by Rick Outzen
Bree had reason to be concerned.
I said the only thing I could. “I will take care of it.”
“How? You’ve been on his enemies list before,” she asked. “What can you do?”
“I will find his pressure point.”
7
The next few days we tried to focus on our regular routines at the Insider, but Pensacola wasn’t going to let that happen.
The medical examiner, at the request of the state attorney, finished the autopsy and reported she had found that a combination of barbiturates and alcohol had killed Sue Hines. The deceased had been drinking heavily according to her husband and niece and had only recently started taking the Phenobarbital again, which had been prescribed for her epilepsy, to help her sleep.
Her husband said he had had trouble waking her before he went to the television station for his morning interview. After he left Sue had made it as far as the bathroom, where she collapsed and died of cardiogenic shock due to what the medical examiner determined was an accidental overdose.
Standing in his front yard, Bo spoke to the media that had camped out on his street. We watched the impromptu press conference that was streamed on the internet by the Herald. The Insider wasn’t a part of the media entourage.
“I want to publicly thank the medical examiner for acting so quickly,” Hines said. “This report will dispel any hurtful rumors that some have tried to promulgate on the blogs.”
He announced that the funeral would be the following Monday at St. Joseph’s Church, the downtown church founded in 1891 as a place of worship for Pensacola’s Creoles and blacks. Sue had been one of the parish’s biggest benefactors and sang in its choir.
When asked about the status of his trial, Hines said, “The state attorney’s office has said they are reviewing the case and will have an announcement next week after meeting with my lawyers and the judge.”
He looked directly into the camera. “I’m hopeful they will dismiss the charges and end this nightmare for my family.”
I called State Attorney Hiram Newton to find out what they were debating. I needed that trial to happen and soon.
Newton and I had once been friends. We coached AAU basketball together when his stepson was attracting attention from college coaches. Over the years, I reached out to him and his assistants when I came across things that didn’t quite look right, such as a county administrator giving “surplus” equipment to a fraternity brother, a city councilman voting to give a contract to his nephew’s firm, or an escort service tied to a state lawmaker.
But when I reported on the high percentage of prosecutions of black teens in comparison with their white counterparts, Newton blew a fuse. Our research found young white males had a much greater chance of being offered pretrial diversion or work release than black teens. Newton didn’t like being portrayed as a possible racist and said his office handled each prosecution fairly on a case-by-case basis.
The ACLU and NAACP tried to get the U.S. Department of Justice interested, but Newton had too much political clout. We no longer talked. He assigned Assistant State Attorney Clark Spencer to deal with me, which was fine. I liked Spencer more, and over beers the assistant state attorney once admitted, after I pledged to never repeat it, that he was happy I did the article on the prosecution disparity.
When my call was answered, the receptionist sent me to Spencer, even though I had asked to talk with Newton.
“What’s this crap that you’re reviewing the Hines case?” I asked. “What’s there to review? He’s a crook.”
“Holmes, I’m ready to try the case, but the boss is worried his wife’s death will make it hard to find a fair jury,” said Spencer. “Hines’ attorneys are going to place the blame on the missing executive director of the Arts Council.”
“What about the mystery bank account and the ATM withdrawals?” I asked. “And the series of cash deposits in his personal bank account?”
“They will try to convince the jury that the deposits were his gambling winnings from his trips to Biloxi.”
I said, “Funny, he never mentioned that before.”
“Yeah, well his attorneys are good, but I think I can poke holes in their arguments,” he said. “However, Newton knows the case isn’t a slam dunk—gosh, I hate how he always uses basketball lingo—and he doesn’t like to lose cases.”
“Clark, we need the trial to happen sooner, not later.”
He said, “I agree but Newton will make the call.”
Spencer asked that I stop by his office after Sue’s funeral on Monday. When I hung up the phone, I dialed Dare. The call went directly to her voicemail. I informed her about the medical examiner’s report and asked her to call if she had any questions or wanted to talk. I hoped she would.
In the meantime, at the Insider we were focusing on the sales of the Best of the Coast issue. The advertising cancellations had slowed down, and Roxie shifted over to the ads for Best of the Coast. We needed to book the ads soon and give Mal and Teddy enough time to design them.
Best of the Coast picks were based on an online poll where our readers voted on the best restaurants, burgers, doctors, politicians, nail salons, and just about everything else the greater Pensacola area had to offer. The first year we received about three hundred ballots and sold a little over $7,000 in ads. This year we had over ten thousand votes cast. Summer needed three weeks to count all the ballots.
Summer, Roxie, and Mal reviewed the winners with me on Thursday.
“If I get started today, Mal and I think we can easily reach sixty grand in sales, which would be a 20 percent increase over last year,” said Roxie. “Even better, we think we can get them to prepay before the issue runs.”
Both Roxie and Mal wanted me to give Summer more hours to help track the sales and ad approvals, handle invoicing, and manage the collections for the special issue. They also wanted me to give her a bonus for doing the extra work.
Summer would never ask. She was the only one who knew the paper’s bank account was on life support. She blushed as they talked about her, almost shrinking.
“Summer did the best job yet handling the tallying of the votes,” said Mal. “I don’t have the time to track all this crap. I’ll be lucky to get all the ads finished and approved in time.”
The other big task was gathering the email addresses for the winners. Roxie said, “The more prep work Summer does making sure we have the right emails and mailing addresses, the more ads I can sell.”
“You don’t have the time to do the administration and accounting stuff,” Mal told me. “Besides, you’re shitty at it.”
I raised my hand. Typically, we had set aside 15 percent of the total Best of the Coast sales for a bonus pool, which usually went to Mal, Roxie, and Teddy because they put in the extra work. However, the most we had ever sold was fifty grand in ads.
“I’ve been meaning to give Summer a raise,” I said. “Let’s do this. Summer, we will pay you two and a half percent of the total sales for the Best of the Coast issue. After that, we will sit down and talk about increasing your hourly rate.”
Summer nodded.
I said, “Does that make everybody happy?”
It did. They left the office for lunch and to celebrate Summer’s new role.
Looking over the Best of the Coast report, I agreed they had enough potential customers to reach and maybe even exceed the goal. We only needed to hold out until those dollars began flowing.
Meanwhile, we got by. The Thursday and Friday deposits covered our checks and payroll after I made a second round picking up payments from advertisers. I coasted on the blog, posting occasionally about upcoming meetings and rewriting press releases. Wittman’s petition drive still wasn’t gaining much traction. It was time to sit back and hope the state attorney’s office stayed the course and won the case against Hines.
Sue’s funeral was set for Monday. The staff agreed with me that we wouldn’t write anything on her death or her husband’s pending trial until after the services. It was a
Southern tradition that no one spoke ill of the dead until after the funeral. News tips would start to flow late Monday afternoon. I guaranteed it.
I talked with Summer Friday morning. Dressed in jeans and a Van Halen concert T-shirt, she had come to work early to finish entering the sheriff’s office’s payroll data into a spreadsheet for the database and begin her Best of the Coast assignments.
“What do you hear about The Green Olive?” I asked her.
“Not much. The place has gotten creepy. Some of my girlfriends still go because the drinks are so cheap.”
I asked, “What do you mean by creepy?”
“The owner is too touchy-feely,” she said. “Wants to hug or tries to kiss you on the cheek. He offers to buy shots, but nothing’s really free in this world.”
Smart girl, I thought. “Any pot or drugs being sold?”
“I didn’t get that vibe, but who knows what happens late at night?” said Summer as she headed back to her desk. “The Green Olive isn’t the kind of bar any girl wants to be at closing time.”
At night I worked on the Frost cover story while Big Boy slept under the desk and jazz drifted over from Blazzues.
Ron Frost was a product of the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office, where he started work in 1965. We had never been able to prove he had actually graduated from Pensacola High School or that he had even got a GED. He was hired because his father and three uncles worked there.
From the beginning, Frost displayed folksy charm. He didn’t hesitate to do favors for the wealthy. Sons and daughters of the powerful didn’t have to worry about DUI arrests.
In 1973 he almost lost his badge for changing an arrest report regarding a bar fight on Pensacola Beach. The naval aviators complained that their names were the only ones on the report, while a cab whisked away the instigators, sons of a beach hotel owner. The commander of the Naval Air Station complained that while his men sat in jail, their attackers went free. An unamused county grand jury indicted the arresting officer, Frost. The state attorney ended up freeing the aviators and dropped all charges. Frost never went to trial. The incident simply disappeared from memory. Only my mentor Roger Fairley seemed to remember this, and he had delighted in giving me every juicy detail.
With each new sheriff, Frost ingratiated himself with his boss. Each of the sheriffs needed someone like Frost under them. The first sheriff Frost worked for, Bud Long, was removed from office after a grand jury indictment for two counts of gambling. The grand jury had reviewed an extensive list of allegations of misconduct, neglect of duty, and incompetence and settled on the gambling.
Sitting on his back deck that overlooked Pensacola Bay, Fairley had told me the stories of Long’s political career over drinks. Sheriff Long had also once been investigated for drunken, lewd behavior before minors. During a trip to Birmingham with the county school safety patrol, he invited the teenage girls, some younger than fifteen, to his hotel room and served them alcohol while only wearing a bathrobe. The incident report said he wanted to teach them how to “French kiss.”
The advisor for the safety patrol program was Deputy Ron Frost, who testified on Sheriff Long’s behalf and was promoted to sergeant after the state attorney refused to prosecute.
Later while awaiting trial on the gambling charges, Long was fatally wounded by his chief deputy, who mistook him for a burglar when the deputy pulled up into his driveway and saw the former sheriff climbing out his bedroom window. The rumor was Sheriff Long had been having an affair with the chief deputy’s young wife.
Dan Sota succeeded Sheriff Long. He was investigated for letting family and friends fuel their vehicles at the county pumps. The man in charge of the fuel pumps was Sergeant Ron Frost.
Sheriff Sota had tough opposition when he ran for a second term. Escambia County Solicitor “Big Jim” Reilly, who had garnered attention for fighting illegal gambling, challenged Sota in the Democratic primary. One month before the election, a plot to kill Reilly was uncovered. Five men, three from Pensacola and two from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, were involved.
Fairley told me that the murder plot was never tied directly to Sota, but many felt the sheriff and the Dixie Mafia were behind it. Sota narrowly won the election, but was removed from office after Reilly’s cousin in the Pensacola Police Department arrested him for DUI.
Sergeant Frost, who had run Sota’s reelection campaign, was promoted to lieutenant before the DUI arrest. During the nineties, Frost rose to the rank of captain, serving as the public information officer for the next two sheriffs, which helped to build his name recognition. He handled the VIP parking at concerts and events at the Pensacola Bay Center, garnering more favor with Pensacola’s power brokers.
Along the way, he changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. When he ran for sheriff, Frost was swept into office as the county overwhelmingly supported all the Republicans on the ballot. At his swearing-in ceremony at Riverside Baptist Church, Sheriff Ron Frost told the audience “the era of the John Wayne-style deputy has come and gone.”
He immediately dissolved the Street Crimes Unit, which was reportedly involved in many of the fourteen fatal deputy-involved shootings under his predecessor’s administration. Frost brought instructors from the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute for Nonviolence in Miami to Pensacola to train his deputies. A local civil rights group honored his efforts with its “MLK Man of the Year” award, making him the first white man ever to receive it.
We started the paper six months before Sheriff Frost was sworn into office. There never was much of a honeymoon for the two of us. Maybe it was the stories that Fairley shared, or perhaps it was just Frost’s cockiness, but the truth was we never got along.
His words and actions never quite matched. While he constantly whined about not having enough money to pay his deputies, Frost loved to buy the latest “gadgets.” He bought two helicopters and a mobile command bus that he showed off at the Pensacola Interstate Fair.
He also spent millions to renovate, reequip, and refurbish his administrative offices. Every office had a flat-screen television. While his deputies’ pay remained flat, his administrative salaries nearly doubled, jumping from $1.68 million to $3.23 million.
When he bought his deputies Tasers, reports of abuse began to surface. Frost was forced to settle lawsuit after lawsuit. He reached a $150,000 settlement with a Pensacola teacher, who was struck with a Taser stun gun four times as he tried to comfort his pregnant wife after a minor traffic accident. The family of a high school honor student received a settlement of a quarter of a million dollars after he was tasered while riding his bicycle. The boy suffered severe brain damage.
Then deaths in the jail began to mount—six in two years. Frost tried at first to dismiss them as sick people who would have died anywhere, but after the sixth death, public pressure forced him to reorganize the facility. We had heard the changes were only cosmetic and anticipated another wave of deaths was on the horizon.
Despite the problems, Frost had easily won a second term. After the election, his Democratic opponent filed suit in circuit court against Frost and Peck Krager, alleging dirty tricks by the Frost campaign to hurt his efforts, including dispatching investigators to his former places of employment to dig up dirt on him and sending flowers to his home signed, “Love, Delilah.” Frost settled that case, too.
We reported it all but got little traction from the other media. Apparently, I was the only one who didn’t like Frost. Realizing that no news story or investigation would ever be big enough to knock him out of office, I had adopted the strategy of a thousand cuts, pointing out his miscues and abuses of power without too much hyperbole. The strategy appeared to be working. People were talking about finding someone to run against Frost next time.
The story on pay raises wasn’t a home run, but it was a solid double. Frost had asked the Escambia County Commission to approve a special appropriation so that he could give his deputies a $4,000 a year raise, in addition to the 3 percent merit raise budget
ed for all county employees.
The spreadsheet Frost gave me agreed with our research that many deputies weren’t underpaid and nearly two dozen sergeants earned more than sixty grand a year. When I compared his payroll with sheriff’s offices in other Panhandle counties, his troops were paid $3,600 more on average. His chief deputy made $135,000 a year. Five of his administrators made over $95,000. Damn, Peck made $85,000. You would think he could buy a better fitting uniform.
I smiled. This wasn’t the kind of story Frost wanted published while potential candidates were trying to gauge if they could unseat him in the next election.
8
While I held off publishing anymore on Hines on the blog until after Sue’s funeral, the Pensacola Herald had no such compunction.
Sunday morning, Big Boy and I took our daily walk. At the Circle K, where they ignored that I brought a dog into the store, I poured a big cup of coffee and bought the dog a ham and cheese biscuit. The sales clerk loved Big Boy.
The Sunday edition of the Pensacola Herald was on the counter with big photos of Bo and Sue Hines above the fold. Dammit. I paid for a copy, handing the inserts to the clerk. We found the nearest park bench, and Big Boy feasted while I read what a worthless piece of crap I was.
The daily newspaper had published a double truck on Bo and Sue. The spread had photos from their wedding with Rory Evans standing with the couple. They published a team shot from a charity softball game. I was in the back row, having played second base for Sue’s team. The article was a beautiful obituary for a woman universally appreciated by the community.
A separate article focused on the circumstances surrounding her death. The reporter mentioned Bo’s arrest, the Pensacola Insider, and me. Friends speculated about her death and how her husband’s pending trial might have contributed to her state of mind. Wittman took a direct shot at me. He called for a boycott of my newspaper, blaming his sister’s death on the Insider and me.
Reporters, both print and broadcast, had begun digging into my life. I suspected they would profile me soon, warts and all, before the Hines’ trial began. They would recount some of my more infamous battles with politicians. The reporters wouldn’t have trouble getting interviews with those I had exposed, who would offer quotes that questioned my sources and ethics without mentioning the facts backing up our articles. The pent-up frustration and anger toward me would be released.