Former Atlanta watershed commissioner Jo Ann Macrina is asking federal appellate judges to wipe her City Hall corruption convictions and order a new trial, claiming the thousands of dollars in cash, jewelry, travel upgrades, landscaping and other favors she allegedly received from a city contractor were not bribes.
Macrina, fired in May 2016, was found guilty in October 2022 of bribery and conspiracy to commit bribery. She was sentenced in February 2023 to four and a half years in prison and ordered to pay $40,000 in restitution. Macrina, 67, is in federal prison in North Florida.
Macrina’s attorney, Paul Kish, argued her new trial bid before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta on Wednesday. He said the jury that convicted Macrina should have been told by the trial judge that gifts she received from contractor Lohrasb “Jeff” Jafari after allegedly helping him win multimillion-dollar city contracts were legal gratuities.
Kish said Macrina didn’t accept Jafari’s gifts, which prosecutors said included a diamond ring, $10,000 in cash, a stay in a luxury hotel room in Dubai and home landscaping worth more than $1,000, until after she allegedly helped steer architecture and engineering contracts to his company.
“If (Jafari) made an offer, that cannot be a bribe until she accepts it,” Kish said.
Prosecutors alleged that Jafari’s company, JP2, received about $26 million in task orders under an architecture and engineering contract in early 2016 while Macrina served as commissioner, accounting for more than half the money awarded under the contract to that point. Jafari’s company had already received almost $35 million in projects from an earlier architecture and engineering contract with the city, including $13.2 million between December 2014 and September 2015, the government alleged.
Macrina led the city’s watershed management department, which had a $600 million budget, from 2011, case records show. The department came under fire in June when a large swath of the city was without water for days due to a series of pipe breaks and leaks.
Credit: Hyosub Shin
Credit: Hyosub Shin
Chief 11th Circuit Judge William H. Pryor Jr. said Wednesday that the jury instruction Kish claimed should have been given at trial seemed to be a “misstatement of the law.” He said the U.S. Supreme Court recently clarified in an unrelated case that whether a gift is a bribe or a gratuity depends on when someone agreed to accept it in exchange for a favor.
“It seems to me that your proposed instruction was focused on the timing of the payment as opposed to the timing of the agreement,” Pryor told Kish. “Your instruction would have told the jury that if payment came after (the favor) then it’s categorically a gratuity and that seems to me clearly wrong based on the recent decision of the Supreme Court.”
Prosecutor Nathan Kitchens said the evidence in the case showed that bribes, and not gratuities, were given by Jafari to Macrina in exchange for her taking improper actions to send city contracts his way. The case “had nothing to do with whether she was somehow rewarded after the fact,” he said.
Kish said the trial judge also allowed prosecutors to play to the jury parts of a secretly recorded conversation Macrina had with FBI agents, without playing portions that provided crucial context. He said the jury heard that Jafari had given Macrina thousands of dollars, but not her explanation that she used the money to buy gifts for his wife.
“This was a close case and we think that the failure to let the jury hear this was harmful error,” Kish said.
Pryor pointed out that Macrina’s lawyers failed to specify during trial the parts of the conversation they wanted the jury to hear. He said defense counsel can’t wait until after the verdict to make that argument.
Macrina is one of nine defendants sentenced to prison in the yearslong City Hall corruption probe that brought Atlanta officials and contractors before U.S. District Judge Steve C. Jones.
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Credit: undefined
Jafari, 73, was sentenced in July 2023 to five years in prison after pleading guilty to single counts of bribery, conspiracy to commit bribery, and tax evasion. He was ordered to pay restitution of $909,674. Jafari is serving his sentence in a federal prison in North Carolina.
The 11th Circuit could take months to decide Macrina’s appeal.
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