A Spy in Canaan

by Marc Perrusquia

  “I had, let’s say, a police background,” Withers testified, a reference to his brief stint from 1948 to 1951 as a Memphis police officer. Withers didn’t offer that he’d lost that earlier job for bootlegging.

  “Mr. Murrell asked me maybe did I want the job,” Withers testified. It offered a regular salary, health benefits, and a pension—security he never knew in the photography business. “I felt getting older in the picture business I would really want to get a job and would be in a retirement-type level,” he said. Withers soon learned the job involved very little actual police work. In an early meeting in Nashville with ABC director Lee Hyden, who would also go to prison for extortion, Withers received his marching orders. “In the meeting there it was decided that I would be an Alcoholic Beverage agent and that my off time, or during my normal course of work, that I would be required to assist Mr. Murrell in his area, work as a patronage man for the governor.”24

  After serving his five months, Withers was released on May 23, 1980, returning to his family in Memphis to begin serving a year of probation and six months of community service. A judge also ordered him to pay a $2,500 fine. Authorities had a hard time getting the money out of Withers. They threatened more than once to revoke his probation for nonpayment.25

  For all his hustling, for all the seminal photos he’d shot over the years, Ernest Withers was broke. As Murrell’s bagman, Withers had handled tens of thousands of dollars in cash. It’s unclear how much, if anything, he ever kept for himself.

  * * *

  —

  BUT FOR ONE shining moment, at least, it may have seemed worth it.

  In 1977, two years after he started working for Blanton, Withers and his wife, Dorothy, received a once-in-a-lifetime invitation: they attended a state dinner at Jimmy Carter’s White House. Dressed in a smart tuxedo and his wife in a flowing gown, the handsome couple reveled in the company of the nation’s political elite. As a photographer for Jet magazine shot pictures, they witnessed stirring performances by the Metropolitan Opera company and the Marine Corps Band. They met the president and his guest of honor, West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who rose at one point to lead the Marine band in a heartfelt rendition of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. The Witherses’ son, Ernest Jr., worked on the staff of Democratic National Committee deputy chairman Benjamin Brown, a prestigious assignment that spoke well of Ernest Sr.’s own political connections and one that undoubtedly opened the door for the elder Witherses at the White House that summer day in 1977.

  It was a solitary, perfect day, forever frozen in the pages of Jet, one that neither politics nor the pursuit of money nor Withers’s own inner demons could ever take away.26

  *1 Blanton eventually pardoned Humphreys to storms of protest. Despite payments Denton allegedly made through intermediaries, he wasn’t released. Three days before his term was to expire, Blanton put Denton on a list of inmates to be pardoned. However, in a move orchestrated by U.S. Attorney Hal Hardin and executed with help from the FBI, Blanton was locked out of his office and his successor, Lamar Alexander, was sworn in as governor three days early. The move, most certainly illegal, went unchallenged and is believed to have blocked Blanton from pardoning Denton and a host of others.

  *2 Johnican, now deceased, was an elected member of the Shelby County Court, the governing body that later became known as the County Commission.

  *3 In a December 13, 2011, interview with the author, prosecutor W. Hickman Ewing said the FBI initially was very reluctant to investigate. Bitten by a series of national scandals, the agency balked at working with Baldwin despite the obvious crimes he knew about. “I’m having to talk the FBI into what a crime would be,” Ewing said incredulously. After some persuasion, agents relented and found Baldwin to be “a gold mine,” he said.

  *4 During the author’s initial research in 1997 of the Clemency for Cash case, the FBI reports referenced in this chapter were unavailable. The accounts in those reports, obtained since 2009, are presented here for the purpose of efficient storytelling and they represent more than the author knew in 1997.

  *5 Benson later was acquitted at trial. Taylor and Sisk each pleaded guilty to racketeering and served terms in prison.

  *6 Withers’s involvement in soliciting cash in three failed bids to release felons—a murderer, the wife of a Los Angeles drug dealer, and a convicted robber—are discussed in chapter 7.

  6.

  INTO THE SHED

  SOME PEOPLE HAVE A HARD time understanding how sweet, good-natured Ernest Withers could get involved in something like the Clemency for Cash scandal. Those people don’t know Memphis. Once you know it, you’ll understand.

  I came to Memphis in 1989, seeing it first through the acrylic pane of a jetliner window. It was bright and clear, and from five thousand feet even a white-knuckled aviophobe like me could sense the splendor: the great sweep of the Mississippi River, half a mile wide as it passes downtown before snaking over the horizon on its way south to New Orleans; the jeweled Memphis skyline; Liberty Bowl Stadium; the broad railyards; the dense, green canopy of oak, sweet gum, and poplar that covers the city like a country forest. H. L. Mencken called Memphis the buckle of America’s Bible Belt. From here, you see exactly what he was talking about: churches, everywhere. They dot the cityscape, steeples reaching skyward, pretty as a postcard.

  But like a Siren’s call, Memphis can be treacherous. Rampant blight, crushing poverty, unforgiving racism, entrenched corruption—these are as much a part of the city’s infrastructure as any road, bridge, or utility line.

  Up close, it can appear as a city in chaos.

  In my very first week in town, an intruder robbed and raped a woman as she dressed for church in her home on a Sunday morning; the local congressman prepared to stand trial for bank fraud; the superintendent of schools fretted over his romantic affairs, which were about to explode in front-page allegations that he’d traded sex for promotions.

  Over the next twenty-nine years, I saw scores of public officials convicted of corruption offenses—more than a hundred in one eight-year span alone: legislators taking payoffs; cops dealing drugs or robbing motorists; councilmen, clerks, and county commissioners steering funds into their pockets. One, Councilman Rickey Peete, went to prison—twice—for taking bribes. He served time, got out, got reelected, then went back to prison—again, for bribery. Now they call him Rickey “Re-Peete.” Another, Joe Cooper, tried for a hat trick. An affable man with a quick smile and a set of gnarled teeth, he went to prison as a commissioner and again as a back-slapping lobbyist doling out graft. He escaped from the middle of a third probe when two other suspects—a venal businessman and a bribe-taking judge—both died unexpectedly of natural causes, spinning the case apart.1

  At times it’s incredibly easy being an investigative reporter in Memphis. Like shooting fish in a barrel, as they say. I’ve written stories about a real estate developer who gave a state senator a $75,000 diamond-encrusted Rolex watch; about government clerks who sacrificed their careers for payoffs as small as five dollars; about day care owners who redirected hundreds of thousands of government dollars intended for poor children to buy Caribbean cruises, fancy cars, and expensive homes. It may be unfair to characterize Memphis as a corrupt town. There are plenty of honest officials. They work hard to provide efficient services. Yet every ten or fifteen years, in cycles as regular as cicadas awakening from their subterranean slumber, all screeching hell breaks loose: the city’s latent, decades-old culture of corruption releases another wave of contagion.

  I wasn’t surprised to learn of Ernest Withers’s criminal record. Though it seems irreconcilable—this sweet, soft-spoken man, so full of kindness, so identified with that righteous movement—it made sense. It made sense knowing what I’d come to learn of Memphis. Even some of the best-intentioned are swept into the city’s great current of corruption. “It takes a tremendous amount of morality and self-control to stay out of the attraction of money,” Withers once said.2

  That defines it bet
ter than anything: desperation. Memphis started as a hard-knocks river town, populated over the decades by dirt-poor sharecroppers, black and white, forced off their land in the Mississippi Delta; by wretched, penniless laborers fleeing hardscrabble West Tennessee and Arkansas in search of opportunity. What emerged was one of the most concentrated pockets of poverty in America. Despite heroic reform efforts, year after year Memphis remains at or near the top of those often-dubious but reputation-harming “Worst” lists: worst in violent crime; worst in infant mortality; in failing schools; bankruptcy; child abuse; hunger; obesity; in predatory lending.

  Corruption is simply an inevitable by-product.

  * * *

  —

  STRANGELY, ALL THESE “negatives” lured me here. For an issue-hungry reporter raised in middle-class Wisconsin and schooled in the sterile, idealistic halls of the University of Minnesota, Memphis provided a joyful chaos: wonderful music, history, and an endless cast of colorful characters.

  After working at small papers in Minnesota and Florida, I came to The Commercial Appeal, Memphis’s venerable, then-150-year-old daily newspaper, at an editor’s suggestion: A great paper. A big news budget. They had over 220 employees in the editorial department alone (now there are fewer than 40), buzzing like honeybees in their third-floor hive in the newsroom at 495 Union Avenue. In all, more than 1,100 people labored to keep the Mid-South informed from the paper’s five-story, contoured glass headquarters. The news staff included six librarians, scores of reporters, and a crew of copy clerks who ran errands, from serious stuff like delivering source material, to the whimsical fetching of pizza and dry-cleaning tickets.

  These were newspapering’s end times—the sunset on the heyday before technology, the Internet, and Wall Street took the wheel and steered America’s great dailies into the ditch, into that great dark void of instability.

  Yet even now, amid the empty offices—after all the decimating layoffs—Memphis mesmerizes.

  Every morning on my way to work I drive past Sun Studios, where young Elvis Presley first recorded “That’s All Right Mama”; I park around the corner on Beale Street and walk over to the newspaper offices. If I look to the west I see the glittery Beale Street Historic District, where B.B. King, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and so many other legendary bluesmen got their start. A short drive toward the river takes you to the Lorraine Motel—now the National Civil Rights Museum—where Dr. King was shot. Not far to the southeast is Mason Temple, the cavernous sanctuary where he gave his last speech, during a thunderstorm, the night before the assassination.

  Memphis is sometimes described as America’s biggest small town. It was especially true in my early days there. Just walking down the street I’d run into singers like Rufus Thomas, famous for the “Funky Chicken” and “Walking the Dog.” Wave, and Rufus waves back. I once got in a heated argument with Isaac Hayes over a story I wrote on his interest in Scientology, and, more memorably, had a friendly chat with James Meredith during a chance encounter at the airport. By then, the once iconic, fresh-faced Meredith, the black student who had integrated all-white Ole Miss in 1962, was gray-bearded. Ironically, he now worked for arch-conservative Republican senator Jesse Helms. He took a beating for it in the press, but he could have cared less. “Politicians are all part of the same club,” he told me with a shrug. “They’re all the same.”

  My first assignment for The Commercial Appeal involved a six-month stint as its one-man news bureau in Greenville, Mississippi, in the heart of the Delta. There, I learned as much about Memphis as I would over the next two decades up in Memphis proper. This was ground zero: The sharecropper culture. The hard life. The shacks. The cotton fields. The brutal, unvarnished racism—it was all here. Everything that triggered the Great Diaspora, pushing poor white and black farmers off their land to Memphis and points north, sat here, nearly untouched, like a time capsule.

  There was so much to discover. I was single then and tied to nothing. Roving the Delta in my ’67 Chevy Caprice, my collie Lena on the seat beside me, I found opportunities to write about voting rights, poverty, and the death penalty. In June 1989 I interviewed condemned inmate Leo Edwards the day before his execution. Convicted by an all-white jury, Edwards, a thin, bespectacled thirty-six-year-old African American, told me he didn’t get a fair trial.

  “You know how I felt when I saw the jury?” he said in shackles as hulking prison guards looked on. “I said, ‘I’m dead.’ ”

  His trial definitely seemed rigged. The district attorney who prosecuted him confessed afterward that his ideal juror was “a forty-five-year-old white male with a crew cut and white socks who welds for a living.” He had cherry-picked Edwards’s jury. Even in the 1980s, Mississippi’s old ways held fast. Yet prosecutors had no need to railroad Edwards. They could have convicted him fair and square; the evidence was that strong. Found guilty of three separate murders, Edwards got his death sentence for shooting a helpless convenience store clerk during a robbery. This was the muddled nature of justice in the South: a horrific crime tainted by a rigged trial, an obvious disrespect for black life, and an ancient rite of unsettling, irreversible retribution.3

  Compelling stories never waned. My travels took me to places like Nelson Street—Greenville’s gritty version of pre-touristy Beale Street—where I saw singer Little Milton perform at the fabled Flowing Fountain, and to Parchman, Mississippi’s infamous maximum-security prison farm. One humid afternoon there I tailed B.B. King behind the prison walls, where, in a scene reminiscent of Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues performance, he played a hard-luck concert for the inmates. To cheers and whistles, King sang to their souls:

  Nobody loves me but my mother.

  And she could be jivin’ too…

  * * *

  —

  MISSISSIPPI TAUGHT ME much about Memphis, yet my single greatest lesson in the city’s legendary corruption came in the form of a brilliant, philandering, foul-mouthed politician named John Ford, the bad apple of one of Tennessee’s most prominent political families. I spent years investigating him. I first wrote about him in 1995 when he put one of his lovers on the county payroll in a highly paid, but, as far as anyone could tell, do-little job. As a flamboyant state senator who had fathered thirteen children with six women and who once confided to an FBI agent on an undercover tape played in federal court, “When they make pussy a state or federal crime, then I can go to jail happy,” Ford dizzied Memphis with his constant antics.4

  Once, in a rage, he threatened a group of city utility workers with a loaded shotgun. “If you don’t leave, I’ll blow your…brains out,” he yelled at them for blocking his driveway. Despite multiple witnesses, prosecutors agreed to drop all charges.*1 When he got a parking ticket one night at the airport, he allegedly shoved the citation back into a female officer’s chest. “You cannot do a damn thing to me,” he told her. He was right—no charge. Pulled over another time for driving 94 in a 65 mph zone, he yelled as the trooper’s audio recorder rolled. “You better not lay a fucking finger on me,” Ford shouted, refusing the officer’s command to step out of the car. When the trooper’s supervisor arrived, Ford declared “legislative immunity.” After filing a complaint alleging police misconduct, he paid a $112 fine.5

  Another time, when I questioned him about an auditor’s contention that he’d tried to interfere with a state audit, Ford exploded in a twenty-minute rant. “You done got caught in your own damn trap!” he yelled, threatening to sue me when he got the auditor to retract what he’d said—a bluff he never followed through on.6

  John Ford could be frightening.

  * * *

  —

  IT TOOK JAY Leno to finally bring him down. It was 2005, and the comedian made a joke about the rascally state senator on his nationally broadcast Tonight Show. It came after a story I wrote about a woman who had sued Ford for child support. Trying to limit his court-ordered payments, Ford testified he already was supporting two other families in expensive homes he owned miles outside his senat
e district. In fact, Ford said, he lived in both homes, alternating between two women whose children he had fathered. “I live back and forth,” he told an astonished Juvenile Court judge. On his show, Leno rehashed Ford’s living arrangements and his women, delivering a punch line: Ford deserved “a Jerry Springer lifetime achievement award.”7

  But this time, Ford would be more than just the butt of a joke. The judge overseeing his child support case ordered him to deliver his tax returns to Shelby County Juvenile Court to help determine how much he could pay. A source then handed them to me. The returns showed he’d received at least $237,000 he’d failed to disclose on his state conflict-of-interest forms. I tracked the payments to something called Managed Care Services Group, a shell used to funnel Ford money from TennCare, Tennessee’s Medicaid program. Ford sat on a committee that oversaw the program. Finally, the Senate Ethics Committee acted. All through the spring of 2005 the details dribbled out in hearings packed with reporters and TV cameras: Ford had taken more than $800,000 in “consulting fees” from two TennCare contractors while advocating on their behalf, trying to obtain higher provider rates and win other concessions.

  Soon, he’d have even greater troubles.

  * * *

  —

  IN MAY, IN the middle of the ethics probe, Ford was indicted in Memphis. In the initial news flash it seemed the charges involved the TennCare probe.*2 But as FBI agents led Ford from the capitol grounds in handcuffs along with four other arrested legislators, it became clear this involved something even bigger. It was then the public learned of the Tennessee Waltz bribery sting, an undercover FBI operation that had been grinding on in stealth for two years—a second case unrelated to the TennCare scheme.