One thing about hunting for official corruption --- and there's a lot of it going on around here these days --- is that it's inevitably a puzzle.

"Why do they do it?" a friend asked.

This is a deeper question than it sounds.  Bad upbringing? Sometimes.

Stupidity? Sometimes. Certainly taking an envelope stuffed with cash in a restaurant is pretty stupid. So is depending on the honor of thieves.

Resentment? A sense of entitlement? Envy? A belief that everybody does it? Yes, sometimes.

Sometimes they get caught up, habituated. Sometimes they're just sociopaths --- people who blithely do whatever they can get away with. Sometimes they mirror their environments (there are whole countries that are corrupt). Sometimes it's just a little thing --- a wink, an understanding --- and sometimes it's big, and rough.

In the South, where race lays its hand on much of public life, you hear vicious explanations not just for corruption but also for investigating corruption, caring about corruption, not caring about corruption --- everything.

Then there's the odd sense I get in Atlanta that people I think would care most about appearances don't seem to care very much.

Take the current federal corruption trial of Ray McClendon (an investment banker and friend of former Mayor Maynard Jackson who won a big chunk of the city's investment business) and Theresa Stanford (Atlanta's former investment officer), who are charged with defrauding the city and its citizens out of more than $15 million. (They began putting up a spirited defense last week in a complicated trial that could drag on all summer.) You'd think --- after multiple news stories about deals and payoffs, and then a damaging report on the pair from the Securities and Exchange Commission, and then a federal criminal indictment --- that the city government would be extra scrupulous and vigorous in trying to get back some of that money, if indeed it was taken improperly.

But Mayor Bill Campbell's administration has let years pass without going after the money.

Last September, Lee Morris, chairman of the City Council's finance committee, asked Judith Blackwell, the city's acting chief financial officer (she has since quit), whether she knew how much money the city's police pension fund might have lost in the early '90s from this alleged fraud.

Blackwell replied that she knew about the case only "secondhand," since she'd come to work for the city in 1995; that she was in no position to investigate; that "there are allegations on both sides"; and that "we are not concentrating on the newspaper articles."

She agreed that the issue of restitution was "absolutely relevant" --- but her whole attitude (the meeting was taped) seemed bland and dubious and resentful of the news media's interest.

Morris nonetheless forged ahead. Some experts were warning that the statute of limitations was about to run out, while the city's lawyers said everything would be fine. So the City Council passed an ordinance this May authorizing an outside legal study of the issue, which would cost $100,000. And Campbell signed the ordinance.

But the outside study hasn't been done. It's strange.

There just isn't much interest around here in ferreting out official corruption. I recently asked Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard (who rightly alerted federal prosecutors when a witness told his office that Howard's friend Michael Hightower, a Fulton County commissioner, was taking bribes) whether he had turned over any other allegations of official corruption to federal prosecutors in his 3 1/2 years as DA. Howard said he couldn't recall any.

He agreed, though, that local prosecutors have traditionally done a poor job of investigating official corruption (he has been trying to remedy that), and obviously he hears an occasional tale of official corruption.

Last year, for example, Howard heard from Atlanta City Attorney Susan Langford that two men (both now involved in a federal investigation of corruption in Atlanta and Fulton County) were threatening to sue Campbell for not giving one of the men, a strip club owner, a liquor license; the two also were claiming they'd bribed the mayor. The matter was serious enough that the mayor and his city attorney told Howard about it, but Howard advised Langford that everybody should wait until the two men sued (one did sue on Friday). Howard also told me he found the allegations of bribing the mayor implausible because the mayor actually had revoked the club's liquor license.

Howard didn't investigate further --- although it sounds, at least in retrospect, that the men might have been trying to blackmail the mayor or get a license through threats, which would be a crime worth investigating in its own right.

Howard didn't tell federal prosecutors about the allegations, either. I wish he'd been more interested in getting to the bottom of the matter.

Our Sunday columnist

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