MLILY Mattresses in Macon, GA

A Milledgeville man who prosecutors say was the leader of a Middle Georgia drug ring that distributed more than five kilograms of meth pleaded guilty in federal court, along with 16 co-defendants.

The drug ring was based in Milledgeville and revolved around Jarvis Havior, 31, who was also known as “J Bo” while he dealt the drugs, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Havior pleaded guilty Feb. 16. while 16 others admitted their part in the drug ring later, authorities said.

“...Law enforcement agents coordinated a successful take-down of a drug trafficking network pushing high volumes of methamphetamine into the Milledgeville area,” U.S. Attorney Peter Leary said. “Local, state and federal law enforcement are helping us hold those distributing large quantities of the most deadly and addictive illegal drugs accountable at the federal level.”

According to court documents, an investigation into the drug ring started in June of 2020 when the DEA, GBI and the Ocmulgee Drug Task Force got a tip about Havior’s operation. Agents located the “trap” houses Havior stored bulk drugs in, the statement said, and planned a seizure.

In 2021, agents tracked Havior as he drove to Stone Mountain to re-up his drug supply. They saw him buy drugs in a Publix parking lot, the meth packed into a bright green Publix bag, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Havior met with Anrico Taylor, 34, in Covington to give him the meth bag before the two traveled back to Milledgeville in separate cars.

When Havior and Taylor were pulled over in Baldwin County, Taylor tried to run from the cops with the drugs, spilling several small bags of meth on the ground before he was caught, the release said.

The meth in the not-so-unassuming Publix bag weighed in at about five kilos, including the drugs Taylor spilled on the ground.

Havior pleaded guilty to possession of meth with the intent to distribute and faces a minimum of 10 years in prison. He will be sentenced in May. Taylor and 15 other co-defendants pleaded guilty as well and will be sentenced later.

Three dealers in the ring, two from Milledgeville and another from Lilburn, are still wanted. Assistant U.S. Attorney Alex Kalim is prosecuting the case.

This story was originally published March 6, 2023, 12:00 PM.

Macon-Bibb County’s commissioners approved the use of security cameras in downtown Macon late last month, raising privacy concerns and sparking debate over surveillance.

The government will install cameras from a private company across Macon, including 36 cameras downtown, eight along the Riverwalk, and 20 in Carolyn Crayton Park. Mayor Lester Miller and the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office hope the cameras will serve as a deterrent and help investigators solve crimes.

The 64 cameras will not need to be constantly monitored and can send notifications to deputies much like traffic cameras, according to a presentation by the sheriff’s office. Investigators will also be able to review footage after crimes happen.

Some county commissioners worried that citizens’ privacy may be breached by the cameras. Legal experts say the cameras don’t break any laws.

Former dean of Mercer Law School and constitutional law professor Gary Simson said that, on a constitutional basis, the cameras are legal.

“While there have been court cases that prove that cameras are a form of search under the Fourth Amendment, these cameras are not targeting any one individual, they survey a large area,” he said of the downtown cameras.

Simson referred to Katz v. U.S., a case that established modern technology surveillance as a form of search. It also established a “reasonable expectation of privacy,” meaning a surveillance camera invading someone’s private space is an unlawful search.

The cameras downtown are not targeted, though, and watch over a public space as opposed to a private one like someone’s house.

“These cameras are not going into residential neighborhoods where people can have some issues of violating their privacy,” Mayor Lester Miller said in a commission meeting. “There’s no reasonable expectation of privacy when you’re walking down a public street or if you’re in a park or when you’re along the river walk.”

The next step in the legality of the cameras is tort law, civil wrongs that are not laid out in constitutional law but are still illegal. Simson, though not an expert in tort law, doubted that the cameras violated any prior precedents there, either.

David Hricik, a law professor at Mercer who teaches tort law, also didn’t immediately see a violation.

“In a public place, absent some kind of misuse of the images, I don’t see a current legal issue,” he said. “ I do think people should consider contacting their legislators, since it may be that there aren’t clear limits on use.”

Verkada, the company providing the cameras, has experienced security problems of their own, according to media reports.

Verkada is a multi-million dollar tech company that provides similar security to dozens of cities and private companies, including the Macon Housing Authority. The package approved by Bibb commissioners will cost almost $700,000 for 10 years of camera use, according to a presentation in a commission meeting.

In some past contracts, however, Verkada encountered issues. Bloomberg reported in 2021 that hundreds of Verkada employees could see camera footage from thousands of customers. They also reported that employees could toggle the “privacy setting” on customer cameras.

Another report noted that hackers breached the cameras for dozens of clients, including Tesla and multiple jails and schools. Verkada also had to nix facial recognition software after law changes earlier this year.

Verkada serves multiple Georgia cities like Columbus and Marietta. The county did not set an installation date for the cameras in Macon.

Several high-profile acts come to Macon in spring and summer of 2023 as concert season ramps up. Here’s a look at some bands playing shows at the Macon Centreplex in the upcoming months.

The band is touring in support of their new albums Unplugged and Our Bande Apart as part of their “25 Years in the Blind” tour. They were well-known among fans for their early albums including a self-titled debut in 1997 and “Blue” in 1999.Tickets are available online via Ticketmaster.

The iconic R&B group comes to Macon as part of their latest tour, which will hit other southern cities including North Charleston and Fayetteville, North Carolina. The famous trio have sold over 64 million albums thanks to hit songs like “End of the Road” and “Motownphilly.”

Fans can buy tickets online via Ticketmaster.

While it isn’t one band, the festival will feature several blues groups performing classic tracks as part of a joint performance.

Guests include J-Wonn, Ronnie Bell and Lenny Williams. Tickets are available online.

The 70’s rock group is hitting Macon as part of their latest U.S. tour effort. Known for their songs “Joy to the World” and “Mama Told Me (Not to Come),” Three Dog Night once had 21 straight Top 40 singles.

Tickets are available online through Ticketmaster.

The renowned Allman Brothers offshoot featuring Warren Haynes will play in Macon this summer. It will be one of the last stops before their Spring 2023 tour concludes in Asheville.

Tickets will go on sale March 8 at 10 a.m. online and at the Centreplex ticket office.

The iconic surf rock and pop group hits Macon in May as part of their “Sixty Years of the Sounds of Summer” tour. Headlined by co-founder and lead singer Mike Love, the tour won’t feature other iconic members such as Brian Wilson.

Tickets are available online through Ticketmaster.

The singer-songwriter added the Macon show to his tour late. He’s touring in support of his latest album, “Out of the Blues.” Scoggs’s music ranges from blues to jazz.

Tickets are available online via Ticketmaster.

The famous rock and funk group will be one of the last concerts of the summer season in Macon. Michael McDonald and other band members are touring together for the first time in more than 25 years.

Tickets, including special VIP packages, go on sale Friday at 10 a.m. online or in person at the Centreplex ticket office.

This story was originally published March 6, 2023, 5:00 AM.

In June of 2021, a nonprofit organization in Macon tasked with providing housing aid flagged a potential conflict of interest with the federal government.

The Macon-Bibb Economic Opportunity Council (EOC), a private nonprofit that receives between $250,000 and $300,000 annually for housing support, had received a request for $2,850 in housing assistance.

In a note to the Atlanta office of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, an EOC program manager noted that the woman requesting the assistance was the daughter-in-law of state Sen. David Lucas and Macon-Bibb County Commissioner Elaine Lucas.

The Lucases were buying the woman a home and she wanted federal housing aid to give her the $1,900 deposit and $950 first month’s rent she was going to owe her in-laws, according to a partially redacted letter obtained by GPB News in an open records request.

The federal housing official decided there was no conflict of interest, and the woman did not end up receiving the rental assistance after leaving the program. Carlton Williams, who manages housing aid at the Macon-Bibb EOC, said the back and forth on the way to the eventual greenlight from HUD took so long that the applicant found help some other way.

It’s an example of the often opaque world of housing aid, where — despite a growing number of people desperate for homes — federal, state and local governments and nonprofits struggle to get aid where it needs to go.

The state senate passed Senate Bill 62 Thursday night, which calls for a state audit of public money spent by nonprofits on homeless services.

State Sen. David Lucas was one of only seven “nay” votes on SB 62.

“What does an audit do in terms of direct effect to someone who is living on the street?” Lucas said. “I voted against it because they need to get off their behinds and fix the system to give folks housing.”

In its original form, Senate Bill 62 included language which would have provided for state-sanctioned, tent-based shelters for homeless people around the state, as well as sections setting up a path for civil suits against municipalities that don’t enforce their ordinances against camping by homeless people.

By the time the vote on SB 62 came, the tent shelter provision was completely removed and the protections for no camping ordinances were dramatically weakened. What remained was the call for the state audit of public money spent by nonprofits on homeless services.

Jake Hall is the executive director of United to End Homelessness, an arm of the Macon-based United Way of Central Georgia. He said he was never for the now-moot tent shelter idea, but he said he’s behind an audit as he tries to understand the local landscape of service providers in his still-new job.

“I do think an asset map of where service dollars are going is an important thing,” Hall said. “That due diligence happens because there is always geographic equity in how these funds are disbursed in any state.”

In Georgia’s largest cities, that spending is already easy to see. Atlanta, Athens, Augusta and Columbus all have an organization called a “continuum of care.” A CoC is an organization of homeless service providers working under one leader and communicating withthe federal housing department.

Part of being a CoC is transparency about how you spend money and what the spending accomplishes. Groups such as Atlanta’s Partner for Home already publish data in deep detail online. For other CoCs, the data is accessible via a HUD portal.

Where transparency may fall short in Georgia is in communities that don’t have their own relationship with HUD.

Those places are often members of Georgia’s Balance of State Continuum of Care, which means information about the efficacy of homeless programs from essentially the entire state gets balled up into a single HUD report, making it tough to tease out the cause and effect of local actors in any single town.

That’s the case in Macon. There, the private nonprofit Macon-Bibb Economic Opportunity Council contends that, as a non-governmental actor, it does not have to share program data with the public.

But reports made from the Macon-Bibb EOC to the Georgia Department of Community Affairs and, ultimately, to HUD acquired through open record requests, suggest the group has only provided Rapid Rehousing aid to about 10 chronically homeless people — those commonly thought of as “street homeless” — since 2016. More typically, that aid goes to people recently evicted, often single mothers with children. Even then, the aid falls short of some estimates of need.

Lucas said none of it — neither the lack of transparency from a local nonprofit nor the way his position might have influenced the flow of money — adds up to his seeing a need for state audits of service providers as described in SB 62. And he doesn’t care how others may see it.

“I don’t care how it looks,” Lucas said. “My books are open. I pay taxes.”

Jake Hall of United to End Homelessness said there are other ideas he would prefer to see in a piece of legislation aimed at helping people without a place to call their own.

“What is needed is a direct and earnest interest in critical housing supply and not simply removing vulnerable populations from sight,” Hall said.

One of the recommendations in the Senate study committee report which preceded SB 62 was to increase state spending on housing options for the homeless. No version of the bill has yet included such a provision.

SB 62 now heads to the Georgia House.

This story comes to The Telegraph through a reporting partnership with GPB News, a nonprofit newsroom covering the state of Georgia

A few days after selling all she had to flee Cuba with her three children on a crowded boat, Daneilis Tamayo raised her hand in praise and sang the rousing opening hymn at Sunday worship in this Miami suburb.

“The only thing that gave me strength is the Lord. I’m not going to lose my faith, whatever I might go through,” she said. The family has been sleeping in Iglesia Rescate's improvised shelter since the promises of help made by her contact in the United States turned out to be “all lies.”

In the past 18 months, an estimated 250,000 migrants and asylum-seekers like Tamayo have arrived in the Miami area after being granted only precarious legal status that often doesn’t include permission to work, which is essential to building new lives in the U.S.

This influx is maxing out the migrant social safety net in Miami's faith communities, long accustomed to integrating those escaping political persecution, a lack of freedoms and a dearth of basic necessities. Cubans were the first to arrive during the island’s communist revolution 60 years ago, and they’re still fleeing here alongside Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans.

“The Lord says to welcome the stranger. It’s the saddest thing, the quantity of people who come and we can’t help them,” said the Rev. David Monduy, Iglesia Rescate’s pastor.

Miami’s faith leaders and their congregations remain steadfast in their mission to help settle new migrants. But they’re sounding the alarm that the need is growing unmanageable.

“We can get a call on a Saturday that 30 migrants were dropped off, and two hours later all have been picked up,” said Peter Routsis-Arroyo, the CEO of Catholic Charities in Miami. “But the challenge is at what point you reach saturation.”

The number of arrivals, by sea directly to Florida and from those heading here from the US-Mexico border, surged earlier this winter. For most newcomers, the best hope to settle in the U.S. is to win asylum, but immigration courts are so backlogged migrants can be in limbo for years, ineligible to get a job legally.

Advocates say that makes them vulnerable to criminals, puts an impossible financial burden on existing migrant communities that try to help, and slows down integration into U.S. society.

“It’s completely irrational that they’re not giving out work permits,” said Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski, whose Catholic archdiocese has long helped welcome migrants. “Because of that, the government can make a situation that’s not too bad yet, become worse.”

Many migrants are already homeless due to soaring rent and motel rates.

“Every day, people knock on the doors of our parishes, saying they have no place to sleep,” said the Rev. Marcos Somarriba, rector at St. Agatha Catholic Church on Miami’s outskirts.

In addition to providing food, clothes and some housing relief, churches are helping educate migrants about their legal options.

St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church put together a migration forum with Catholic Legal Services in mid-February about a new humanitarian parole program that allows 30,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans into the U.S. each month if they have a sponsor who assumes financial responsibility for them for two years.

Parishioner Dalia Marrero attended to learn about sponsoring an uncle in Nicaragua, where many are fleeing President Daniel Ortega’s crackdown on opponents.

“I don’t want to fail him or U.S. law,” she said, worried about how long she’d be required to support her relative.

Miami’s established diaspora communities know all too well the hardships that migrating entails, and that motivates many to help. But there also is mistrust among some old timers who remain active in opposition to autocratic regimes like Cuba’s and view some new arrivals’ politics with suspicion, said Jorge Duany, director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.

That underscores the potentially crucial role for faith leaders — to preach forgiveness and build a sense of shared experience.

“That’s it — to unite,” said the Rev. Elvis González, pastor at St. Michael the Archangel, a historically Cuban church that welcomes faithful from across Central America. “They have seen the church as the only institution that can give some hope.”

A few miles south on the seashore stands La Ermita, a shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Charity that’s long been a beacon for Cuban exiles.

Migrants from all over Latin America come to bring sunflowers to the Virgin, to cry in gratitude for having made it and to ask for help with food and clothing, said Sister Consuelo Gómez.

“Jesus also was a migrant,” said Gómez, who helps many newcomers find jobs and decent housing, often with the aid of diaspora members. “We try to help so that they can get ahead on their own.”

Among them were two Venezuelan sisters Gómez helped get their own place as well as jobs that allow them to send money back to their ailing mother.

“Here I motivate myself, even though, yes, I miss my family,” said older sister Daniela Valletero, who works two jobs, six days a week. “Here I feel that I’ll make it.”

That’s the kind of faith that motivates Marylin Rondon, an attorney originally from Venezuela whose weekly prayer group of professionals from Latin America prepares hundreds of sandwiches for the nuns to distribute to migrants and the homeless.

“As a Catholic, you can’t stop at sadness,” Rondon said. “The biggest faith is that of the one who is arriving. He has to depend 100% on providence.”

Outside the Ermita shrine, a couple stood under the palms, their homeland of Cuba some 200 miles across the sea. Roberto Sardiñas came seven years ago, and in December managed to get his wife, Dadiana Figueroa, to immigrate legally through family reunification.

Asked about the influx of new arrivals, Sardiñas said it would be selfish to argue anything but that “all who can come, let them come.”

“The ideal would be that freedom existed in Cuba,” Figueroa added.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

This story was originally published March 5, 2023, 9:05 AM.