Chatham district attorney: Republican opponent ‘compromised’ drug investigation

Andre Pretorius has made allegations of ethical and professional lapses by Chatham County District Attorney Shalena Cook Jones the centerpiece of his campaign to unseat her in November’s election.

Now, Cook Jones, a Democrat, is accusing Pretorius, a Republican, of ethical and professional blunders of his own.

While on a leave of absence from his job as the county’s deputy attorney, Pretorius improperly intervened in an ongoing drug-trafficking case that ultimately cost county taxpayers $100,000 and could endanger prosecutions, according to Cook Jones.

In a letter sent Tuesday to all nine members of the Chatham County Commission, Cook Jones detailed what she called “flagrant” ethical misconduct by Pretorius when he provided legal opinions to the head of the Chatham-Savannah Counter Narcotics Team.

“He’s compromised the case(s), and he’s compromised the evidence,” Cook Jones told The Current in an interview. She said she planned to file a complaint with the State Bar of Georgia.

Pretorius confirmed that his actions outlined by Cook Jones were accurate, but said he did nothing wrong.

“They were not asking me to prosecute a case,” he said. “They were just asking me my opinion on whether they should give the money back or not.”

The director of the narcotics team, Michael Sarhatt, confirmed that he had sought out Pretorius for legal advice but declined to answer specific questions about the case.

“I was trying to figure out where we were on a certain legal issue,” Sarhatt told The Current . “Did I go about it the wrong way? Maybe.”

County Attorney Jonathan Hart, whom Pretorius said did not know of his exchanges with the head of the narcotics team, did not respond to requests for comment.

District 6 Commissioner Aaron “Adot” Whitely, who heads the county’s Democratic Party, said that Pretorius and Sarhatt’s actions give the appearance of something nefarious occurring. “My trust is extremely damaged,” he said.

It’s unclear how — or if — the allegations of impropriety will affect the race to win the DA’s race.

A former prosecutor, Pretorius and his supporters have sought to promote him as a more ethical and competent alternative to Cook Jones. They point to the fact that a federal judge sanctioned Cook Jones’ professional conduct during a civil case brought by a former subordinate as evidence that she is unsuited to the job.

Since her election as district attorney in 2020, Cook Jones has faced tough scrutiny about her management style and policy priorities, especially from Republicans across the state who are turned off by the progressive political action committees that have provided financial support for her political campaigns and advocate for a softening of punitive criminal justice laws.

Gov. Brian Kemp came to Savannah , for instance, to sign a controversial law that he and other Republicans say will provide more oversight into district attorney’s offices. Democrats see the measure as a way to unseat popularly-elected Democratic officials like Cook Jones.

Those efforts have not blunted Cook Jones’ messaging in the current campaign. She continues to run on a platform of correcting what she sees as an institutionalized bias of prosecuting crimes that negatively affect majority Black communities.

The timing of Cook Jones’ letter detailing Pretorius’ actions came days after Mayor Van Johnson derided his fellow Democrat for not prosecuting felonies more aggressively — a rebuke that has Republicans hopeful their preferred candidate will win in November.

Major drug trafficking probe

According to Cook Jones, Pretorius’ errant behavior started in May, shortly before Pretorius had won his Republican primary to contest the DA’s race but after he stopped working for the county.

The counter-narcotics team, following a 14-month investigation into a Savannah-based drug trafficking “organization,” arrested multiple people involved in the network, which court documents say stretched from Savannah to Atlanta.

The Chatham DA’s office, on the basis of those arrests, filed forfeiture requests to seize and keep properties on Tybee Island, Bloomingdale and Savannah that prosecutors said related to the traffickers.

Around the same time, CNT seized approximately $100,000 in two bank accounts controlled by James “Jim” Cole, the owner of Castaways restaurant in Sandfly who died on May 1, according to a forfeiture document filed by the DA’s office.

On May 29, a Chatham County grand jury indicted five people on charges of trafficking hundreds of grams of fentanyl and methamphetamine, the indictment stated.

Details about the relationship between Cole and the trafficking case aren’t publicly known, and no criminal charges were ever filed against Cole.

Cole’s widow, meanwhile, hired a lawyer to try to reclaim the $100,000 that authorities seized from her husband’s accounts. That lawyer, Brian Tanner, reached out to Sarhatt.

It was then that Sarhatt turned to Pretorius for advice about returning the money.

Police agencies normally work with prosecutors at the DA’s office to freeze funds during an investigation “to dismantle organized criminal activity, restrict the resources of repeat offenders, and generally decrease crime rates in a jurisdiction,” according to a 2022 federal report on Georgia’s civil asset forfeiture system.

Whether to return the frozen funds is a question brought up in court, facilitated by the DA’s office and decided by a judge. But instead of beginning that process, Sarhatt reached out to Pretorius and not the district attorney.

Asked about why he decided to loop in Pretorius, Sarhatt declined to comment.

Returning ‘laundered money’

Cook Jones’ letter highlights text messages and emails detailing what she calls lapses in judgment from her competitor. They show communications between Sarhatt, Pretorius and the widow’s lawyer about an evidence deal and frozen funds, all while keeping prosecutors in the dark.

In one text message, Sarhatt erroneously claimed to Tanner that Pretorius was the prosecutor on the trafficking case. This came after Tanner asked him which prosecutor to reach out to to facilitate the release of the $100,000.

“Isn’t Andre the assistant county attorney now? I thought he left the DA’s office a while back and is running against Shalena for DA?” Tanner wrote to Sarhatt on May 20.

“He did but he is handling portions on the civil forfeiture,” Sarhatt responded.

According to the DA, Pretorius proactively offered ways to facilitate the return of the frozen funds. Cole’s wife, he opined, should turn over her husband’s phone to the police, and if no “significant evidence” of her husband’s involvement in drug trafficking surfaced, the widow should be given the $100,000, according to the DA.

Pretorius told The Current he never touched any evidence. He continued, however, to offer legal opinions. According to the documents, Pretorius said the telephone which Cole’s widow gave police “added very little to the already lean evidence” against her deceased husband.

Pretorius said he did not believe his actions constituted interference with Cook Jones’ criminal prosecutions.

“When I was told the person was dead, meaning there was no criminal case against the guy, there didn’t seem to be any issue with giving my opinion on the case,” he told The Current .

Sarhatt then asked the DA’s office to return the money to Cole’s wife. He never mentioned the deal’s existence to the prosecutors, according to an email included in the letter.

Despite Sarhatt’s request, Cook Jones decided the state would try to keep the seized money: “While l am sympathetic to her plight, the $100k is laundered money,” Cook Jones wrote to Sarhatt in a June 27 email.

By July 5, the district attorney’s office filed a forfeiture request with the court to keep the seized funds. By late July, Cook Jones heard from Tanner and learned of the deal. She fired off a strongly worded email to Sarhatt.

“I would also like to know why my office was not included in the negotiations with Ms. Cole despite the fact that you used my office and your agents to file and support the petitions for the seizure, and now rely on my office to initiate the return of said funds,” Cook Jones wrote to Sarhatt on July 30.

Days later Sarhatt apologized over email for “not handling this correctly.”

The district attorney’s office was forced to honor the deal and return the laundered money last month, Cook Jones alleges.

Campaigning on ethics

With less than two months until the election, Cook Jones is urging the county to take action against Pretorius, who is still classified as a county employee.

“Mr. Pretorius, with the County’s support and compensation, has continued to interfere with the inner workings of this office right up until this most flagrant violation,” she said.

Pretorius, meanwhile, keeps hammering home the issue that he says separates him from Cook Jones: ethics.

Speaking to high-dollar donors at the Savannah Yacht Club on Thursday night, Pretorius described his opponent’s checkered reputation as a lawyer.

“She’s had multiple ethics violations with the state board of elections. So when I get in, I want to make sure that all the employees there understand this is the level that we need to be in,” he said. “We need to be ethical. We need to make sure that we do our job correctly.”