Nearly every interview with John Oxendine in the mid-to-late 2000s ended with him saying, “You know you’d love it if I were governor. There’d always be something to write about.”
From his decision to bus about 40 mentally challenged registered voters to a Democratic presidential delegate election in hopes of getting named as a delegate - to 16 years of fighting insurance companies while taking their campaign contributions - to a promising but ultimately failed run for governor as a Republican - to a more than decadelong fight over ethics charges - to his indictment, plea and sentencing Friday - Oxendine was good to his word.
The curly haired, boyish-looking son of a prominent Democratic Gwinnett judge, Oxendine rose to prominence in 1994 with another Republican upstart, Linda Schrenko, riding the wave of Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolution to win statewide races for insurance commissioner and school superintendent, respectively.
Schrenko, a two-term superintendent and, like Oxendine, later failed Republican gubernatorial candidate, beat him to prison by about two decades, being sentenced in 2006 after pleading guilty to fraud and money laundering. She was accused of stealing $600,000 of federal education money, spending more than $9,000 of it on a face-lift.
Oxendine was sentenced Friday to 3.5 years in prison in a federal case accusing him of taking part in a $3 million health care fraud scheme.
Oxendine went into office backed by the politically powerful insurance and small-loan industries he would regulate. They were fed up with Democratic incumbent Tim Ryles, whom they said used dictoratorial tactics to deny all rate hikes.
Throughout his 16 years in office he had a love-hate relationship with the industry, publicly chastising them to reporters for exorbitant rate hikes or questionable claims handling, while at the same time collecting checks from them to bankroll his campaigns.
Throughout the 2000s he was in Capitol committee rooms fighting against industry legislation to allow insurance companies to put higher rates into effect before getting Oxendine’s approval. Some in the industry said his crusade was more about Oxendine not wanting to lose his leverage to squeeze them for campaign contributions. But when the measure eventually passed, Oxendine was proved correct because auto insurance rates immediately went up.
Throughout his tenure there were rumors of lavish dinners and expensive bottles of wine paid for by the industry, and constant Capitol eye-rolls over his love of using the blue emergency lights and siren on his state cars, which he famously crashed in 1997, and then again in 1999.
Credit: John Spink
Credit: John Spink
The insurance and small-loan industries helped bankroll his 2010 run for governor, and he led the GOP race in some polls. Winning the nomination was tantamount to being elected at the time. In the end, he came in fourth, his dream denied.
In 2011, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that on his last full day in office, Oxendine issued himself several licenses to sell insurance and adjust claims without taking the mandated classes or licensing tests, using his authority as insurance commissioner to waive requirements for himself that apply to other Georgians seeking to sell insurance. Lawmakers quickly sought to change state law to take away that authority.
Four years later I noticed Oxendine’s was reporting that his bank account loaded with left over campaign money - $500,000 - was empty. A front-page story in the AJC got the Ethics Commission interested, and it turned out the $500,000 in leftover money was actually $700,000, and the panel said he illegally used some of it for a down payment on a Buckhead home, expensive car leases and child care for his kids.
There was a lot more to the case, but the commission had been slow to look into allegations before the AJC article, and Oxendine’s lawyer vigorously fought the new charges, eating up more time after the story ran. The statute of limitations ran out on most of the accusations and the case was settled in 2022, about a week before he was back in the news, indicted on health care fraud and money laundering charges.
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