Demetrios John "Mitch" Skandalakis (born July 22, 1957)[1] is an American lawyer and former Republican Party politician from Georgia who rose quickly to national prominence in the early-1990s.
He upset Martin Luther King III to become chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners and in 1998, was the unsuccessful Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of Georgia.
He emigrated to the United States and became a prominent surgeon who taught at Emory University and was named by a Governor George Busbee to the Georgia Board of Regents.
[3] He attracted national attention when he upset Martin Luther King III in a 1993 special election for chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners.
In 1998, he hired former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed as his campaign manager and ran for lieutenant governor of Georgia as a right wing conservative.
[9] The spots from the campaign were cited years later as examples of Ralph Reed's "dirty tactics":In the autumn of 1998, Georgians were jolted from their armchairs by television ads run by a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor with the nicely onomatopoeic name of Mitch Skandalakis.
Another featured an actor who resembled Skandalakis's opponent, state senator Mark Taylor, shuffling down a hallway at a well-known psychiatric and drug treatment facility near Atlanta.
[10]Although successful with Reed's help in winning the Republican primary, Skandalakis's strategy of negative campaigning backfired in the general election.
[26] After serving his prison sentence, Skandalakis went to work for Waffle House, eventually becoming a vice president for security, risk management, and loss prevention.