by Safran, John
I’ve just come from the bars with Ali Winters. She’s twenty-five, a writer from Western Australia. She heard I was in Mississippi and hit me up on Twitter. She’s here covering the case of a guy on death row called Corey. She thinks he’s innocent. The lawyers think he’s innocent. The legal aid lawyers, who have thousands of cases and not enough money, think that it’s worth dedicating time to him. She’s on the outside now because she oversold herself as a social justice journalist who was there just to advocate for Corey. They found out that she had been writing these articles that they felt were self-serving.
It was good to compare Corey’s case with Vincent’s. I’m not sure that Vincent doesn’t deserve life or lots of time. Like Daisy Reyes with the Mexican money, they might have the wrong crime, but they’ve got the right guy. He raped a guy with a bottle. He beat China. That’s putting aside killing Richard. With Richard, it’s like, Oh, he was a white supremacist. Oh, maybe he attacked Vincent. Who knows what happened in that little house? But Vincent doesn’t deny that he beat China and he absolutely doesn’t deny that he shoved a bottle in the arse of his white cellmate.
I remember when I was cut off by the McGee family, I thought, This is so annoying, because I wanted a book where I would get to be the advocate for this guy. But now that more and more of the story has come out and I’ve been able to rest on it, I’m glad there’s no pressure about being the advocate for him. There’s minor pressure from Earnest McBride to be the advocate for Vincent McGee, victim of a racist system. I tried to get across to Earnest that I think that there’s more to this than, Oh, this guy’s been set up for dating a white girl. I really tried to present to him—without being offensive or confrontational—that Vincent’s a dangerous man, but he weaved around the topic.
I texted Vincent and phoned him tonight and he hasn’t gotten back to me. He texted me and phoned me the night before and I didn’t get back to him. Is he trying to get revenge?
I talked to Ali about how Vincent’s very impulsive, how he seems to have no forward thinking even in his manipulations. To give you an example: To my mind, it never seems to occur to him that I might be helpful to him next week, or in two days’ time, so he should put on his charming act and reveal a little. Like, as soon as it’s some instant thing that he needs—a phone card, a Walmart Green Dot card—then suddenly he reveals all to me. He’s happy then, in that moment, to be kind of charming or give me a little of what happened, shed a little light on the truth of that night, because he needs that card, that number, that minute, that second. But it doesn’t register with him that maybe he should—even as a manipulator, not as a person, but as a manipulator—maybe he should think a bit more ahead. I could be an advocate for him, but now I’m kind of not one. I said to Ali that if I met some guy here in Mississippi who I thought could help me in a year’s time with a potential documentary or something, I’d think, Oh, I should be charming to him now. Because he might help me next year. Or people might help me next week or next month. But Vincent, he can’t seem to think beyond the minute. He can’t even seem to think two hours ahead. So he’ll be a jerk to me. He’ll cut me off, and then when he needs it, that minute, that’s when he’ll be charming and give me what I need. Yeah, yeah, I suppose I’ve used my power—Green Dots, the prospect of telling his story—to get what I want from him, but sorry, I don’t think telling a story is bad. I’m drunk, by the way.
10.
THE LETTER OF THE LAW
Richard’s War Record
A Vietnam veteran who lived near the Nationalist Movement headquarters told me he didn’t buy Richard’s war stories.
“I said, ‘Where’d you fight?’ He said, ‘Dankok.’ I said, ‘Where’s that?’ He said, ‘South of Da Nang.’ I said, ‘I was at Da Nang, I never heard of Dankok.’ If you’re going to lie about being a vet, I just walk away.”
Another fellow, a white supremacist who knew Richard in the 1960s, told me he’d tease Richard about his war record. To earn a Purple Heart you needed to be killed or wounded. Richard, he told me, couldn’t produce a wound.
Richard’s war record arrived in the mail today. His severe 1964 face snarls at me from his ID picture. The document tells me he did spend eleven months in Vietnam. He did receive a Purple Heart with First Oak Leaf Cluster.
In The Commission Richard says he received his Purple Heart after he was thrown from a helicopter hovering close to the ground, just before it exploded under enemy fire. I notice a detail on his military record. Everything on the document is typed. The document says he served as a “security guard” in Vietnam. But a hand has crossed that out and scribbled in with pen “door gunner”—that is, a gunman on a helicopter. Why is it that the one detail on the document that is needed to match up with his dramatic story in The Commission is scribbled in by hand?
How the World Works, According to John Moore
John Moore told me that if I want to see how Mississippi works, I should come down to the House of Representatives today. They don’t usually sit this time of the year, but they’re convening to pass a special bill.
The public gallery is closed for plastering, so a cable runs from the House to a crackly speaker in a boardroom. The speaker looks down like a black eye on black and white Mississippians spread around the table. Men from the chamber of commerce and women from the trade union mix in with the journalists.
The House is discussing a bill that will offer $175 million in incentives to two companies to lure them to Mississippi. Eighteen hundred jobs will be created, so no one, Republican or Democrat, is against the bill in general.
John Moore rises. He wants an amendment made before the bill is passed.
Mississippi is the poorest state in America. The poorest of the poor live along the Delta, mostly black and in permanent recession. Ten years ago, the Black Caucus pushed for a $2 million study to work out how to draw business to the Delta, but the study was never funded. With $175 million being found to lure business to other parts of the state, the Black Caucus says now is the time to fund the study.
John Moore clears his throat. He tells the House he wants the $2 million study cut from the bill.
“Oh, this is outrageous,” Rufus Straughter, a black Democrat from the Delta, snaps at John. “Why are you making such a fuss over this $2 million?”
John Moore says he has nothing against the study. He just wants the money to come from another kitty.
“There’s no other kitty!” yells Rufus Straughter. “You know there’s no other kitty!”
Asking to find the money elsewhere will kill off the study.
I glance around the boardroom. One minute ago we were a bunch of people sitting around a table. Now every black face has twisted to sourness and every white one is pretending they’re not noticing the mood shift.
Now Rufus is shouting about “sins of the father.” He says blacks in the Delta suffered under slavery and segregation and now they are being left behind.
“This is our Mississippi, too!” yells Rufus. “God help me, I’ll preach this till the day I die!”
I drift down to a white guy sitting at the end of the boardroom. He turns out to be from the chamber of commerce.
“What just happened?” I ask.
“Oh, look,” he says calmly, “John Moore just doesn’t want the money coming out of bonds. The governor made a point last year that the government’s taking out too many bonds.”
“Was there another level to it, where he was trying to be provocative?” I ask.
The man from the chamber of commerce sniffs out what I’m getting at.
“Oh, no, no,” he mumbles, and starts staring at his BlackBerry.
I’ve noticed Mississippians just stop talking until the dead air is so awkward, you just walk away.
The bill is passed with the $2 million study cut out.
Floating out the front of the State Capitol Building are two white Republicans. They tel
l me the $2 million would have been a waste. It was just the Delta asking for a handout.
“What kind of business could set up in the Delta?” asks one.
“Well, not a call center!” says the other, and they both laugh.
I don’t get it.
“Oh, look,” the first one says, “he was joking, but in the Delta they’re a bit less educated, so they’d have a bit of trouble speaking to people from lots of different areas. You wouldn’t really be able to understand them.”
The other one tells me there are no ice pops in the Delta. The electricity is down so often, the corner shops can’t rely on refrigeration. On the counters of the shops are big jars of Kool-Aid with pickles floating about. He says the kids have to suck on these pickles instead of ice pops.
The two politicians laugh.
I find Rufus Straughter.
He tells me foreign companies have no preconceptions that this bit of Mississippi is better than that bit. They go where the government authorities steer them. And they steer them toward the places politicians like John Moore want them steered.
“When John Moore spoke,” I say to Rufus, “you threw around expressions like ‘sins of your father’ and ‘slavery.’”
“Always during the House sessions, situations like this are popping up,” Rufus says. “When John Moore and his people get up and oppose a proposal like this, we strongly believe that it’s historical. We know exactly where they’re coming from. And when one uses a term about their forefathers, you know, we all the time hear them say that ‘we’re not like our fathers, we are a different age now.’ Well, I’m sure you’ve heard an old saying that an apple don’t fall too far away from the tree.”
Did John Moore want me to see him get Richard’s work done, in a way that is softer, more polite, and bleeds all the way to the Delta? Why else did the number two on Richard’s will suggest that I come along today?
The Mailbox Again
It’s arrived. Vincent McGee has squiggled his signature at the bottom of the consent letter. I skid out to OfficeMax to fax the page to Mike Scott.
Mike Scott
“Do you enjoy being a lawyer?” I ask.
“Well, it lets me come to work at noon, so yeah,” Mike Scott says, blue-eyed and handsome.
Water flows and the occasional bird chirps from the Bang & Olufsen speakers, and I toss up whether to ask him to shut off the goddamn relaxation music so my Dictaphone recording is clean.
“What did Vincent tell you happened?” I ask.
“He said Richard came on to him and that he snapped.”
Mike Scott believes this version because of another incident. In 1995, Richard turned up at a police station and told an officer that a young man had stolen jewelry from him. Mike says this was to undermine the young man, who Richard feared was about to file a complaint of his own about a sexual advance. The young man was indicted for theft, although the case never made it to court. The young man told his side of the story in an affidavit. Not secondhand gossip. A sworn and signed first-person story of Richard’s predatory nature! That affidavit is presumably in the manila folder marked McGee sitting before Mike Scott.
Mike says most documents like this—a fifteen-year-old affidavit for a trial that never happened—essentially disappear into puffs of smoke. They certainly aren’t stored in data banks. However, the day Mike was first assigned to Vincent’s case, he received a phone call. The voice on the other end of the phone told him about the incident and where to find the affidavit.
My eyes are going numb staring at the manila folder, trying to see through the cardboard. Calm down, John, it sounds like he’s going to give you the document.
Mike Scott taps the folder.
“And,” Mike says, “I thought I had a copy of his affidavit that he gave, but I don’t for some reason.”
My chest puffs out a tiny squeak of pain.
Mike Scott says it’s missing from his file, but I might find it at the Hinds County police department. He has the indictment number.
“The guy’s name is Daniel Earl Cox. He was at the time, in ’95, he would’ve been twenty-three. So roughly the same age as Vincent.”
“Was he white or black?”
“He was white.”
Mike Scott did flap the affidavit in the district attorney’s face, showing Richard Barrett had a history of such behavior, but the affidavit lost its value once Vincent switched his story to one without a sexual advance.
A dolphin bleats from the Bang & Olufsen speakers.
I ask Mike why he let Vincent plead to sixty-five years. Nearly everyone else involved in the case is unashamedly conservative. Mike’s the only one who feels he has to defend himself on progressive terms. Mike tells me there’s no way Vincent will serve that. That he’ll get a day knocked off for every day he serves, good behavior, so he’ll be out in about thirty. And that there are other prison programs that knock off time, too. He says if he’d allowed Vincent to go to trial and lost, he would have been given life without the chance of “one-for-one.”
Mike says the district attorney knows Vincent will be out in thirty, and his tough talk is theater for the voters of Rankin County. He says county officials are in a bind. Their conservative constituents have two demands: (1) Lock ’em away and throw away the key, and (2) don’t raise taxes. So officials go through the show of being arch-conservative, then, when faced with paying the prison bill, they release prisoners early. In fact, Mike says, this is why Vincent was out of prison early and able to kill Richard.
“I thought I’d show you something,” Mike Scott says.
He opens the manila folder, which activates a naughty smirk on his face.
He slides a large glossy photo across the desk.
I stare down at Vincent McGee.
Vincent stands in a narrow hallway. He is topless. It’s a posed photograph. He is muscular and gorgeous. He clenches his fists, bulging out his arm and chest muscles further. His eyes, with the long, feminine lashes, are gently shut. Vincent is not smiling.
Mike Scott’s finger points to a detail, not at first apparent. A mirror hangs from a door behind Vincent. Reflecting in the mirror is the hand of the cameraman.
“That’s Barrett,” says Mike Scott.
“No way,” I say.
“And that’s Barrett’s house,” says Mike Scott.
Vincent blocks the reflection except for the hand. But what other hand would be in Barrett’s crummy little home? And why else would that crummy little home have the room full of photographic equipment that the investigators found?
“Oh! Wow!” I say. “How did you get this?”
“It just got sent.”
“That’s amazing, ’cause that sort of suggests something’s going on.”
“Uh-hm,” says Mike Scott with a smirk.
He scribbles Daniel Earl Cox’s indictment number on a sheet of paper and slides it across the desk.
In Search of Daniel Earl Cox: Plan A
I run down toward the Jackson public library, gripping my topless photo of Vincent McGee. Mike Scott told me a clerk at the Hinds County police department might have the affidavit. But it’s kicked me in the face that someone else might, too—Daniel Earl Cox himself.
Squeezed between men with Afros and stained tracksuits in the library’s computer room, I punch Daniel Earl Cox into PeopleFinder.com. Then, hovering around the Goodwill bin in the library parking lot, I flip out my phone and dial the first of several leads that the computer coughed up.
A man picks up my call. He’s baffled by both my accent and my question.
Yes, he knows Daniel Earl Cox. He’s dead.
The man breathes an upset breath and hangs up.
A woman soon calls me from the same number. Why am I ringing about Daniel? she asks anxiously. I begin to explain. She says she doesn’t want to talk about Daniel and hangs
up, too.
Maybe this isn’t going to work.
Plan B: Hinds County Police Department
Deputy Sheriff Steve Pickett brings me into the sheriff’s office so we can stretch out and pull some drinks from the minibar.
After twenty years of service, the sheriff and deputy sheriff are finishing up. They lost office. What happened?
“Demographics,” Steve says.
“What do you mean?”
“They voted the black guy in.”
“Where did all these new black people come from?”
“The wrong question,” Steve says. “It’s not where the black people came from, it’s where the white people went.” Rankin County, of course.
Steve remembers Richard.
“He was leprosy,” Steve says.
He says he knows the case Mike Scott is talking about. He picks up the phone and asks someone to find Richard’s file.
“That’s odd,” Steve finally says.
Richard’s name is in the computer system, but all other information has been wiped. He recommends I try the Hinds County district attorney.
Plan C: Hinds County District Attorney’s Office
A black woman at the Hinds County district attorney’s office hands me a plump folder. I skip through the pages and hit the document that matches the indictment number provided by Mike Scott.
It’s not Daniel Earl Cox’s affidavit.
It’s a single-page document labeled Grand larceny. There’s not a word about sexual advances. Nor a word elaborating on grand larceny. It’s like a receipt from an electronics store.
It takes a minute to think through. Richard filed a complaint against Daniel for stealing his jewelry—grand larceny—and the affidavit was merely Daniel writing down his side of the tale. And the case never went to trial. That’s why I’m staring at a page of numbers and names and nothing more.