Seamy allegations don’t fit Jack Camp's courtly life | ajc.com

If the stripper known as Confidential Informant-1 is to believed, Jack T. Camp Jr., a folksy, suspenders-wearing federal judge, walked into the Goldrush Showbar last spring, got private dances from her and almost immediately asked if they could get high together.

Soon, the dancer and the judge were snorting cocaine, having sex and kicking off a months-long romp that ended Oct. 1 with his arrest in the parking lot of another strip club where he was buying drugs, the FBI said. In his pockets, Camp had what he thought were cocaine and painkillers, authorities said. In his car were two pistols, including a cocked and loaded .380 Sig Sauer he allegedly brought along to protect his illicit sweetheart.

That “sweetheart” had set up Camp in a classic undercover sting orchestrated by the FBI, one that included recorded phone calls, wired money and a turncoat “friend.”

If the allegations are true — which those who know Camp still can’t believe — there had to be seismic change in the core of the normally careful and courtly jurist, they say. Some say a severe head trauma suffered years ago may have triggered a strange behavior swing. Maybe he got hooked on painkillers while on the mend. Or maybe, some say, it was simply an aging man trying to win favor with a younger woman who was good at letting him think he was special.

“You’re in Atlanta. You’re going to a strip bar. What were you thinking?” asked Jerry Froelich, a defense attorney who has known Camp for years. “She gets in trouble and turning on you will be the first thing she does. He sees things like this all the time. He knew better.”

According to the FBI, the woman, since identified as Sherry Ann Ramos, 27, had a federal felony drug conviction and has continually violated her parole by engaging in prostitution and using drugs. Delivering a wayward federal judge could help her stay out of jail. She is being given immunity, the FBI stated in an affidavit detailing the charges.

After his arrest, Camp, a federal judge since 1988, spent a weekend in custody. He was released Monday after a court appearance his wife attended. He plans to plead not guilty, his lawyer, William Morrison, said.

“He’s a juicy target,” said John Stuckey, Camp’s former law partner from Newnan who headed the selection committee that recommended him for the bench. “It’s a classic situation. People with criminal problems create situations where they can give prosecutors something. He would be a prime target.

“He’s seen 1,000 trials with 1,000 fact situations like this. That’s why it’s so unbelievable.”

In trying to explain the unexplainable, several friends have mentioned that Camp had a severe head trauma several years ago after he was thrown from his bicycle. He was in intensive care for nearly a week, said Stuckey.

“I’ve had conversations with old friends trying to come up with reasonable explanations,” Stuckey said. “There is no rational explanation. You’d have to look at the irrational. Possibly the head injury.

“If true, it’s an inexplicable deviation of character, a Jekyll and Hyde effect.”

Froelich agrees. “This is unscientific, but I think he changed” since the accident, he said. “Sometimes he’d stop and say ‘How are you doing?’ But other times he’d walk by like you weren’t there. He’d kid me, ‘Why don’t you come down to Newnan?’ The next day it’d be like you didn’t know him.”

The stripper listed as CI-1 in the affidavit was identified late last week by public records website The Smoking Gun as Ramos, a Dalton native who spent three years in prison after a 2005 conviction in connection with a methamphetamine ring.

A lawyer from the Goldrush and a manager from another club, Follies, verified Ramos danced at those clubs during the time the federal informant worked there. Federal court documents list the same drug charge against Ramos — using a telephone in a drug trafficking crime — the informant had.

Ramos, who grew up Sherry Baker in Dalton, has lived life on the edge. Her husband, Juan Carlos Ramos, was convicted with her in the drug case and is still incarcerated. In April 2004, months before that drug arrest, Sherry Ramos was arrested with Bobby Glen Hamrick, a man later charged in a shooting death, records show. Both were charged with trafficking methamphetamine.

Some Goldrush employees describe Ramos as a fun girl. Others saw more of a drama queen. She was fired from the night shift after police arrested her for not having a permit to dance. She was later rehired on the day shift.

Aubrey Villines, a lawyer for the Goldrush, said the dancers are independent contractors and come and go. And customers are often anonymous in the dimly lit, blue-collar establishments. The Goldrush sits on a seedy strip of Metropolitan Parkway near two boarded-up strip clubs. Follies is a nondescript Buford Highway joint situated among strip-malls and restaurants.

At Follies, a dancer shown a photo of the white-haired, bespectacled Camp shrugged. “They all look like that,” she said.

On recent nights, both bars had more dancers than patrons. Men were sprinkled through the clubs, often sitting by themselves, and were frequently approached by dancers looking for them to buy drinks or lap dances. At Follies, $10 will do it.

News of the arrest spread through the clubs as quickly as it did through legal circles. At the Goldrush, a security guard and female staffers read news accounts on a laptop computer. “She won’t be able to get a job in Alaska,” guffawed the guard.

Inside, a staffer said the judge was a daytime patron. “I felt sorry for him,” said a bartender. “He was a nice man.”

Camp apparently was nice enough to go to bat for Ramos, said Katrina Hardy, who owned a Union City condo she said Ramos damaged this year while renting it. Hardy said she was evicting Ramos when she got a call from the judge, telling her to back off.

“He said he was a judge; he hollered at me and said I’d get in trouble if I pressed charges,” said Hardy. “He said, ‘I know the law.’ He said I cannot win with her.”

While Ramos’ life was filled with hardship and bad decisions, Camp’s was characterized by doing right.

J. Littleton Glover Jr., a Newnan lawyer and former state bar association president, ticked off his former law partner’s pedigree and rock-ribbed roots: Citadel graduate, an artilleryman in Vietnam, returned to practice law in Coweta County, where his family has farmed since the 1800s.

Camp enjoyed the prestige accorded a U.S. District judge, a post with a lifetime appointment. “But he missed the collegiality of being to mix with lawyers; they tend to be deferential,” Glover said.

Camp was appointed to the bench by President Reagan in 1988 and took senior judge status last year, allowing him to work fewer cases. He earns the same $174,000 that active federal judges receive. But he would earn nearly the same if he simply retired.

He has agreed to let the district reassign his cases until his case is over. The chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Northern Georgia did not return a call for comment on any possible discipline. Impeachment is rare; only seven federal judges have been impeached and removed from office in U.S. history.

Glover was left wondering about the friend he has known since they were in Cub Scouts together. “If those facts are true, he is one of many fine men who made a mistake.

“Jack is a private person, chauvinistic in the best sense of the word, a true Southern gentleman,” said Glover. “Money is not at the top of his value system. Respect and honor are.”

That high sense of character makes the allegations all the more shocking, especially the voracious appetite for drugs the judge allegedly expressed in recorded telephone calls detailed in the affidavit. The stripper said Camp knew what he was doing and provided a pill crusher so they could more easily snort Roxicodone pills.

Others are shocked at the stories of Camp’s guns. In June, according to the affidavit, Camp secretly followed the stripper to Marietta in his car when she was buying Roxicodone, a prescription painkiller. She later noticed he was carrying a pistol; he told her he followed her to protect her.

The stripper said that last month she and Camp snorted cocaine at Follies. As they left, she said, he was angry about how the person who sold them drugs was treating her. Camp, who cradled a pistol on his lap, tried to get out of the car, the woman said. She stopped him, fearing he would confront the person, the affidavit said.

David Wolfe, a defense attorney who has practiced in front of Camp, says if those allegations are true, the judge was merely acting within his established belief system, even if his thinking patterns were addled.

“She says she’s going to buy drugs from someone she doesn’t know and he follows her to protect her,” Wolfe said. “He’s being chivalrous. At they end of the day, he obviously cared for the girl. He left his guard down.”