Pam Stephenson and the Cover Up of Corruption

On December 15th 2000, Sheriff Elect Derwin Brown was gunned down in front of his home two days before he was to be sworn in as Sheriff of Dekalb County in Georgia. The perpetrators of this heinous murder included several individuals all with ties to the Sheriff's Department in Dekalb County in the group's ringleader was Syd Dorsey, then outgoing Sheriff. Worse than that, this crime was the culmination of years of corruption within the Sheriff's Department that had more former Sheriff's in jail than not in jail. Despite the fact that this despicable crime should have shined a bright light on a culture of corruption within the Department that needed immediate wholesale changes, the selected Sheriff Thomas Brown made only cosmetic changes within the department following Derwin Brown's (no relation) murder. As such, Derwin Brown, who ran on a platform of rooting out the very corruption that wound up killing him, continues to have his death be in vain.

How could such a heainous crime and the obscene corruption that followed it be met with such a marginal response? It's because the media in the area took little interest in what the department did in the aftermath of this heinous crime. Because the media cared very little just how much reform the aftermath of Derwin Brown's death would bring to the department, very little reform was actually brought. Unfortunately, when examining the crime at Grady Hospital and the areas surrounding it, one finds a very troubling pattern like the one followed in the aftermath of Derwin Brown's death.

Back in 2004, the Department of Health and Human Services completed an in depth investigation of Grady Hospital and its conclusions were

Grady Hospital poses and immediate threat to the health and safety of the patients

Much like the cosmetic reforms after Derwin Brown's death, the media in Atlanta gave very little attention to this report. One would find nothing more than a by line in the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the television media barely made any mention of it. There was little examination of how it came to be that Grady, one of the biggest hospitals in the country, was becoming a threat to the very people it was meant to heal. Because they didn't, Grady Hospital did little to fix the inherent problems that created these findings and no one noticed.

In 2005, Kevin Kuritzky was expelled from Emory University Medical School with 41 days left before he was to graduate. At the time, Kuritzky was leveling serious charges of corruption at the higher ups with Emory and Grady Hospital. Yet, he fellow students would have no little of his situation because the Emory Wheel, the schoo's newspaper, wrote exactly 2 stories about the situation. Thus, while one of their colleagues was being expelled on the eve of his graduation, the entire student body was kept essentially in the dark because their media refused to cover the story.

At the end of November 2007, JCAHO threatened to revoke the accreditation of Grady Hospital. This was a stunning and nearly unprecedented move. It had only happened once prior in the history of JCAHO, King-Drew Hospital in Los Angeles. After a flurry of attention after JCAHO made the announcement, this story, like most involving Grady Hospital, lost all appeal in the Atlanta media. In fact, since threatening Grady with revocation of their license, JCAHO has actually wound up doing absolutely nothing. Furthermore, the actual report that JCAHO filed that produced this action has never been made public. No one in the Atlanta media has made an effort through FOIA to attempt to make this report public. As such, after making a big deal of it in November, there has been nearly no mention of this since. Many local area activists I have spoken with have made their own attempts to take a look at the report. Many of them have told me that they have been stone walled by higher ups within Grady Hospital. In fact, one name mentioned as a perpetrator of the stonewalling is Pam Stephenson, herself.

Back in February of this year, Otis Story Jr. was fired as CEO of Grady Hospital after less than a year on the job. The circumstances surrounding his firing have never fully been explained besides nebulous statements like "going in another direction". Sources I have spoken with suspect that Story simply wouldn't go along with the program of corruption. Whatever the reason, one thing is clear is that the media has no interest in finding out for itself what it is. Of course, after he was fired, the board replaced Story with Pam Stephenson. To say this was a controversial move is an understatement. At the time, Stephenson was also simultaneously Chairmwoman of the Board at Grady Hospital and a State Senator. This obscene conflict of interest and accumulation of power also received little if any attention.

Months later, this story received new media attention when Stephenson used her centralized power to award herself a contract that potentially could reach seven figures. Of course, that was nearly three weeks ago. That particular story turned out to have a twenty four hour life in the Atlanta area news cycle. Since then, there has been scant attention paid to the situation. As such, it appears that Stephenson will be able to consummate the contract and media will again look the other way.

This latest episode continues a long legacy of corruption and media disinterest involving all things Grady Hospital. The first amendment's main value is not in the freedom of speech it provides individuals. In fact, the first amendment was meant so that media like the Atlanta Journal Constitution provided a check against the powerful so that this very corruption would exposed if and when it occurred. In fact, the best check on corruption is a vigorous media always looking to expose it. One of the biggest factors for the long term systemic corruption at Grady Hospital is the media total lack of interest in reporting on it. Time after time, corruption goes on and the media is largely silent in the face of it. What has occurred with the contract involving Pam Stephenson and the manner in which the media in the area has treated it, is yet another example. Until the media decides that corruption is unacceptable Grady will continue to be corrupted and the corruptors will operate with impugnity.

Shame: Pam Stephenson

Let's welcome Ron Marshall of the New Grady Coalition for his thoughts on Pam Stephenson's boondoggle.

Today, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that Pam Stephenson, the current interim CEO of Grady Hospital, has negotiated quite a financial boondoggle for herself. She is only the interim CEO because the board she heads recently fired Otis Story who was the CEO of Grady. The financial boon has raised many eyebrows, and here is Ron Marshall's view...







For years, I have urged the State Senate to hold hearings into ongoing and worsening corruption at Grady Memorial Hospital. The hospital is going broke, but wealthy contractors continue to get rich on the backs of Grady patients.

Now, the absolute worse has happened. Pam Stephenson, a person with absolutely no experience in running a hospital, fired the highly qualified Otis Story in January 2008, and then took over the extremely lucrative CEO position, for her self. Give Otis Story the same deal at least he was experienced.

Pam, your temerity in capturing this position was incredible. Talk to the Hawks & Falcons, they need this type of thinking. For you to have negotiated this flagrantly unethical masterpiece behind closed doors shows that you never had the Grady patient’s interests at heart.

The board claimed that this would be a new era in Open Government, and Grady would be transparent. Hello! Instead, Grady is back in the smoke-filled rooms, dealing out public money without restraint. The board wanted Pam to deliver a private hospital. She delivered. Now, Pam is this the paid off? Pam and the board put personal profit before patients.

This new board suppose to be the big business thinkers, is this how they made there fortunes? Maybe we need to have a corruption reality show, no need to audition.

I wonder how this board became a non profit so fast. It was with the help of John Lewis. I also wonder why this type of influence didn’t step in when the crisis started at Grady. The influential sure know when to get involved with certain events that impact their political livelihoods.

The AJC reports that Grady officials are furious over this deal, and well they should be. Many trustees never heard of the contract, much less approved it. How did this happen again?

State legislators went through the roof. "I think it's appalling," said Rep. Mike Jacobs (R-Atlanta). "It is a sweetheart deal done in secret." Lynne Riley, a member of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, criticized the Authority for executing what she said was a secret contract. Public outrage over the deal could endanger some county funding for the hospital, she said. Why not ask for an investigation Lynn and Mike?

Mr. Jacobs, Ms. Riley, it is time to hold on the record public hearings. We must get to the bottom of the endless corruption. It must be a holiday for corruption, everybody is on it. The public now has no confidence in either the old board or the new board. Most legislators appeared to vote for the Grady deal without any understanding of what is at stake.

Let’s look at what’s ahead. We must now see if this new board is for the people or are they what they are, big business. When I attend the board meetings I do not see a representative from the community. Nobody that comes to any of our community meeting or anybody else’s I know of is on this board
With more hospitals closing at an alarming rate, just look in New Jersey. More than 62 public facilities have been closed. Muhlenberg Regional Medical Center in New Jersey is fighting for its life as we read.

We have to ask why? This is not just a Grady thing, this is a forget the poor people thing. Grady is in the wrong place, must of these facilities are. Look what happened to all of the low income housing in the downtown matrix.

Pam gave away the billion dollar hospital asset to the private board. The land that Grady sits on is even more valuable than the hospital itself, and it appears the true motivation of the industry captains has not been to save Grady, but to gut it. I still see a twin 60 story tower complex where Grady presently sits.

Why did Ms. Stephenson go along with this ill-advised privatization when the people were against the entire move? Now it is clear. Stephenson agreed to take the heat, in exchange for a secret deal to giveaway $1.2 Million dollars as a golden parachute.

The hypocrisy: Stephenson denied Otis Story the same golden parachute she is claiming for herself. Unlike Stephenson, Story was eminently qualified for the CEO Job, with a long and lustrous history of turning around public hospitals.

How can Stephenson claim that Story is bilking the hospital, and turn around and attempt to extract the same contract as Story?

Stephenson claims she is like a prime baseball player, who can command whatever she can get. But the record shows that Stephenson was a rookie, and would never have stood a national search. She never would have been considered a draft pick for the job.

Now, its de ja vu all over again.

Grady's biggest open-ended no bid contract is to Emory University for more than $50 Million a year. Despite this incredible amount of money paid to Emory, the JCAHO and other federal investigators have found Emory's care at Grady is so sub-standards, JCAHO is considering pulling Grady's accreditation.

Why hasn’t the media flagged that sound bite? If JCAHO does this, all other discussions are moot. That would be the end of Grady. Can you hear me now?

The New Grady Coalition has submitted more than 50 open records requests since 2004 directly to now-Grady CEO Pam Stephenson and Grady lawyer Tim Jefferson requesting the internal report Grady conducted on its no-bid contracts to politicians and to politically-connected cronies as well as requesting a report on the pension funds. Not a single request has been honored.

Why don’t the officials at Grady release audits of its pension fund? Has the pension fund been raided as part of the giveaway program?

It might interest you to know that Pam Stephenson did a similar move when she appointed herself CEO of Legacy Medical Center after Herb Weldon was fired.

Pam later became a consultant to the recently fired consulting firm, Marsal and Alvarez as they worked toward reopening the closed hospital at 501 Fairburn Road.

No one, not even Stephenson is above the law. Immediate release of records is urgent. State hearings are needed now! Don't settle for less. This is our money, our hospital, and our healthcare system. It all belongs to the people, and not to bigwig officials who claim they want to help, but in reality are looking for more giveaways.

Pam Stephenson"s Grady Boondoggle

The Atlanta Journal Constitution has the latest on this developing scandal.

Several Georgia lawmakers and Grady hospital officials expressed outrage Wednesday over a two-year, $1.2 million contract awarded interim hospital CEO Pam Stephenson, with some calling for a state investigation and her resignation from hospital leadership posts.

Stephenson's contract was sealed shortly before the Fulton-DeKalb Hospital Authority was to hand over control of the hospital to a new nonprofit corporation. On Monday, the corporation announced four finalists for the CEO position, and Stephenson was not among them.

Officials blasted the contract, characterizing it as a deal deliberately crafted away from public scrutiny. Some attacked what they termed the contract's lucrative offerings, including a $600,000 annual base salary and a golden parachute that could earn Stephenson a separate check for $750,000 when she is replaced.

In February, I pointed out that Stephenson was accumulating far too much power into her own single hands.. At the time, the board of Grady Hospital had just fired Otis Story Jr. This firing was orchestrated by the board at Grady Hospital headed up by none other than Pam Stephenson. Sources have told me that the reason for Story's firing was because he wouldn't go along with the corruption at Grady Hospital. As head of the board at the time of his firing, Stephenson would have been a main point person in deciding on his firing. By then installing herself as the new interim CEO, it ought to have raised serious questions about how kosher the whole thing was. .

Besides simultaneously being the CEO of Grady and head of the board, Stephenson is also a State Senator. There appears to be all sorts of frothing at the mouths of her State Senator colleagues about the lucrative deal she landed for herself. Of course, no one seemed to mind when she manipulated herself into a postion of near absolute power so that such a deal would be possible. It seems the State's pol's wait only until corruption has occurred until being indignant. It appears the State Senate apparatus gets all worked up when corruption is actually committed, but says nothing when the roots of that corruption are set in place.

So, State Senators are calling for an investigation, however their righteous indignation is rather half hearted in my opinion. Grady has been corrupted for decades. The whole thing has gone under the nose of the state legislature. The biggest corruption committed at the hospital was committed by Charles Walker, then himself a State Senator. All of them have known for months that their State Senate colleague was simultaneously running the board and CEO of the hospital and no one said anything until this clearly corrupt confluence of power was actually used to corrupt.



Keep in mind that Stephenson has absolutely zero healthcare experience and little executive experience. Thus, she got her Grady power through connections not qualifications.



So how did she use all that power? According to this article, she used to give herself an annual salary of $600,000 per yeara and a golden parachute to the tune of $750,000. Keep in mind that Grady Hospital was in such dire financial straits that it needed to be bailed out with a private donation of roughly $200 million from the Woodruff Foundation. The Woodruff Foundation is of course closely tied to Emory University, the single biggest employer at Grady Hospital. So closely tied is Woodruff that the medical school at Emory University is named the Woodruff Health Sciences Center.



Now, given that Grady was in such dire financial straits that it needed a nine digit bailout, is it really financially wise to give such a massive contract to someone that orchestrated her position? Well, of course, financial frugality has never been the order of the day at Grady Hospital. Back in 2002, when Grady was also facing a financial crisis, they began building a multi million dollar addition. The recipient of that contract was RL Brown and Associates. RL Brown and Associates was owned by Robert Brown, then head of the board at Grady.



In other words, what is going on now is the same corruption that put Grady into a position of being in need of receiving the massive bailout they received. The backstory on the bailout likely also has a nefarious undercurrent. Why is a group so tied to Emory University (which provides more than 90% of the staff at Grady Hospital) giving so much money to the hospital that employs it? Of course, the new private board, a creation of the Grady Task Force, was supposed to be able prevent this sort of corruption. Of course, a close examination of the make up of the new private board finds several with ties to Woodruff like Steve Correl.

In other words, the corruption continues in full at Grady Hospital and no one seems to be doing much about it. Here is an updated summary of the entire scandal. Here are my recommendations for fixing Grady Hospital.

Grady Hospital and the Definition of Insanity (Updated)

An old proverb goes like this

the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

According to the AJC, Otis Story, who left under murky circumstances, is in the process of suing cash strapped Grady Hospital for $2 million dollars in severence.

A lawyer for Otis Story, who was earning $600,000 a year, said he is negotiating with Grady.The issue may focus on whether Story was fired for good reason and whether the Grady board members provided him with written notice and a chance to defend himself. His attorney said they didn't.

If he was fired for cause, he gets no severance, but a hearing process is required.

When Story was fired two weeks ago, after less than a year in the job, Grady board chairwoman Pam Stephenson did not cite any failure on his part. The board, she said, wanted a change in administration.

Grady board member Geoffrey Heard, however, said at the time, "The position needed strengthening."

While that is interesting, and likely has a lot more back story than the AJC is reporting, here is the most interesting part of the story. (no pun intended)

The Grady board has replaced Story temporarily with Stephenson, its chairwoman, a move that has created controversy, since it places her as hospital CEO as well as head of the board that oversees the Grady system. Stephenson is also a state legislator.

Stephenson could not be reached for comment.

From the late nineties through much of the beginning of this decade, State Senator Charles Walker committed so much criminality at Grady Hospital and beyond that he was charged with 138 felonies, convicted of 127, and sentenced to 10 years in jail (or about three months per felony). He was able to accomplish this by using a sphere of influence that he created. For instance, as a powerful State Senator he had great influence in the purse strings to Grady Hospital. He used that influence and parlayed that into extorting Grady Hospital into hiring up to ten times as many temps from the temp agency he owned as Grady actually wanted or needed. (Many times he demanded up to fifty temps be hired per day even though Grady only wanted or needed five) He also ran a newspaper and threatened all those who didn't play ball with him with bad press in the newspaper.

Among the many lessons of the Walker case, is the corrossive and corrupting influence of allowing one individual to hold so many duel roles that they have a conflict of interest. Robert Brown, long time prominent board member, received a lucrative contract from cash strapped Grady Hospital in 2002 for his architecture firm, RL Brown and Associates, for a major expansion of Grady Hospital. These sorts of conflicts of interest are common at Grady Hospital. The entire Grady Task Force is filled with folks with a professional, legislative, or financial interest in Grady Hospital. The members are exclusively folks from Emory University and Morehouse College (the two schools that staff Grady), former and current board members like Robert Brown himself, and those with current or past contracts with Grady, like Michael Russell of H.J. Russell. There are no whistleblowers on the board, no community activist, there is no one on this board that doesn't themselves have a conflict of interest already. It should surprise no one then that the Grady Task Force has come up with a plan that will do nothing but make it easier to corrupt the hospital going forward.

Despite this pattern of conflict of interest leading to corruption, after Story was fired under murky circumstances, he was replaced by Pam Stephenson, who herself has all sorts of conflicts. She will now concurrently be head of the board, CEO, and a State Legislator. One could say that she has influence in every single decision at Grady Hospital, from hiring and firing, contracts, purse strings...no one will be able to sneeze there now without Stephenson knowing about it.

Apparently no one has learned any lessons from the previous cases of corruption from Walker, to Brown, to the Task Force. When I say no one, I don't mean the corruptors, the media, or any of their facilatators. I mean the folks that wind up footing the bill for all of this corruption, the folks, the tax payers themselves.

It seems pretty obvious that there is a clear pattern of behavior of the corruptors, and they aren't going to change. The media is not going to report it, and Grady will continue to be corrupted. Ultimately, it is the tax payers that will get the shaft. Yet, they sit idly by while this goes on and usually out in the open and right in front of them. The powers that be at Grady aren't going to change. The media isn't going to change. The only group that can change is the one ultimately footing the bill. Unless the folks rise up and demand more, we will continue to have the exact same pattern of behavior over and over and over again.

Epilogue: For better understanding and context, you may want to read this updated summary of the entire Grady Hospital fiasco. Also, here are the recommendations my colleagues and I have developed for fixing Grady Hospital.

Update...

It should come as no surprise that Stephenson used her confluence of power to no good. Here is the update and how she profited from her simultaneous roles.