Today, the company that Fate Leebern began in 1938 is called Georgia Crown Distributing Company. An industry newsletter describes it as “a full-service beverage distributor, with wholesale operations doing business in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee, selling imported and domestic spirits, wines, beers and specialty products.”
The company, like all liquor distributors in Georgia, operates as a monopoly thanks to a beneficent Georgia legislature. Georgia laws—largely unchanged since the 1930s—protect liquor distributors by requiring that retailers purchase through a wholesaler, rather than directly from distillers and brewers. To ship alcoholic beverages into Georgia, the producer must appoint a single distributor for a specified territory in the state. Once the producer chooses a wholesaler he cannot change wholesalers without demonstrating due cause and getting approval from the state Department of Revenue. Producers of alcoholic beverages are forbidden from owning a wholesale distributorship and wholesalers cannot own retail stores. Retailers are required to purchase from the designated wholesaler at whatever price the wholesaler sets. And once the alcoholic beverage is delivered to the retail store, it cannot be moved to any other licensed location, even to another store owned by the same retailer.
This three-tier system has long been criticized by consumer advocates as overly costly to consumers. A Georgia Public Policy Foundation study of the state’s liquor laws concluded that the laws stifle competition. “They protect a monopoly controlled by a small number of wholesalers, who siphon off 18–25 percent of the cost to retailers, increasing prices for consumers, hurting producers such as small to mid-size wineries and making liquor distribution the most expensive in the packaged-good industry. There is no public policy reason why producers should not be able to sell directly to retailers, the public or grocers whether on the Internet or through other traditional sales methods.” However, a state house legislative study committee looked into the liquor distribution system and concluded that it works just fine, a judgment that was a testament to the power of Georgia’s liquor lobby and distributors like Donald Leebern. They give generously and they don’t mind calling in favors.
Basically, Don Leebern inherited a cash cow and has grown it into a cash herd. He probably couldn’t have done any better even if he had that degree in business administration that he never completed at the University of Georgia, where he played varsity football in 1957–59 under Coach Wallace Butts but didn’t earn a diploma.
While at UGA, Leebern also courted and married a former Miss Georgia. Don and Betsy Leebern made a handsome couple, rich and rabid Bulldog backers. When Vince and Barbara Dooley arrived in Athens in 1963, they soon developed a close and powerful friendship with the Leeberns.
The Leeberns spent nights with the Dooleys and sat with Barbara when they attended Georgia’s home football games. After Dooley left the sidelines to become exclusively the athletic director, the Leeberns joined the Dooleys in their sky box at Sanford Stadium. In turn, the Dooleys stayed with Betsy and Don Leebern when they went to Columbus or to their beach condo on St. Simons Island. The couples took trips together nearly every year to New York for the annual College Football Hall of Fame dinner. Their relationships extended to their children. Daniel Dooley and Donald Leebern III (Little Don) were roommates at UGA. The Leebern and Dooley daughters were in the same UGA sorority.
A career like Dooley’s, spanning decades as head football coach and athletic director of an NCAA Division I power, is a magnet for attracting casual friendships. This was no casual friendship. Vince and Barbara Dooley have lots of friends in and outside of Georgia but few, if any, became closer to them than Don and Betsy Leebern.
“They weren’t just acquaintances. We gave their son and daughter parties when they got married,” Barbara Dooley recalls. “I thought they were really close friends. I considered them not just friends but close personal friends. He flew Betsy on his company plane up here with other close friends to celebrate my fortieth birthday. And there was nothing I felt like I could ask Don and Betsy to do for me that they wouldn’t do it.”
That cut both ways. Several times over the years, Dooley lent his considerable personal clout to Leebern’s business interests. One instance was after Leebern created a new Georgia Crown division, Poland Spring Water Distributing Company, and began selling Perrier’s Poland Spring bottled water. Quickly realizing the potential profits in bottled water, Leebern’s company opened a plant in Dahlonega, Georgia, in 1991 and began marketing its own brand, Melwood Springs, “Georgia Crown’s own private-labeled spring water.” The problem was that Melwood Springs water doesn’t come from a spring; it is pumped from a well in Dahlonega, just like city water. “Bottled well water” just doesn’t have the cachet of “natural spring water.”
Moreover, Perrier was threatening to quit marketing Poland Spring water in Georgia because new state agriculture regulations scheduled to take effect in May 1992 would not have allowed the product to be labeled as natural spring water. The regulation also would have affected Melwood Springs water. With Georgia Agriculture Commission Tommy Irvin about to put the kibosh on the whole venture, Leebern needed to do something—and quickly. He got hometown legislator Tom Buck of Columbus to introduce a bill in the 1992 legislature redefining natural spring water to include water that comes from wells. The bill easily passed in the state House of Representatives but was defeated in the Senate. Undaunted, Leebern, then a newly appointed member of the state Board of Regents, called on his friends at the University of Georgia.
Both UGA President Charles Knapp and Dooley lobbied for the legislation. Dooley’s son Daniel was working for Georgia Crown at the time and Knapp was an employee of the Regents. UGA spokesman Tom Jackson said Knapp and Leebern were personal friends and that Knapp’s support of the legislation had nothing to do with his position at the university. After the full-court press by Dooley and Knapp, the Senate, which had voted 31–24 to defeat the bill two weeks earlier, reversed itself, voting 32–23 to approve the bill. Governor Zell Miller signed the legislation into law. Miller said he saw nothing wrong with the labeling or the lobbying. “In this age of where we want people to participate, there’s no problem with anyone calling . . . no matter what position they hold,” Miller told an AJC reporter. And as for the labeling controversy, Miller said he didn’t see any difference between well and spring water. It can all be traced back to an underground source, he said.
The Leebern-Dooley relationship, entwined across personal, family, and UGA lines, held firm through the 1990s. In 1997, Leebern and another of Dooley’s close friends, Sonny Seiler, personally called Dooley to give him a heads-up before the public announcement of the hiring of Michael Adams as UGA president. “You’ll like him,” Seiler predicted. “He has a real fondness for athletics.” Leebern also mentioned Adams’s fondness for athletics.
Like most Georgians, Dooley knew little about Adams and therefore had no concerns about his appointment. A self-described “good soldier,” Dooley was confident that he would get along well with the new president. After all, he had served four previous presidents at UGA without conflict. Nevertheless, Dooley thought it was a good idea to reach out to the man who would be his boss during his final years at UGA, so he telephoned his congratulations and left his number. “He never returned my phone call,” Dooley remembers. “This was a couple of days after he was named. So, I called him again in a couple of days and this time he took my call. I just congratulated him. That was the first time I talked to him.”
Dooley wanted a close relationship with the president and tried to convince Adams that it was important to have good lines of communications. The best way to do that, Dooley felt, was for the two of them to have monthly meetings, just as he had done with previous presidents. Adams wanted no part of it.
Dooley hasn’t said whether Leebern, in his heads-up call about the Adams selection, also explained that Adams was his personal choice, or that he had ramrodded Adams through the interview and hiring process. By then, Leebern had become the dominant personality on the Board of Regents. He was first appointed to the board in 1991 by Governor Zell Miller, then a Democrat. (Miller reappointed him in 1998 to another seven-year term; Republican Governor Sonny Perdue