“I thought they were really close friends. I considered them not just friends but close personal friends. He flew Betsy on his company plane up here with other close friends to celebrate my fortieth birthday. And there was nothing I felt like I could ask Don and Betsy to do for me that they wouldn’t do it.”
That cut both ways. Several times over the years, Dooley lent his considerable personal clout to Leebern’s business interests. One instance was after Leebern created a new Georgia Crown division, Poland Spring Water Distributing Company, and began selling Perrier’s Poland Spring bottled water. Quickly realizing the potential profits in bottled water, Leebern’s company opened a plant in Dahlonega, Georgia, in 1991 and began marketing its own brand, Melwood Springs, “Georgia Crown’s own private-labeled spring water.” The problem was that Melwood Springs water doesn’t come from a spring; it is pumped from a well in Dahlonega, just like city water. “Bottled well water” just doesn’t have the cachet of “natural spring water.”
Moreover, Perrier was threatening to quit marketing Poland Spring water in Georgia because new state agriculture regulations scheduled to take effect in May 1992 would not have allowed the product to be labeled as natural spring water. The regulation also would have affected Melwood Springs water. With Georgia Agriculture Commission Tommy Irvin about to put the kibosh on the whole venture, Leebern needed to do something—and quickly. He got hometown legislator Tom Buck of Columbus to introduce a bill in the 1992 legislature redefining natural spring water to include water that comes from wells. The bill easily passed in the state House of Representatives but was defeated in the Senate. Undaunted, Leebern, then a newly appointed member of the state Board of Regents, called on his friends at the University of Georgia.
Both UGA President Charles Knapp and Dooley lobbied for the legislation. Dooley’s son Daniel was working for Georgia Crown at the time and Knapp was an employee of the Regents. UGA spokesman Tom Jackson said Knapp and Leebern were personal friends and that Knapp’s support of the legislation had nothing to do with his position at the university. After the full-court press by Dooley and Knapp, the Senate, which had voted 31–24 to defeat the bill two weeks earlier, reversed itself, voting 32–23 to approve the bill. Governor Zell Miller signed the legislation into law. Miller said he saw nothing wrong with the labeling or the lobbying. “In this age of where we want people to participate, there’s no problem with anyone calling . . . no matter what position they hold,” Miller told an AJC reporter. And as for the labeling controversy, Miller said he didn’t see any difference between well and spring water. It can all be traced back to an underground source, he said.
The Leebern-Dooley relationship, entwined across personal, family, and UGA lines, held firm through the 1990s. In 1997, Leebern and another of Dooley’s close friends, Sonny Seiler, personally called Dooley to give him a heads-up before the public announcement of the hiring of Michael Adams as UGA president. “You’ll like him,” Seiler predicted. “He has a real fondness for athletics.” Leebern also mentioned Adams’s fondness for athletics.
Like most Georgians, Dooley knew little about Adams and therefore had no concerns about his appointment. A self-described “good soldier,” Dooley was confident that he would get along well with the new president. After all, he had served four previous presidents at UGA without conflict. Nevertheless, Dooley thought it was a good idea to reach out to the man who would be his boss during his final years at UGA, so he telephoned his congratulations and left his number. “He never returned my phone call,” Dooley remembers. “This was a couple of days after he was named. So, I called him again in a couple of days and this time he took my call. I just congratulated him. That was the first time I talked to him.”
Dooley wanted a close relationship with the president and tried to convince Adams that it was important to have good lines of communications. The best way to do that, Dooley felt, was for the two of them to have monthly meetings, just as he had done with previous presidents. Adams wanted no part of it.
Dooley hasn’t said whether Leebern, in his heads-up call about the Adams selection, also explained that Adams was his personal choice, or that he had ramrodded Adams through the interview and hiring process. By then, Leebern had become the dominant personality on the Board of Regents. He was first appointed to the board in 1991 by Governor Zell Miller, then a Democrat. (Miller reappointed him in 1998 to another seven-year term; Republican Governor Sonny Perdue named him to a third term in 2005.)
Leebern has been a big contributor to the University of Georgia and to Georgia politicians. He has also been a lightning rod for controversy, not least due to his public flaunting of his relationship with Georgia gymnastics coach Suzanne Yoculan, with whom he lives openly on a $1.5 million estate outside Athens, though he is still married to Betsy Leebern, who maintains the family domicile in Columbus.
The Bulldog elite comprise a tight circle of friends and acquaintances where everybody knows everybody else. Barbara Dooley had heard rumors about Don Leebern’s girlfriends for years but had always dismissed them. Some folks are jealous of anyone with Leebern’s kind of money, she reasoned. “Anyway, if he was having affairs, he was being discreet about it, as far as I knew, and I assured everyone that he loved his wife, Betsy.” That changed in early 2000 when Leebern began a very public affair with Yoculan.
Leebern began showing up at the Gym Dogs meets with his wife Betsy and their grandson. Surprised to see her friend at a gymnastics meet, Barbara wondered about Betsy’s sudden interest in the sport. “She sort of rolled her eyes and said, ‘Well, Don had to come.’”
Betsy Leebern soon stopped coming to the gymnastics meets and then she stopped attending UGA football games. She’d make excuses to avoid weekends with the Dooleys.
“She just wasn’t going to tell me there was trouble,” Barbara Dooley said. “And I was too stupid to realize what was actually going on. Betsy always made excuses during football season that Don could no longer come on Friday nights and they were just going to fly in for the game on Saturdays. Next she started making excuses why they would not go to New York with us as we had done for many years. It was a wonderful tradition to be in New York for the [College Football] Hall of Fame dinner with good friends, but it just ended. Things just started changing! The next thing that I hear is that he’d actually taken up with Yoculan.”
One Sunday morning she awoke to a local newspaper article written by the late M. A. Barnes, announcing the engagement of Don Leebern to Suzanne Yoculan.
“I screamed for Vince and I truly almost fainted,” she said. “I could not believe what I was reading. And I must have read it three or four times to make sure I was actually reading it right. It was the talk of the town and most people were shaking their heads and saying, ‘What the hell is he doing?’ He had given Yoculan an engagement ring and is still married to Betsy. And put it in our paper! I am still in denial at this point and kept thinking that just can’t be true.
“Still even with this staring me in the face I thought our friendship was strong enough for me to call him and find out just what was happening. So, I called his telephone number. I said, ‘Don, what the hell are you doing? I just read an article about your engagement. Are you totally out of your mind? You are setting yourself up for the biggest lawsuit this state has ever seen.’ Well, he was silent for a minute and gave me an answer like, ‘Mind your own business. I know what I’m doing.’ At that point I realized our friendship was over and I needed to stay out of this mess. And so I told Vincent at the time, I said, ‘Let me tell you something. I am drawing a line in the sand. This is against every principle in my body. Betsy is a good friend of mine and I will not condone any relationship like this.’”
Barbara Dooley said she began to avoid all functions where Leebern and Yoculan might be present. “Every time we’d get an invitation I wouldn’t go. He would have to go by himself. And of course I would say I don’t know why you’re going.
“He said, ‘Well, look,
