A few days after the Davis beating, Klansmen witnessed an altercation between E. D. “Big” Morace, the investigator for the Ferriday-Clayton Klan, and James Scarborough, the Exalted Cyclops. Morace accused Scarborough of informing on the klavern. In fact, he claimed Scarborough was divulging Klan secrets to DeLaughter, Drane, and Fuller and that this action had endangered the life of Coonie Poissot.37
Scarborough was convinced that violent days were ahead for white people in the South. He blamed the federal government and the menacing influence of communism for the push for integration, and ultimately, he believed, black insurrection and a bloody race war would be the result. Scarborough had grown up in the shadows of one of the meanest Klan groups in the history of the United States; its crimes resulted in the first intense FBI investigation into the KKK. The case had drawn the interest of J. Edgar Hoover, then the number-two man in the bureau.
ON THE AFTERNOON of August 24, 1922, residents of Mer Rouge, located in northern Louisiana near the Arkansas line, were heading home after a barbecue and baseball game in the Morehouse parish seat of Bastrop. At a roadblock midway on the seven-mile highway separating Bastrop and Mer Rouge, hooded Klansmen searched each vehicle passing through. Five white men were detained. Each was bound, blindfolded, and led into the woods. Three made it out alive. Two went missing—thirty-five-year-old World War I veteran Walt Daniels, a bachelor, and his friend, Thomas F. Richards, a mechanic and married father of two. Both had been warned previously by the Klan to stop associating with blacks. Daniel, a womanizer who allegedly liked white and black women, had told the Klan to go to hell.38
Both Daniels and Richards were beaten to death, their bodies mutilated, their heads removed, bones broken, and testicles crushed. Soon, tips revealed that their bodies had been dumped into Lake LaFourche. When federal authorities appeared, ready to search the lake, an explosion blew out a sixty-foot-wide, twenty-five-foot-deep hole along the bank. The next morning, the two men’s headless bodies floated to the surface.39
The murders split Morehouse Parish between pro-Klan and anti-Klan factions. Louisiana governor John Parker soon learned not only that the Klan controlled the parish top to bottom, from courthouse officials down to local justices of the peace, but also that they were interfering with the mail, telegraph, and telephone services in the region. So great was the Klan’s influence that Parker asked a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune to hand deliver a message to the FBI calling for assistance. The letter was written to the attention of Hoover, then the assistant director of the bureau.40
Everyone in Morehouse Parish knew that Klan leaders John J. Skipworth, seventy-four, the former mayor of Bastrop, and B. M. McKoin, a dentist and former Mer Rouge mayor in his late thirties, were responsible for the homicides. Skipworth had waged a battle against bootleggers, moonshiners, “immoral” men and women, and anyone who challenged the Klan. His right-hand man McKoin was a Baptist deacon who was particularly offended by white men sleeping around with black women.41
Federal officials in Washington were stunned at the degree of Klan power in northern Louisiana. It included a plot to kill FBI agents, masterminded, in part, by the U.S. attorney at Shreveport. Although two separate grand juries, populated by Klansmen, failed to indict anyone on felony charges in the killings, the state’s extensive hearing on the matter provided pages of testimony. This would become one of the most famous murder cases attributed to William Simmons’s Klan during the first half of the twentieth century.
BORN IN THE NEIGHBORING parish of Union in 1921, a year before the murders of Daniels and Richards, Scarborough grew up hearing stories about the heroic Morehouse Klan’s crusade against immorality and racial mixing. A World War II veteran with an eighth-grade education, he moved to Ferriday in 1951 after transferring to the International Paper Company mill in Natchez. He joined the Concordia Klan at its formation and in late 1964 was elected Exalted Cyclops of the Ferriday-Clayton Original Knights klavern. Known for his marksmanship with an archer’s bow, he was called “The Indian” by some of his fellow Klansmen and local hunters. At a Klan meeting in March 1965, Scarborough delivered a passionate speech advocating the formation of armed squads to train for the coming race war.42 He joined Red Glover and other SDG Klansmen in beatings and arson projects in 1964 and early 1965 and was known to have a cache of explosives.
Morace believed that Scarborough alerted DeLaughter by messenger about the Klan’s proposed projects. During his ten years on the ground investigating the sheriff’s office, FBI agent John Pfeifer learned that DeLaughter and other deputies rarely attended Klan meetings. They were members mostly to gather intelligence to prevent the execution of any Klan projects that targeted prostitution and gambling enterprises from which the sheriff profited via kickbacks, such as the early 1965 arsons of two parish lounges where both vices flourished.43
In early November, a few days after the beating of Davis, Klansmen convened at the meetinghouse in Clayton. Morace collected guns from the arriving Klansmen and hung them on racks along the wall. Within a few minutes, they heard a car drive up. Soon four men wearing white robes and white hoods, each armed with a rifle, walked in and sat at the front of the room facing the gathering. Morace said that Scarborough was to be tried for divulging Klan secrets and that the four men in robes would serve as executioners. They were to carry out the sentence imposed by the Klansmen.44
Morace planned to reveal that Drane and Fuller believed Poissot and another Klansman had torched Drane’s warehouse that stored, among other things, gambling machines and parts. It was also where William Cliff Davis received his second beating. Drane thought the arson was Nugent’s idea. To make matters worse, Poissot had witnessed DeLaughter’s apprehension of Davis at the King Hotel, and Poissot knew Fuller and Drane had joined the deputy in beating Davis. A grand jury was investigating the beating. Now, DeLaughter intended to deal with Poissot.45
Before the trial of Scarborough began, a handful of Klansmen huddled. When a terrified, newly recruited Klansman stood to leave, the four executioners pointed their rifles at his head. The trembling man returned to his seat.46 In short order, a deal was cut. Morace agreed to call off the trial if Scarborough was removed as Exalted Cyclops and booted out of the Klan. Morace had stacked the deck against Scarborough.47
As the hooded executioners left the building, only Morace knew their names: Glover, Kenneth Norman Head, Buck Horton, and Coonie Poissot. Poissot appeared unhooded at the klavern’s December meeting and thanked Morace and others for protecting him from DeLaughter.48 Knowing his fate would be similar to Davis’s if DeLaughter had his way, Poissot left town. But in two years, the FBI would find Poissot in Texas and secretly bring him back as an informant. Poissot would tell agents that he was with DeLaughter the night before the arson of Frank Morris’s shoe shop in late 1964 and that the deputy had previously argued heatedly with the shoemaker over a pair of cowboy boots.
1966
11
“OH, LORD, WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE THIS?”
IN CONCORDIA PARISH, Sheriff Noah Cross’s alliance with the New Orleans mob in the operation of a profitable brothel drew the attention of a young FBI agent. Cross also found himself under attack from several other formidable foes. A confederation of preachers and civic clubs opened a campaign to rid the parish of prostitution and gambling, and sought the help of Louisiana governor John McKeithen. Meanwhile, the Concordia Sentinel’s new publisher, Sam Hanna, covered the lack of law and order with fourteen front-page stories detailing the “moral and ethical” crisis the ministerial alliance was addressing. Hanna also extensively covered the race for district attorney, in which vice and corruption became the top issue, setting the stage for Cross’s reelection campaign in the year to follow.
The preachers’ crusade drew immediate support from civic groups and local governing bodies. The governor met in May with the ministerial alliance and local legislators. McKeithen learned from Assistant District Attorney Roy Halcomb that Cross was stonewalling any effo
rts to address the vice issues.1 In June, Louisiana state police superintendent Thomas Burbank met with Cross. “I think we had an understanding,” Burbank told the Sentinel after the meeting. Burbank advised Cross that if he didn’t close the gambling and prostitution operations, the state police would. When, after a month, Cross hadn’t moved, Burbank made good on his threat.2
State police launched a late-night raid on Saturday, July 30, on three lounges, two of which belonged to the sheriff’s political and financial ally Blackie Drane. Three of Drane’s employees were arrested, as were a pimp and four prostitutes who worked at the Morville Lounge, a brothel and casino fourteen miles south of Vidalia. Thirteen state troopers confiscated Drane’s blackjack and dice tables, as well as an assortment of chips, dice, and cards. At the Morville Lounge, troopers found an arsenal of weapons and ammunition, and observed ten bedrooms used for prostitution.3 The confiscated gambling material, per state law, was turned over to Sheriff Cross. Although the ministers praised the governor, McKeithen advised the preachers, “Prosecution is local.” A few days later, the Morville Lounge was back in operation, Drane had repossessed his property, and bribes to Cross resumed.4
In the DA race, Halcomb and Vidalia attorney W. C. Falkenheiner waged a heated run-off battle. Halcomb had worked for District Attorney Wana Gibson for eight years. Gibson hailed from neighboring Catahoula Parish, which shared the judicial district with Concordia. He had served since 1948, but when in Concordia Parish neither he nor the judge typically challenged Cross. The sheriff despised Halcomb, who labeled Falkenheiner as Cross’s candidate in the race. Falkenheiner countered that Halcomb held the power to close the vice operations. In fact, such action required the support of Halcomb’s boss, the DA.5 On election day, Falkenheiner was victorious. In December, a month prior to his taking office, the DA-elect said he would fulfill his campaign promise to “carry out the law as written in the statutes.”6 When he took office in January 1967, he padlocked the lounge. The FBI by then had launched a full-scale investigation.
DURING THE EARLY stages of the race for district attorney, two young FBI agents arrived in Ferriday with instructions to put a stop to the violence perpetrated in part (and completely ignored by) the sheriff’s office. Born and reared in Ohio, John Pfeifer was an English literature major at Princeton. Honorably discharged from the Marines in 1959, he went to work as an insurance investigator and adjuster in Detroit before he was promoted to bodily injury claim supervisor in Brooklyn, where he reviewed five hundred claims each month. Pfeifer disliked the long commute to work and hated the job.7 Throughout his life, he had been an admirer of the FBI. He devoured Don Whitehead’s book The FBI Story, which outlined the bureau’s history and some of its most famous cases. While sipping beer with a fellow Marine reservist in 1964, Pfeifer learned that a comrade was joining the bureau. It was a heavy recruiting period for the FBI, which was waging war on the Klan in the South. After learning that he didn’t have to be a lawyer or an accountant to become a special agent, Pfeifer decided to fulfill his dream of becoming a G-man. After training, he worked for a few months in Belleville, Illinois, before being transferred to the New Orleans field office in February 1966, just in time for Mardi Gras. Pfeifer was thirty-three.8
The office, which handled all of Louisiana, also had been responsible for the southern half of Mississippi until 1964, when the bureau opened a field office in Jackson. The New Orleans office took up two floors in the post office on Loyola Avenue across the street from the new Hyatt and near the future home of the Louisiana Superdome. Space was so limited in the busy office that clerks worked in cluttered hallways filled with desks, filing cabinets, and stacks of papers. Each desk was shared by two agents. Joseph Sylvester, the assistant special agent in charge, headed up one of two squads that operated out of the office. His No. 2 Squad handled police brutality, Klan, and civil rights cases. Sylvester was a short man, fearless, and beloved by agents, who felt he cared about them and their families. But he was a tough boss. Pfeifer described him as the type of father who would take his son to the swimming hole, throw him in, and see if the child would learn to swim on his own.9
Sylvester was proud of Pfeifer’s work and that of another agent on his squad, twenty-seven-year-old Ted Gardner of Virginia. Like Pfeifer, Gardner had joined the bureau in 1964. In the months ahead, he would become involved in the investigation into the murder of Oneal Moore, a black deputy with the Washington Parish Sheriff’s Office who was gunned down by Klansmen in 1965. Pfeifer and Gardner, also a Marine, looked like brothers.10 Together, the new team investigated several racketeers who worked for the New Orleans–based Carlos Marcello mob. Pfeifer came to believe that gambling was so prevalent in Louisiana that “bookies grew on trees.”11
Sylvester had visited Ferriday in 1965 when Frank DeLaughter’s henchmen attacked CORE workers. He quickly assessed that the parish was a powder keg. Agent Don McGorty (who would soon be transferred to New York) was bogged down in a number of civil rights complaints relating to the sheriff’s office and the faltering murder investigation of Frank Morris. Sylvester handed the two new agents the Concordia Parish file, which was so thick they didn’t have time to finish reading it before heading to Ferriday. In addition to stopping the Klan violence, they also were to look into the growing number of police brutality cases that had been filed. These had quickly stalled, mostly because witnesses and victims were afraid to testify. Upon arriving in town in March 1966, the agents met with two informants McGorty had developed during the past months. They quickly learned that in January, Klansman Douglas Nugent, who operated the King Hotel, had died in an automobile accident.12 The funeral of the former Exalted Cyclops, who was buried in his red Klan robe, was held at the hotel lounge. Among the mourners was DeLaughter, who wore his Klan robe over his deputy uniform.13
Soon after their arrival, Sylvester alerted Pfeifer and Gardner that White Knights imperial wizard Sam Bowers of Mississippi might be hiding out with Klan friends in Concordia Parish. Warrants had been issued for his arrest in connection with the murder of African American Vernon Dahmer, a fifty-seven-year-old farmer and businessman who was the NAACP leader in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Dahmer died on January 11, 1966, as a result of a White Knight firebombing attack organized by Bowers and carried out the night before. Pfeifer and Gardner met an FBI agent in Natchez who provided photos of Bowers, a physical description, and details of the warrant.14
They worked into the night, searching fishing and deer camps in the Monterey–Black River area of Concordia. They also took a drive on Highway 15, a lonely two-lane state road that runs parallel at intervals with the Mississippi River outside Ferriday southward to Pointe Coupee Parish. It was common knowledge parishwide that along that route there was a house of prostitution like no other in Louisiana. Spotting lights on the other side of the levee, just north of Deer Park, the agents topped the levee and below saw a single-story building with fifty cars and pickups in a gravel parking lot. A jukebox was blaring, and the voices of partying men and women streamed out. Inside, they saw women in negligees and men, dressed in business suits, work pants, and hunting clothes, three deep at the bar. Nearby, in a cloud of cigarette and cigar smoke, players surrounded blackjack, dice, and poker tables. Slot machines also were in play. Pfeifer and Gardner sidled up to the bar and asked to see the manager, who introduced himself as Curt Hewitt. They showed him photos of Bowers. Hewitt said he had never seen the man before. Neither had any of the lounge’s customers.15
THE MORVILLE LOUNGE was located in an old country store that had closed in 1960. The owner of the building was fifty-three-year-old J. D. Richardson, a tall, thin, rugged cattle and horse rancher who dressed in western attire and was rarely seen without his revolver secured in a holster at his waist. Richardson had a reputation as a ladies’ man and as someone you didn’t mess with. With only a fourth-grade education, he could barely read and write. Despite those limitations, he had done well for himself. Among other ventures, Richardson had a stake in the 6,600-acre Morville
Plantation along the Mississippi River.16
In early 1965, Richardson leased the old grocery building on the property to Curt Hewitt, who had been tapped by the Carlos Marcello mob to manage the prostitution and bar business there in what proved to be a lucrative venture. (The mob had previously sent a representative to Concordia and Natchez to do a feasibility study.) After the deal was made, Hewitt asked Richardson to “fix it” with the sheriff. A short time later, Richardson found Cross at his farm in Ferriday and asked if he would allow Hewitt to operate for $200 a week in protection money. The sheriff agreed, but to insulate himself, he made arrangements for the money to be paid directly by Richardson and not the mob. Later, Cross arranged for DeLaughter to pick up the weekly kickback at the lounge, where Hewitt would hand him a white envelope marked “The Man” with the cash stuffed inside.17
As early as 1959, Hewitt had been arrested for employing “b-girls,” and he had operated the Peppermint Lounge in Eunice in St. Landry Parish before being tapped for the Morville Lounge position. He immediately plugged into the mob’s network of pimps, who delivered the working girls to the lounge. One pimp paid the $100 bond of a destitute twenty-one-year-old named Betty being held in a Shreveport jail on bad check charges. Instead of taking her home, the pimp drove her against her will 182 miles to the Morville Lounge. When she refused to perform, one of Hewitt’s associates slapped her several times and threatened her. Eventually, Betty agreed to turn two tricks. She was held in the lounge for six weeks until, on the sly, she reached her mother by pay phone.18 Around the same time, Methodist preacher Jerry Means, an outspoken leader in the ministerial alliance, was taking a Sunday afternoon drive with his wife near the lounge when he watched in disbelief as a naked teenage girl came running over the levee. She, too, had been forced into prostitution but had escaped. Means drove the teen to Natchez, where FBI agent Billy Bob Williams made arrangements for her safe return home while alerting the New Orleans FBI office of the rescue.19
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