THERE WAS NO BAD PUBLICITY FOR GERALD HEGE IN HEYDAY

The day after he resigned as Davidson County sheriff and pleaded guilty to
two counts of obstructing justice last week, Gerald Hege was more than
ready to break his silence and talk to reporters.

I'd called him at his home where he's under house arrest. I was trying to
understand just how he was such a phenomenon for almost a decade before he
fell, figuring that skillful manipulation of the media had a lot to do with
it. He confirmed my theory. From the time he took office in 1994 and
removed the TVs from the Lexington jail as a pack of reporters followed, he
realized that he was on to something.

"I said right then, I said, 'Look, I got something these guys want.... Hey,
this is me,'" Hege told me.

Occasionally, I was in the pack following the big guy with the big guns.
Like a lot of others, I figured I would be the one to finally expose all
his misdeeds through stories that would start such a public outcry he'd be
run out of office. But from the day he started the dream job he'd finally
won on his third try, he usually got what he wanted from reporters - more
support from their readers - and their toughest stories left him unscathed.

Hege, a savvy Vietnam vet and Republican, used his natural political
instincts to tap into a fear of crime and a longing for conservative
yesteryears in a rural county sometimes made uncomfortable by growth all
around it. He used the press to leave anonymity behind and become the
self-proclaimed "toughest sheriff in America," satisfying his considerable
vanity as well.

"I lot of people thought I was just some dumb old redneck down here," Hege
told me. "I'm just an old country boy, but I've been to town a few times."
He learned to read reporters' faces, he said.

"After a while, you get so familiar with it you can look at an individual
reporter and say, 'This guy is getting ready to ask me a dumb question.'"
He had a theory about reporters: "I'm going to use these people, and
they're going to use me, and it's going to be bad sometimes, and it's going
to be good sometimes. As long as we know we're using each other, it's OK.'"

The press got hundreds of colorful stories and striking photos and footage
that got good play. And reporters here and at other area newspapers did do
plenty of hard-hitting stories as well, ones about Hege's boast of going
more than 140 mph in his "spider car," lawsuits from citizens claiming
they'd been abused by deputies, some of his deputies being busted for
drugs, his run-ins with other law enforcement agencies and his sloppy
financial accounting. Hege countered by playing reporters against one
another, giving scoops to those who didn't ask him hard questions.

He stopped talking to reporters who he said had "an agenda," which usually
meant they covered his bad actions as well as his earnest efforts to help
and protect elderly folks and children.

But Hege, like many a demagogue, knew there was no such thing as bad
publicity. Even stories that cast him in a negative light fired up his
supporters and brought in calls from informants, he said.

"Every time I had a bad story about me, I got more calls than I ever got."

Plenty of county residents rightly saw him as a bully who was making their
good county a laughingstock, but they didn't speak out often enough. Hege's
supporters, however, rained letters in his defense on the Journal and other
newspapers, complaining about stories that only added to his mystique and
brought him more national attention.

"The power of the people - if you can get it, and get it behind you,
there's no machine and no group that can stop it," Hege told me.

But by last year, the tide was turning in a county increasingly conscious
of its image as it tries to recruit business and industry, and some of his
supporters were abandoning him.

Journal reporters continued to write stories questioning Hege's practices,
and the SBI continued to investigate his office as well. SBI agents charged
him with 15 felony counts, including embezzlement and obstruction of
justice, and a judge suspended him from office. He pleaded guilty to just
two of those charges, getting off with a suspended sentence, probation and
an order to pay back $6,200 taken from department accounts for unapproved
expenditures.

Documents filed in his case depicted a sheriff who abused his office;
intimidated and threatened his deputies; endangered the public through his
recklessness; and ordered racial profiling and the occasional beating of
inmates.

Hege told me he pleaded guilty for his family's sake and minimized the case
against him. He talked of how "when you're like I am, people want to bring
you down, and that's just always going to be the way it is," and his plans
for a tell-all book.

For a minute, I could see him giving interviews about the book, the Hege of
old persuading reporters to see the case his way, and I could almost see it
his way.

Almost, but not quite.

I lost the thought as he ended the chat, saying he could talk only a
limited time on his phone because of his house arrest.

. Railey writes local editorials for the Journal. He can be reached at
jrailey@wsjournal.com