Coincidentally, Gerald McCarley, an auditor, had retired in 1999 from Deloitte & Touche, a Big Four professional services firm. He volunteered to set up auditing procedures for Foundation spending. Two inside auditors were assigned to audit cash disbursements on a quarterly basis, with McCarley supervising, and with reports issued to the Foundation board, which also meets quarterly. It wasn’t long before McCarley’s group began questioning Adams’s expenditures. First, it was his use of a Foundation credit card to pay for personal expenses, dinners, and golf outings that seemed unrelated to his job. Sometimes Adams used the credit card for personal travel and would reimburse the Foundation, but even then the Foundation paid additional interest due to his late filings of expense reports. This might not have been a big deal to some, but to McCarley it was money that could have gone to a deserving student. The Foundation eventually revoked the credit card after auditors discovered Adams was using it to pay for expensive dinners for himself, his top assistants, and their wives.
In 2001, the internal auditors questioned a $13,490 charge for a charter airplane to take Adams and two university executives and their wives to Washington for George W. Bush’s inauguration. Although Adams was listed as a passenger on the flight, Foundation officials later learned that he was not on either leg of the flight. He flew commercial to Washington and returned on January 19 and returned January 23 on a different charter at an additional cost of $2,422.50, according to records of that trip. Foundation Chief Financial Officer Cindy Coyle had already flagged the expense, forwarding a copy of the reimbursement request to UGA Vice President for External Affairs Kathryn Costello, who reported directly to Adams but was also executive director of the Foundation.
The auditors’ recommendation on the matter was to “remind executives of the University that they are spending donor contributions and the travel policy of the foundation.” The request was ultimately approved for payment but it resulted in policy changes that increased restrictions and provided for regular review of expenditures of funds that support the president’s office.
For his part, Adams maintained the inauguration trip provided him and other senior university officials with a good opportunity to visit the Georgia congressional delegation. He also bristled at the auditing of presidential expenses, a practice he considered duplicative and unnecessary, and that was abandoned at his direction.
With his cherubic face and shock of white hair, Adams can sometimes seem reserved, almost shy. A devout church-goer, his undergraduate degree is from a school affiliated with the restorationist and generally fundamentalist Churches of Christ. But Adams also has an earthy side and can cuss a streak when riled. And he is quick to anger.
In hindsight, none of this behavior should have surprised Foundation member Wyck Knox, an Atlanta lawyer who gradually became one of Adams’s most vocal critics. As mentioned earlier, he and his wife, Shell Hardman Knox, had been forewarned about Adams’s hiring in 1997. Shell Knox had been unable to get a seat on the search committee, but she had followed the process through a friend, who had told the Knoxes they probably wouldn’t be happy with Adams. The Knoxes learned of Adams’s selection in an early morning phone call. “[The caller] was apologetic,” said Wyck Knox. “He told us [Adams’s] background and the reputation he had at Centre. The reputation was, watch the numbers. Watch the expenses. That’s his reputation everywhere. He will fib on the numbers just like he’s done with Georgia fundraising.”
It’s likely that Adams was told or intuited how Shell and Wyck Knox felt, but he nevertheless was friendly and solicitous toward them when he first arrived on campus. As time passed and Wyck Knox probed into more and more of Adams’s expenditures and actions, the relationship grew tense.
Knox said he began to question the president’s spending of Foundation money after he learned of the charter flight to the Bush inaugural. Following the airplane incident, Knox said he discovered that there were no written guidelines for reimbursement. He also learned about the Foundation credit card that Adams was using.
“In middle of that process Mike asked me to go to dinner with him at Bones [a restaurant in Atlanta’s tony Buckhead neighborhood],” Knox said. “He wanted to talk me into not having any rules. And I remember looking him straight in the eye. I said, ‘Mike, this is not about $5,000 or $10,000. This is about the success of a fundraising campaign. And your job is to raise money for the University of Georgia. Let me put it to you in Georgia vernacular. If somebody in rural Georgia is going to give $10,000 to the University of Georgia, they probably think that’s the biggest gift they’ve ever given in their life. If they see you squandering money on a $500 dinner that ought to be $100, they’re going to give their money to the First Baptist Church. They’re not going to give it to the University of Georgia. That’s what I’m talking about. You can’t ruin your reputation with the image you’re wasting money.’
“He did not like that one bit,” Knox said. “I knew after that dinner we had trouble on our hands. So we wrote the rules and there was always friction. He was always hedging. If he and Mary went out to dinner we got the bill for it. He would co-opt the system.”
And then comes the firing of Vince Dooley, which opened a Pandora’s box of Georgia tradition, university governance, the breaking of long-term friendships, high-profile hanky-panky, and, as always, intramural contests between the moneyed and the powerful. Through it all, it turns out that Adams held an ace hole card named Donald Leebern.
5
To many in the Bulldog family, the name Vince Dooley is synonymous with the University of Georgia. During his forty-one-year career at Georgia, Dooley became one of the most respected figures in college athletics, serving twenty-five years as head football coach and nine years in the dual roles of coach and athletic director before giving up coaching in 1988 to serve exclusively as AD until 2004. A member of the College Football Hall of Fame, he was successful in one of the country’s elite football conferences, bringing excitement and a sense of pride to his adopted state. His teams won six SEC championships, won eight bowl games and tied two in twenty appearances, and won a national championship. Rather studious for a football coach, Dooley has a master’s degree in history and devours literature about the Civil War. His Athens home and office is filled not only with football memorabilia but with books on a wide range of subjects.
Georgia fans adore Dooley not only because he was successful, but also because they see him as a decent human being. He exhibits patience and good humor, has made thousands of speeches to Bulldog Clubs in even the smallest villages, and remains close to his former players, many of whom—like Billy Payne, who brought the 1996 Olympic Games to Atlanta—have become leaders in their communities. Others, like the Heisman-winning Herschel Walker, have become icons. All of them love their coach. And high school coaches love Dooley because he made it a policy to recruit Georgia kids first.
During Dooley’s forty-one years with the school’s athletic program, the University of Georgia got its swagger back. Meanwhile, the state of Georgia was dramatically changing. It has grown and prospered and progressed in many areas, race relations being one of the most significant and most visible. Dooley had a low-key hand in that. He had quietly signed five African American football players to scholarships a decade before Herschel Walker burst onto the scene and carried Georgia to a national championship. Horace King, Larry West, Chuck Kinnebrew, Richard Appleby, and Clarence Pope entered UGA in 1971. Forty years later, Dooley can still tick off their names without having to think. He dismisses the notion that their signings were controversial or even courageous acts. The South was rapidly integrating. Integrated high school teams were already competing. Georgia had signed Ronnie Hogue to a basketball scholarship in 1970. By the time Walker arrived, just twenty years after Georgia politicians threatened to close the university rather than admit blacks, bumper stickers proclaiming “Herschel Walker Is My Cousin” began appearing on whites’ pickup trucks across the state. “I think sports did as much or more than any particular activity in the South to encourage acceptance of integration,” Dooley said. “People