The Atlanta-based federal appeals court has upheld the bribery convictions of former Atlanta watershed commissioner Jo Ann Macrina, rejecting her argument that the thousands of dollars in cash, jewelry, travel upgrades, landscaping and other favors she allegedly received from a city contractor were not bribes.
Macrina, 67, sought a new trial after she 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.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit said the trial judge did nothing wrong by refusing to tell the jury that gifts Macrina received from contractor Lohrasb “Jeff” Jafari after allegedly helping him win multimillion-dollar city contracts were legal gratuities.
“Macrina’s proposed instruction wrongly asserted that a payment received after an official act is completed is always a gratuity and can never be a bribe,” the court said. “As the (U.S.) Supreme Court recently explained in (an unrelated case), a payment after an official act can violate (federal law) if an official earlier agrees to the future reward and accepts payment after completion of the act.”
The court rejected Macrina’s other arguments on appeal: that the jury heard too much evidence about Atlanta’s ethics code and the trial judge wrongly allowed only portions of a secretly recorded conversation between Macrina and federal agents to be played.
The city’s ethics code was relevant in proving Macrina’s corrupt intent, the 11th Circuit said, adding that “her failure to comply with the code makes Macrina’s intent to accept a bribe more probable.” It noted that the trial judge told jurors Macrina was not on trial for violating the code, curing any risk of confusion about the case.
At trial, Macrina’s lawyers did not specify which parts of the recorded conversation should be played to the jury to provide context to the portions that prosecutors presented in evidence. That killed Macrina’s appeal on this point, the 11th Circuit said.
It would have been unduly burdensome for the trial judge to review the entire recording, which was an hour and 45 minutes long, to identify portions that might be admissible, the court said.
Macrina led Atlanta’s watershed management department, which had a $600 million budget, from 2011 until she was fired in May 2016. Prosecutors said she took bribes from Jafari, including a diamond ring, $10,000 in cash, a stay in a luxury hotel room in Dubai and home landscaping worth more than $1,000, in exchange for steering lucrative city architecture and engineering contracts to his company.
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 is one of nine defendants sentenced to prison in the yearslong City Hall corruption probe .
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.
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