Damn! Ya know, a while back I was contacted out of the blue by someone from CL here. It wasn't the guy who's written the ATL articles. He was supposed to set up an interview but then backed out of the story on Straight/Sembler altogether.
I think I'll email him again.
Love this part....
Sembler spokesman Angelo Fuster says Jones has no direct vote on the billion-dollar project at Briarcliff and North Druid Hills. True, but Jones has considerable clout, and sets the agenda in DeKalb government. Fuster also has worked for Jones in the past, adding a little coziness to the affair.
As to why Sembler contributes, he put it best in 2000, while chief fundraiser for the Republican National Committee: "You pay a little more, you get a little more."
The most stunning stories about Sembler involve Straight Inc., a nationwide drug-rehab outfit he founded in 1976 that treated more than 12,000 addicts. The U.S. Senate – citing "cruel and inhuman" procedures – in 1993 shut down Straight by making it ineligible for federal subsidies. In media reports, books, numerous lawsuits and in testimony to the Senate, Straight was accused of utilizing beatings, starvation, sleep deprivation and locking children in closets for days dressed in clothes soaked in their own excrement. At least 40 people have committed suicide related to Straight "treatment," according to ex-patients.
A state of Florida audit of Straight pointed to typical Sembler style: "It appears that pressure may have been generated by Ambassador Sembler and ... state senators" to avoid scrutiny, the audit stated.
Hatred of Sembler is so intense, activists still demonstrate at his home. One of the most vocal, Richard Bradbury, has spent years picketing and protesting Sembler – and rummaging through the ambassador's garbage. In 2003, he found a penis pump in Sembler's trash, and offered it for sale on eBay for $300,000. Sembler sued, but that only attracted media attention in Florida newspapers and the Washington Post.
Those are bits of Sembler lore to think about. In a few years, will angry Atlantans be digging around in Mel's trash – or Vernon's – looking for little embarrassments?
:rofl:
