Macon cop allegedly discussed ongoing homicide case, jail security with ‘dangerous’ gangster
A Bibb County sheriff’s deputy was arrested this week and accused of violating her oath of office when she allegedly engaged in conversations on social media with a convicted gangster in state prison and discussed an ongoing Macon homicide probe.
The deputy, Paulette Anita Lanier, was released from jail Tuesday after posting $30,000 bail about five hours after she was booked.
In a warrant, investigators also accused her of providing the convicted gangster with the names of on-duty deputies and discussing “security operations” at the Bibb jail where she has worked as a corrections officer.
Lanier, 53, of Houston County, was said to have been in contact with two other inmates who were using contraband cellphones to communicate with her. Further details were not noted in the warrant, though the name of the convicted gangster, Johntellis Montez Mathis, was mentioned.
It was unclear how the matter came to light, but investigators obtained a social media search warrant on Dec. 20.
Investigators did not list the social media avenue they searched.
However, a Facebook account under the moniker “DaBlack TBrady” — an apparent nod to NFL star quarterback Tom Brady — that investigators linked to Mathis was independently verified by The Telegraph as having been used by Mathis.
On social media, Lanier is a mutual Facebook “friend” with that account.
Mathis, 35, is serving a 20-year sentence, 10 of them in prison, for gang-related charges.
According to the authorities, Mathis is the self-avowed leader of the Blacc Team, an alleged local offshoot of the better-known Gangster Disciples. He has been housed in the state prison system since last April.
Before that, he spent more than four years in the Bibb jail as cases against him in multiple alleged crimes meandered their way through the court system.
Chief among those cases were a double shooting at a south Macon Waffle House in 2017 and accusations outlined in a 90-page racketeering and gang-crime indictment in 2019 related to transgressions Mathis allegedly committed while behind bars awaiting trial.
The latter case has since been dead-docketed — not dismissed but rather pending — while prosecutors, as they noted in a court filing in late 2021, “resolve outstanding discovery matters and prepare the case for trial or other disposition.”
The sheer volume and complexity of the alleged evidence against him — a full digital terabyte, much of it involving some 13,000 wiretapped and recorded telephone calls — led at least one of Mathis’ lawyers to remove himself from the case for lack of time to wade through it all.
Mathis and co-defendants have also been accused of using smuggled cellphones in jail to further an alleged criminal enterprise, orchestrate drug deals and intimidate witnesses.
At a hearing in May 2021, a Bibb prosecutor described Mathis as “a dangerous man” who had “continued to flout the law while inside (the county jail).”
Information from Telegraph archives was used in this report.
