He Calls Me by Lightning

by S Jonathan Bass

  Soon after Sullinger’s death, Alabama governor John Patterson appointed James Hammonds the new circuit solicitor. A law school classmate at the University of Alabama, Hammonds worked on Patterson’s successful 1958 gubernatorial campaign and received the new position as a political payback. He would serve two years of Sullinger’s term of office and then face election in 1964—which he won. While charming and charismatic, Hammonds had a dark side, with several previous ethical lapses. In 1960, while serving as a municipal judge in Bessemer, he ran afoul of the Internal Revenue Service for failing to report $14,000 in legal fees paid to him by liquor interests in 1956. Hammonds, who was later cleared of tax evasion charges, claimed that he was hiding the “tainted” money from his wife, who frowned upon his work with such sinful clients. The next year, he was forced to resign as a municipal judge when Bessemer officials discovered Hammonds’s involvement in a bond-splitting scheme. A neighbor once described him as likable and a “good actor,” with the ability to turn his emotions “on and off” at will. “He wants to please everybody,” he added, “and he has a good personality. He has good everything, but judgment.”

  A native of the tiny southern Alabama town of Chapman, James Daniel Hammonds was born in September 1919, attended public schools in Butler and Lowndes Counties, and served in World War II. After completing his law degree in 1949, he moved to Bessemer to set up a general legal practice specializing in, ironically, income tax law. Hammonds said at the time that he found the practice of law “interesting, challenging, and the most satisfying work I can follow.” He believed his profession would “better equip me to take an active and intelligent part in the affairs of my community, state, and nation.”

  By July 1965, as Caliph Washington settled once again into the county jail, Hammonds had emerged as Bessemer’s most powerful kingpin. With Hammonds overseeing Washington’s case, hopes dimmed for a speedy trial. The prosecutor had other priorities. As the deputy district attorney (a state amendment changed the name from circuit solicitor in 1965) on the public payroll, Hammonds found the low salary a financial burden compared to the income he generated through representing wealthy clients. He complained to friends that he had high expenses and the new job “just wasn’t paying . . . enough money to take care of them.” Hammonds decided to supplement his income by tapping into Bessemer’s underworld and organized crime. By using his office and position as cover, he maintained the appearance of an energetic crusader who challenged vice and corruption in Bessemer. To stay above the illegal fray, he hired a gunsel—an ex-con named Jonah Ray “Fat Boy” Smith—who would orchestrate a host of nefarious schemes. Hammonds gave Smith a “special investigator” badge, a .45-caliber, nickel-plated, bone-handled pistol, and the authority to “do what he wanted to do at any time, and against anybody.” And that’s just what Fat Boy Smith did. Working from his small Bessemer Pak-a-Sak grocery store, Smith directed Hammonds’s illegal machinations, which included bribery, extortion, intimidation, and attempted murder. The inner life of Bessemer politics continued much as it was in the 1890s.

  At first, Smith’s and Hammonds’s efforts appeared to be a series of quid pro quo schemes. When one woman complained about her ex-husband’s chronic harassment, she paid Smith $250 to have him committed to the state mental hospital in Tuscaloosa. When the man’s new wife complained about his institutionalization, she paid Smith and Hammonds to have him released. On another occasion, when one of Hammonds’s friends ended up in jail for failing to pay child support, he gave the district attorney $850 to make certain his ex-wife would drop the charges. Fat Boy Smith later claimed that he drove to the woman’s house and told her to stop asking for child support. When she refused, Hammonds indicted her father on a trumped-up arson and insurance fraud scheme.

  This was a small monetary return compared to the large sums of illegal money that flowed through Bessemer. Most of the unlawful activities (gambling, prostitution, moonshine) took place along the Bessemer Super Highway between Bessemer and Birmingham. Illegal establishments boomed along the road following the early 1950s effort to clean up Phenix City, Alabama, located along the Chattahoochee River near Fort Benning and the Georgia border. The 1954 cold-blooded murder of Alabama attorney general nominee Albert Patterson in the small town focused state and national attention on what some described as the most “wicked city in America.” During the clampdown on the sin-makers in Phenix City, some of the gamblers, pimps, prostitutes, and mobsters simply packed up and moved across the state to Bessemer, where they operated free from legal restraint. In the years to follow, when Bessemer police arrested a prostitute, they asked the woman to pull down her lower lip in search of an identifying mark. “If the inside of her lip was tattooed with the letter B,” a local resident once observed, it was “perfect evidence” that she was controlled by the former Phenix City Mafia. As Bessemer policeman Lawton Grimes, Jr., concluded, “Phenix City never saw the day when it was as corrupt as Bessemer.”

  BY THE MID-1960S, the Bessemer Super Highway, as one journalist noted, was a “seamy strip of joints, cheap motels, and honky tonks” filled with “free-swinging, swashbuckling law violations.” The Bessemer Cutoff’s district attorney, James Hammonds, stood to profit mightily if he could offer protection to these establishments for a cut of the earnings. “I have nothing against gambling,” Hammonds reportedly said, “and you have nothing to worry about from this office.” Hammonds predicted that when his friend John Patterson became governor again in 1967, gambling would be legalized throughout the state, and those who “paid and played” would be able to pick prime locations and receive more political favors.

  But Patterson finished a distant seventh in the primary elections held on May 3, 1966. In that same election, however, Hammonds defeated Bessemer attorney Robert E. Paden 11,166 to 8,323 and later won the November general election without opposition. Once again reaffirmed by the voters, Hammonds continued to spread his protection, control, and intimidation. When the sheriff’s office or a local police office planned to raid a gambling house, Hammonds would call and say to an owner in good standing with the district attorney, “Let’s go fishing”—the signal to close up and get out of the building. For those who refused to pay, Hammonds had the establishments raided and closed by either sheriff’s deputies or Fat Boy Smith—the latter whom Hammonds gave a free hand to enter any club, confiscate cash, and in general “do what he wanted.”

  Political and legal opponents were also a target of Hammonds’s wrath. When he clashed with Bessemer police chief George Barron, Fat Boy Smith came up with a plan to disgrace Barron and prevent him from interfering with their business transactions. “We can’t move him out,” Smith said at the time, “but if we can get something on him, we can get him in our hands and everything will be all right.” Smith hired a couple of local hoods, Alton Batson and Willard Slayton, to plant moonshine in a car owned by Barron’s son, a law student at the University of Alabama, and then have police arrest the young man for transporting illegal shine.

  As soon as Batson and Slayton finished that job, Smith paid the men $200 to “beat the devil” out of a local accountant who publically criticized Hammonds and was causing trouble for the district attorney. “You can kill him if necessary but take him and just beat him unmercifully,” Smith told the men. “He has messed the big man up.” Batson telephoned Hammonds and pledged his loyalty: “We will get them . . . and tear Bessemer up for you if you want us to because we’re tired of people picking on you.”

  But for Batson and Slayton, this was all a ruse. Batson was working undercover as an informer for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, and Slayton was a special investigator with the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Unit of the U.S. Treasury Department. “I was working for the sheriff’s office on various occasions about gambling,” Batson said at the time, “and . . . trying to apprehend the fact about what was disgracing the Cutoff.” Unbeknownst to Hammonds, two disgruntled gamblers, convinced that he set up their clubs for raids, contacted Jefferson County sheri
ff Mel Bailey and told “a shocking story of a gambling and protection racket in the Cutoff, and of how money could buy a person out of almost any kind of trouble.” They pleaded with Bailey to keep their conversation a secret because the “boss” had “ways of dealing with those who got out of line.” Bailey long suspected that the widespread lawlessness in the Bessemer area existed at the pleasure of Boss Hammonds and Fat Boy Smith, whom he called the “enforcer.” Bailey worked closely with the recently appointed assistant deputy (informally the “major”) in charge of the sheriff’s office in Bessemer, David Orange. Orange, who a decade before began his law enforcement career with the Caliph Washington manhunt, arranged for the accountant to “disappear for a couple of days.” Bailey and Orange released a fake story to the local television stations that the accountant was abducted and beaten by unknown assailants. Hammonds was pleased and told Batson that the job was “beautiful.”

  Hammonds’s methods were extreme even by Bessemer’s standards. With rumors of widespread corruption in the district attorney’s office, Judge Gardner Goodwyn, Jr. (the judge in Caliph Washington’s second trial) empaneled a special grand jury to “investigate charges of gambling and a protection racket” in the Bessemer Cutoff. “If you find such a poisonous plant exists,” Goodwyn instructed the jurors, “gentlemen, do not limit your duties to pruning the limbs but pull the roots out regardless in whose yard you find them.” Ironically, Hammonds, as district attorney, would supervise the work of a grand jury. For two weeks, the district attorney presided over deliberations and questioned witnesses, and several “key witnesses” took impromptu “vacations to Florida” to avoid the probe.

  But on September 22, that all changed when Mel Bailey arrived at the courthouse to testify. History does not record what Bailey told the grand jury about Hammonds, who most likely questioned the witness, but it must have been damning. Following Bailey’s behind-closed-door testimony, Hammonds recused himself. “No explanation was offered in open court,” the Birmingham News reported, “for the DA’s action.”

  In response, Goodwyn appointed two attorneys, Clewis Trucks and Powell Lipscomb, as special prosecutors to continue the grand jury’s work. On October 7, the grand jurors concluded that the Bessemer gaming establishments were operating in “complete disregard and defiance of the law” and had become a “disgrace to our community.” Ironically, the grand jury report directed its toughest criticism at the sheriff’s department and the circuit judges for their “lackadaisical law enforcement practices.” Orange was flabbergasted. “When they finished,” he said, “they had turned and focused on us more than the bootlegging and gambling activities.” The report added that there was insufficient evidence to “bring indictments” on Bailey’s charges of a “protection ring and organized gambling” in Bessemer. Regardless, the grand jurors indicted several individuals involved in local gaming.

  Many of those indicted were under Hammonds’s protection at one time, including Escelle “Touey” Headrick (another of the district attorney’s “special investigators”) who ran the gaming tables at various clubs in and around Bessemer. When Headrick’s case came before Gardner Goodwyn in May 1967, the judge threw it out and freed Headrick on the grounds of being a victim of entrapment. “The court finds that the keeping of the gaming table, which is the subject of this prosecution,” Goodwyn proclaimed, “was approved and protected by the deputy district attorney, Mr. James Hammonds, which continued until it was terminated by Sheriff Mel Bailey’s raid on the club where the table was kept.”

  In public, Hammonds called Goodwyn’s accusations part of a witch hunt by political enemies unsuccessful in defeating him at the ballot box. Behind the scenes, Hammonds and Smith targeted the judge. “We were constantly trying to figure out some way to shoot the man a curve, to belittle the man, to discredit him in some way,” Smith said at the time, “and we were bitterly opposed to the things that the judge stood for.” Evidence suggests, however, that Hammonds wanted to go far beyond just ruining Goodwyn’s reputation.

  Hammonds told a friend that he was going to “get that damn judge off my ass” and had a way to stop him. “I knew he meant violence of some kind,” the neighbor later told a jury. “He is prone to do this, and this is not the first occasion he ever mentioned violence. . . . I mean physical violence to the point of extermination.”

  Soon afterward Hammonds informed Fat Boy Smith to expect a visit from a man from New York. “This is a fellow that will get LBJ [President Lyndon B. Johnson] if you want him got,” Hammonds explained. On May 24, a late-model yellow Cadillac convertible with New York license plates pulled up outside Smith’s Pak-a-Sak. Out stepped Rodolpho “Rudy” Pipolo, a forty-year-old, dark-haired Sicilian from the Bronx, who weighed close to three hundred pounds. Pipolo entered the store and introduced himself to Smith, saying that he was there to help James Hammonds. Smith listened as Pipolo explained that he was a restaurant owner who was affiliated with New York gambling interests and that there was great concern that “some people down here [presumably Gardner Goodwyn] were interfering” with gaming activities in the Bessemer Cutoff. Smith later recalled that Pipolo peppered him with questions: If something happened to Judge Goodwyn, “would there be anybody else in power that would interfere?” Where did he park his car? What route did he take to work? How far was it to the river? Where could he hire a good “wheel man” who knew the route to the river? Pipolo explained that he needed $25,000 to complete the job—a $10,000 retainer and $15,000 when the “job is done.” He never used a high-powered rifle from a distance, preferring instead a handgun with a silencer at close range so he could “see the expression” on his face. He would then take the body down to the river, handcuff it to weights, and dump it in the water. “They could never put no case against anybody unless they find the corpse,” he added.

  For reasons unclear (perhaps Pipolo unnerved Smith), Fat Boy began talking to sheriff’s deputies in Bessemer about the assassination plot. Immediately, David Orange contacted the FBI and received a detailed report on Rudy Pipolo. Born December 5, 1926, in New York to immigrant parents, Pipolo was a chef and a part owner of the Sea Hunt Super Club in the Bronx. According to the FBI, the restaurant served as a front for his underworld activities as a Mafia soldier and an alleged hit man in the powerful Gambino crime family of New York. The “capo” or captain he reported to was the Gambino family’s consigliere (counselor) Joseph N. Gallo. Born in Bessemer in 1912, Gallo was described in FBI reports as a “high echelon” Mafia figure who profited mightily from gambling, race-fixing, and labor racketeering. He was the heir apparent to the head of the family, “The Don” Carlo Gambino. According to FBI informants, Rudy Pipolo became a mobster in the late 1950s when he allegedly fulfilled part of a murder contract on mobster Frank Scalice, who was shot down by two gunmen (one presumably Pipolo) in a vegetable market in the Bronx on June 17, 1957. “As a result of the contract being well handled,” an FBI agent reported, Gambino leaders invited Pipolo to join the family—or, in mafia terminology, he became a “made man.”

  By 1967, the FBI believed Pipolo was involved in a number of illegal activities, including “shylocking” (high-interest rate loans backed by violence), dealing “swag” (the acquisition and selling of stolen goods), and running illegal card and crap games. Agents warned David Orange that Judge Gardner Goodwyn was in grave danger if Hammonds had hired Pipolo—not even the man who made the contract could break the contract. Orange assigned a deputy to stay with Goodwyn twenty-four hours a day. “In fact,” Orange said at the time, “this man [the deputy] is even staying in his home. . . . We consider it that serious.”

  A few days later, Earl Morgan, the Jefferson County district attorney in Birmingham, took over the Bessemer DA’s office. Morgan’s action marked the first major breach in the “invisible dam” that separated the Cutoff from the rest of Jefferson County since solicitor Hugo Black’s efforts in 1915, and it ended the fifty-two-year-old hands-off policy of the Birmingham district attorney’s office toward operation
of the DA’s office at Bessemer. The forty-three-year-old Earl Morgan was an energetic yet soft-spoken attorney with deep roots in Alabama politics. As a lad, he served as a page in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1937 to 1943 while Luther Patrick was the congressman from Jefferson County and the Speaker of the House was Alabamian William Bankhead. Following service in the Eighth Air Force during World War II, he graduated from law school at the University of Alabama in December 1950 (six months behind James Hammonds) and entered private practice in Birmingham. In 1963, George Wallace hired him as the governor’s executive secretary—a position he held until Wallace appointed him Jefferson County’s circuit solicitor in December 1964, following the death of Emmett Perry. By 1966, an editorial writer for one Birmingham paper praised Morgan. “He is an able public official,” he wrote, “and we should count ourselves fortunate to have him as District Attorney.”

  James Hammonds was no doubt surprised when Morgan and a small cadre of underlings appeared at the county courthouse in Bessemer and relieved him of his duties. Morgan possessed no legal authority to fire Hammonds, so he reassigned him to review and summarize “all the cases that have been handled under his administration.” Within days, sheriff’s deputies were fanning out across the Cutoff serving subpoenas to appear before a new grand jury empaneled by Judge Gardner Goodwyn. Major Orange took special precautions to prevent witnesses from taking any new “vacations” to avoid testimony.