in his habitually flat tone. “I asked him over and over again to subpoena those witnesses, and he never even got back to me. He has really angered me. So, I think I’m going to take a look at his finances.”