Just in case you missed it (Langfords Greatest Hits)
Three years ago, then-Jefferson County Commission President Larry Langford led a reading group at the Summit Barnes & Noble. It was a monthly event, organized by the store, at which local celebrities discussed their favorite books. In most cases, the celebrity picks were easy-reading pop-culture pap — Who Moved My Cheese? But not Langford’s choices. He chose two books.
Langford’s first book was The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis. A moralizing satire, the book takes the form of correspondence between a senior demon in hell, Screwtape, and his nephew, Wormwood, a devil-in-training who’s having trouble corrupting a young Christian. Screwtape instructs his nephew on the gradualism of sin and its usefulness in spoiling a good soul.
Langford’s second selection was The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. It is at once one of the more important works in Western political thought and also a handbook for how to be a dictator. In the last 400 years, its author’s name has been twisted into an adjective: Machiavellian, meaning ruthless, ambitious and without conscience. The most quoted line: “It is better to be feared than loved.”
Larry's personality is volatile and his mood swings can be instantaneous. One Thursday last April at the county courthouse, Langford was chatting with a couple of TV news photographers when a staffer interrupted him to ask a question. Langford exploded and his profanity echoed down the marble hall to the other end of the building. He didn’t stop until she cried.
I was around the corner when the shouting started, so I asked Langford what had happened.
“How’s that any of your damn business?” he snapped.
I told him that when I hear commissioners cussing in the hall it makes me curious.
“Well, it’s none of your damn business,” he said.
Less than five minutes later, he had his hand on my shoulder, pulling me aside from the other reporters to feed me some gossip about City Councilor Joel Montgomery’s recent arrest. Half of it later turned out to be true, but the important point here is the distraction. Langford entered politics through the news. He was a TV reporter before he ever ran for office, and he knows how to misdirect the media. It’s easier with TV than with the print reporters. Sound bytes are his specialty. Just look at his latest political ad touting his one-point crime plan: “We’re going to put criminals behind bars.” His opponents can call it amateur hour at the Apollo if they want, but his quips have carried him through 30 years of politics.
Larry Langford grew up in Loveman Village, a public housing project on Birmingham’s Westside. After five years in the military, he attended UAB and got a job at WBRC as one of the city’s first black TV reporters. In 1977, he won a seat on the Birmingham City Council. Two years later, he announced in the middle of a council meeting that he was running for mayor. He was 31 years old.
Despite a public pronouncement that he would win without a run-off, Langford was trounced. Richard Arrington defeated the incumbent, David Vann, to become the city’s first black mayor. During the campaign, however, Langford had threatened to peel black voters away from Arrington’s base, and Arrington responded by questioning Langford’s credibility, specifically his responsibility with public money. Langford had declared personal bankruptcy after falling more than $40,000 in debt.
After he lost the 1979 election, Langford moved to Fairfield and into exile from Birmingham politics. About 10 years later, he ran for Mayor of Fairfield. This time he won, and there he began to craft a public image that was as uncommon as it was appealing.
When Langford had served on the Birmingham City Council, being black made him an outsider, but he embraced that role with a wide Afro, flashy ties, lavender-tinted glasses and attitude to match. But sometime between then and his years as Fairfield mayor, he changed. That attitude was still there, but he learned to direct it more deliberately. The result was something of an anomaly in contemporary politics.
There is a political cliché widely shared among candidates as well as voters: “I’m a social liberal and a fiscal conservative.” It’s a safe thing to say. It crosses party lines and doesn’t offend. But what’s interesting about Langford — and this is possibly the most important thing to understand about him — is that he is the very opposite of that cliché: Langford is a social conservative and a fiscal liberal. (It’s also worth noting that there was one other before him: George Wallace.)
Langford was the mayor of a small, majority-black city that had been left behind by white flight, but suddenly his popularity in white neighborhoods and suburbs surged. The reason why is obvious: He promised to protect whites and older blacks from the young black men and the emerging gangsta culture they feared. He didn’t say it that directly, but the coded language was there. His favorite speech: “Beat your kids.”
According to the speech, the problem with society is that parents no longer whip their children the way parents used to years ago. What’s more, teachers can’t beat misbehaving students anymore, and that’s what’s wrong with our schools. It’s a throwback to the good-old-days of the 1950s, when everybody got along and all was right with the world. Even in Loveman Village. Things ain’t the way they used to be.
When he’s on a roll, Langford is Joe Brown from New Jersey, or rather Morgan Freeman playing Joe Brown in Lean on Me. He’s Bill Cosby talking to the parents about the kids with the brain damage. Once I even heard him tell a Bessemer Cut-Off civic group that what Alabama needed was a knee-high electric chair. Some people gasped. Some laughed. But in the end they applauded.
As the story goes, his niece asked him to take her to Six Flags in Atlanta. He built his own park instead, and he did it with public money. It opened on May 23, 1998.
The arrangement was a peculiar one, especially for Jefferson County. With enabling legislation from Montgomery and the approval of an interlocal agreement, Langford bound 11 municipalities to paying a combined $2.95 million per year toward the park. Birmingham’s annual share in that cost was $1 million.
With this sponsorship, Langford and former Alabama Democratic chairman Bill Blount were able to sell $60 million in bonds. The money from the 11 cities plus revenue from the park was supposed to pay off that debt, but by the end of the first year, some officials began to detect problems with VisionLand.
Beginning in February 1999, then-Birmingham Finance Director Mac Underwood began to ring alarm bells at City Hall. Over the next two years, Underwood would write a series of memos to Mayor Arrington, interim Mayor William Bell and Mayor Bernard Kincaid, alerting them to major discrepancies he had found in VisionLand audits and financial statements.
Not only did Underwood double-check VisionLand’s math, but the city eventually contracted two separate financial advisors — Banks, Finley, White & Co. and the Swarthmore Group — to study the park’s statements. Looking back at those reports today, they read like detective novels written by enthusiastic CPAs. They all reached virtually identical conclusions.
Beginning in the 1998 season, the park apparently used the money from the municipalities, which was supposed to cover debt service, to pay for at least some operating costs. One later report disputed this, but more agreed than not. By counting the municipal payments, VisionLand exaggerated the money they were taking in. In the press that year, it was reported that VisionLand turned a profit of more than $2.2 million, when the park actually lost about $1 million. To make matters worse, VisionLand’s auditor, Pitts, Daniels & Co., was not following Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), and many items on the balance sheet did not match.
The next year, 1999, Underwood discovered that another $30 million worth of bond debt had appeared on VisionLand’s financial statements.
“It appears from my review of this report that only $2.6 million of the $25 million was used to purchase or construct additional assets for the Authority,” Underwood wrote.
Langford explained at the time that the park had refinanced its debt. In fact, it had accumulated much more and was now using bond money to pay operating expenses.
The replacement, retired FBI agent and VisionLand security chief Rob Langford (no relation), turned out to be unqualified for the job. Operating expenses rose by 59 percent. Revenue fell nearly $6 million below projections. By the end of the year, the park posted a net loss of $9.2 million. The park began to drown in its debt and would never recover.
Outside of a few public officials, public perception of the park remained high, at least until the Birmingham advertising and public relations firm, O2 Ideas, began to alert area vendors that VisionLand had stiffed them for $400,000. Suddenly a private crisis became a public one.
In the media and before each of the 11 municipalities, Langford insisted that the park was financially solvent and that the setback was temporary. Instead of triage, Langford insisted that plans to expand the park would proceed. Those plans included an aquarium on par with the one in Chattanooga and an “Entertainment Zone,” essentially a theater multiplex, arcade and miniature golf course.
But by the summer of 2000, VisionLand’s bondholders began wresting control from Langford, bringing in a private firm to manage the park and firing many of the contractors Langford had personally hired. But all of the financial analyses, even VisionLand’s auditor, agreed on one thing — there was no feasible way for the park to meet its annual debt service. In 2001, bondholders allowed the park to default on debts rather than forcing it into foreclosure. The investors even put in more money in order to promote the park, but to no avail. Attendance was no greater than in previous years and revenue remained stagnant. The park owed more than $7 million to vendors and trade payables — money it couldn’t pay. In the summer of 2002, bondholders relented and sold the park for $5.25 million.
City Councilor Roderick Royal expressed it neatly for the time: “It sounds like those bondholders are going to get Enroned.”
Interestingly, for more than two years during the VisionLand debacle — from July 1999 to November 2001 — the West Jefferson Amusement and Public Park Authority board never met, yet major decisions were made at the park. Later park officials and board members said that Langford was calling the shots.
During that time a 2000 audit of the park’s finances was concealed for nearly a year and a half.
One of the VisionLand board members, then-Alabama Transportation Director Jimmy Butts, was convicted of accepting a bribe from the park in exchange for an interstate interchange. Langford has said that he was asked by Butts to sponsor Butts’ son’s racecar and that the park was extorted by Butts.
In the end, two lobbyists and one board member were in jail. Most cities in the interlocal agreement were still bound to pay their annual commitments for another five years. The city of Birmingham paid its last $1 million last year. Nonetheless, the bondholders were left with an enormous loss and no public entity to hold accountable. Nor any individual.
Larry Langford was running for County Commission.
Langford’s last major act as mayor of Fairfield was to sell its charity hospital, Lloyd Noland, to his friend and political benefactor Richard M. Scrushy. Actually, the City of Fairfield sold it to HealthSouth, but Richard Scrushy got his name on the parkway that led to the hospital.
But their ties didn’t end there.
Earlier this year, federal investigators subpoenaed documents from the county and Langford concerning a non-profit, Computer Help for Kids. The feds should have been familiar with charity. One of their star witnesses, former HealthSouth Treasurer Ken Livsay, discussed it at length during Scrushy’s accounting fraud trial.
Langford, former Birmingham politico John Katapodis and Scrushy were co-founders of the non-profit. Since Langford was elected to the commission in 2002, the county had given $765,000 to the non-profit. Computer Help for Kids also shares an address with another non-profit, the Holy Family Foundation, which is headed by Langford’s wife.
Livesay’s testimony offers some insight to why federal investigators are interested. By 2002, Livesay thought he had extricated himself from the $2.7 billion accounting fraud at HealthSouth. He had been reassigned to the company’s information technology division, when Scrushy asked him to serve on the board for Computer Help for Kids. The intention of the non-profit, Livesay said, was to refurbish old computers and then give them to underprivileged families and community institutions. HealthSouth had thousands of non-Y2K compliant computers to donate to the program. The partnership seemed a logical fit.
However in 2002, the non-profit had taken an odd turn, according to Livesay’s testimony. The executive director had been dismissed by “a volunteer,” he said. Throughout his testimony, Livesay referred to this individual cryptically as “the volunteer,” but it is now known this person was Katapodis.
“The foundation had hired an executive director, and it also had a volunteer that was responsible for the day-to-day activities,” Livesay testified. “Once it got up and running and the computers were coming in, and there was a process in place to get them refurbished and get them in place, I sort of stepped back because I wasn’t expected to be involved day to day.”
Livesay served as treasurer of Computer Help for Kids. In that role, one of his responsibilities was to prepare the records for the organization so it could maintain its tax-exempt status. When Livesay attempted this in 2002, he discovered something irregular was happening there.
The accounting system for Computer Help for Kids was rather simple, Livesay testified. Basically it was just a checkbook. When Livesay asked Katapodis for that checkbook, Katapodis was reluctant to give it to him, Livesay said on the stand.
After several attempts, Livesay finally received a “version of the checkbook.” From that information, Livesay said he determined that Computers Help for Kids was commingling funds with another non-profit organization run by Katapodis.
“I started getting concerned that the funds were not being used for their intended purpose, and I pressed this individual to give me more information,” Livesay testified. “He was reluctant to do it. Some of the information that I did get from him, it was clear to me that the funds were not being used for its intended purpose. They were being used for political or personal interests.”
Having recently extricated himself from one tremendous fraud, Livesay worried that he was becoming entangled in another. HealthSouth had donated large sums of money to Computer Help for Kids. Livesay told Scrushy that he was not comfortable with what was happening at Computer Help for Kids and that he did not want to serve on the board anymore. One of Scrushy’s assistants told him that he didn’t need to serve on that board any longer.
“After what I had been through before, and this was going to require me to actually sign a document that would go to the government, to the IRS, I was just — I decided I’m going to nip this one in the bud,” Livesay said on the stand.
With VisionLand imploding behind him and Fairfield in marginal financial shape, in 2002, Langford easily defeated Jeff Germany for a seat on the Jefferson County Commission.
We know now that Langford had at least some financial problems of his own during this time. Last month, the Birmingham News discovered that Langford had accrued more than $125,000 of personal debt. He told the News that at least $60,000 of that money paid for dental bills. Rather than paying the loans himself, in 2001 Langford asked his friend, Al LaPierre, a lobbyist and former state Democratic Party chairman, to pay off the loans. LaPierre had previously lobbied for Fairfield, making more than $100,000 there while Langford was mayor.
Perhaps even more intriguing, SEC investigators discovered an email from the bondsman and Langford friend, Blount, to a Colonial bank executive in which Blount said the loans would be paid.
Blount knows something about debt. As a principal at Blount & Parrish, he has been involved in several bond deals with Langford, going back at least to the financing for VisionLand. However, the VisionLand financing was small potatoes compared to what was waiting at the county.
Since Langford took office in 2002, the county has refinanced its $3.3 billion of sewer bonds. The refinancing was done through a complicated and esoteric aspect of public finance called bond swaps. Essentially the agreements, negotiated with investment banks, trade fixed interests rates for variable rates and are used to speculate on rate variations.
Between 2002 and 2007, Jefferson County participated in $5.7 billion worth of these swaps, more than all but four states.
When the deals began, Langford and other county officials bragged that they would save millions of taxpayer dollars. However analyses by state auditors, media and county consultants have indicated that the deals have cost the county as much as $150 million in additional interest payments. County officials say that these analyses are unfair, as the swaps are meant to save money over a 40-year period and the loss might be short-term.
Regardless, the swaps cost the county millions in additional fees, many of which were made to politically connected consultants who had little to do with the transactions. Blount was among those consultants.
One of the architects of those swaps, former JPMorgan investment banker Charles LeCroy, pleaded guilty to an unrelated federal public corruption case in Philadelphia.
In addition to the sewer bond swaps, in 2004 Langford persuaded his fellow commissioners to pass an additional one percent sales tax, which the county used to back another $1 billion of school construction bonds. Again, much of the work went to investment bankers, Blount among them, with close ties to elected county officials.
The conspicuous bond deals have drawn the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the IRS.
Last month, the SEC demanded documents going back to 2002 from Langford himself. Initially, Langford said he would fight the request, but ultimately he relented.
In 2006, Langford retained his county commission seat, but not his hold on presidential power. Current Commission President Bettye Fine Collins has all but put him into political quarantine and second-guesses even the work he does with Cooper Green Mercy Hospital. With the county’s credit card maxed, Langford has little left there but the stunt politics that garner headlines. Meanwhile his political inconsistencies have made him an inconvenience or an annoyance to parties who once solicited his support. For instance, last year Langford announced publicly that a 70,000-seat domed stadium would be too big for the city. With a 40,000-seat stadium, he could recruit an NBA team, he said, promising an announcement 90 days later. That date passed silently. Meanwhile, BJCC officials accepted the plan for a smaller 40,000-seat arena. Almost immediately Langford reversed course, blasting the new plan as too small.
Meanwhile, a laundry list of pipedreams never came true.
“Let’s do something!” his slogan says. But it might as well read, “Let’s get outta here!” It’s time for Langford to move again, lest his history of troubles finally catch him.
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I'm new to the Alabama chat forum, got tired of chatting in the Georgia forum. Hope it's okay to switch sides. What's going on in Alabama? Grandma was from RockRun, anybody from there? Grandpa had roots in Cherokee. Reckon I'm Alabama by heart. Spent alot of time in Cherokee some years back on Lake Weiss, had a place there. Gave it up, long story. I miss Alabama, friendly people, made to feel at home. Not to mention great fishing. But I reckon ya'll are in the same spot we are in here in Georgia. No water. But as long as I can find a mudhole, you'll find me fishing!!!!! Peace to all. 
........the biggest was ovr 9lbs
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