No Truth Left to Tell

by Michael McAuliffe

  “The impact of the cross burnings on this community has been significant, but not in the way the perpetrators had planned or hoped for. I want to believe most residents of Lynwood, while fearful about who poured fuel on the flames of hatred, rejected the proposition that they should be unwelcoming to those who came from elsewhere to live here or those who have different traditions and customs.”

  The judge paused to measure her delivery.

  “The hateful campaign of threats by a small number of self-professed truth tellers—who believe they have a mandate to hurt innocent people because of the color of their skin, or the clothes they wear, or the God they pray to—had little chance of real success that night. The defeat of fear, however, isn’t automatic. Fear doesn’t simply evaporate with the morning sun. You must believe in your neighbors and they in you.”

  The judge continued reading her order without looking up.

  “The trial provided the town with answers to the questions of who and, to some extent, why. The parties now have returned to court because the case was defective, not the victims. The government has filed a motion to vacate the conviction and sentence of this defendant because it believes that justice demands it.

  “It is fundamental to our court system that this defendant, really all defendants, must have his or her liberty taken away by a process that is fair and respects the rights we all possess regardless of guilt, innocence, or popularity. That’s our system of law, and it demands our respect.”

  The judge took a moment to look at faces in nearly every row in the silent courtroom.

  “Nothing that happens today changes this town’s ongoing struggle with hate and ignorance. In fact, today is an affirmation, a difficult one, of the basic truth we Americans hold closest: that the rule of law is more cherished than any single case, even this case. The court system—its judges and lawyers, and the parties who come here—all yield to demands of the same laws. That may seem disappointing to many of you here, but I assure you, it is not. Indeed, that truth is the very source of our strength.”

  The judge paused again before finishing.

  “Therefore, the government’s motion is granted. The defendant is ordered released from custody after processing, and he’ll be free to go.”

  The audience members looked shocked even though they had been told the hearing likely would end this way. The judge’s words were lofty and academic, the kind of message that needed to be read on a paper to be understood, but the phrase free to go was unmistakable. A spectator in the front row reached over to grab Mercer’s arm, but he pulled away and went over to Rush. The courtroom was a cacophony of raised voices, one conversation layered over another, and it was impossible to tell who was talking to whom. Rush turned to see DuBose still sitting in the courtroom, looking up with glistening eyes that possessed no warmth for him or any of it.

  Daniels stood up. He appeared not to know what to do, but his hands were jerking around in an uncontrolled display of satisfaction. His lawyer began whispering in his ear when the judge interrupted.

  “Counsel, I’d like you both in chambers,” the judge said as she walked toward the paneled side door.

  “Yes, Judge.”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  Once back in chambers, and after she’d hung up her judicial gown, Matthews motioned for Rush and Porter to sit in the chairs positioned around a glass coffee table. The judge lingered by her massive wood desk, looking over at both counsel before taking the armed chair opposite the two.

  “I’ve never before made such a statement in a case. I’m not sure I should have; maybe it was a bit aspirational, but I did it anyway.”

  “I understand, Judge,” Porter said.

  “Mr. Rush, you know Ms. Porter defends her clients with zeal no matter what the charge or the defendant’s circumstance—guilt or innocence isn’t the issue. The defendant gets an advocate, period. While she has little choice in the matters or clients, she defends because we have the adversarial system, and the truth is supposed to emerge from the clash. We know the system doesn’t work near well enough, but it works.”

  “Yes, Judge. I know.” Rush was confused as to why the judge apparently felt the need for another lecture. He wasn’t in an obliging mood and wanted to escape the courthouse and the town.

  “You identified who burned the crosses, you pursued the case against Daniels, and you secured his conviction. You did your job.”

  The judge looked directly at Rush.

  “But your job wasn’t finished. It’s never really finished as a prosecutor, is it? You vindicated the victim’s rights, but the government also has to play by the rules. I heard the same testimony you did from the detective. It was compelling and dramatic, and we now know it wasn’t true.”

  Rush was prepared for a scolding from the judge.

  “I don’t doubt the confession itself—Ms. Porter here might disagree—but I’m fully willing to accept his admission of guilt was the truth. It makes sense, doesn’t it? A Klansman admits to a series of cross burnings with the goal of starting a new race war. But it doesn’t matter. The detective short-circuited everything. In his zeal, or anger, or whatever else motivated him, he broke the laws to get to the Klansman.”

  The judge leaned in.

  “Mr. Rush, sometimes the best defender of a defendant’s civil liberties is an ethical prosecutor. You have the fearsome power and the resources of the government behind you, with almost unfettered discretion to use them. You can bury the mistakes and the shortcuts under a mountain of information or in the deep hole of secrecy. The balance is heavily tipped in your favor. So when the government does wrong, even if no one else knows about it, it has a special obligation to acknowledge its own hard truth. And you did. You’ve paid a price for it, but you did it anyway.”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “Now, you’re both excused, as I have three more hearings to prepare for this morning.”

  Porter and Rush walked out of chambers through the judge’s private door leading to a back stairway. Porter put her hand on Rush’s bony shoulder and said, “You did right.”

  “It got upside down,” Rush responded.

  “You’ve just joined the not-so-exclusive club of advocates with very unwelcome outcomes.”

  “Your client got a gift, a gift he doesn’t deserve. I hope he learns from it.”

  “He won’t.”

  46

  ANOTHER CASE BEGINS

  The thin envelope addressed to Lieutenant Anthony Johns arrived at his house on a Thursday. Underneath the return address of 950 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20530, it stated in bold letters OFFICIAL BUSINESS. The target letter—Rush and other federal prosecutors’ standard communication to increase the pressure on soon-to-be defendants—had the great seal of the department embossed on the top left corner.

  Lieutenant Anthony Johns

  114 Littlefield Road

  Lynwood, Louisiana 71068

  Lt. Johns—

  This letter serves to inform you that you are the target of a federal criminal civil rights investigation being conducted jointly by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. A “target” is a person as to whom the prosecutor or the grand jury has substantial evidence linking him to the commission of a crime or crimes. In this matter, the evidence developed against you includes testimony from individuals, physical evidence, the interception of wire communications, and also consensually recorded conversations.

  This office intends to submit a proposed indictment with you named as a defendant in the next two weeks. The charges stem from your actions as a supervisor with the RAID unit at the Lynwood Police Department over the past five years. We anticipate that the charges will include alleged civil rights violations, obstruction of justice, perjury, and conspiracy. A federal grand jury sitting in Lynwood will make the final decision regarding the proposed indictment.

  If you have any questions regarding your status or the investigation,
you may contact Special Agents Lee Mercer or Amanda Gill of the FBI at 318-567-0983. If you have legal counsel, please have your attorney make any inquiries on your behalf.

  Sincerely,

  Adrien Rush

  Trial Attorney

  Criminal Section, Civil Rights Division

  cc: FBI Special Agent Lee Mercer

  Johns sat at a folding table in his barely furnished house and drank Jack Daniels, then tequila, for the better part of five hours.

  His phone rang.

  “What?”

  “Lieutenant, there’s feds here at the station. They got a warrant to take most everything.”

  “How long they been—”

  “Hour, maybe a little more,” the man answered. “Where you at?”

  “Don’t matter,” Johns responded.

  He ignored a dozen more calls and finally threw the phone up against the wall, resulting in a shower of parts onto the stained carpet. In his bedroom, the safe sat in the corner. Its thick door lay wide open, revealing two firearms with serial numbers filed away, a large Ziploc bag of white powder wrapped with evidence tape, and three thick rolls of twenties. The sun disappeared beyond the line of pines in his backyard as he sat at the kitchen table glaring at the letter he could no longer read.

  . . .

  Bikers packed the Baked Skull most every night, and on weekends the crowd spilled out onto a concrete patio in the back. The area, bounded by a chain link fence designed to keep drinkers from fleeing bar debts and the consequences of sucker punches, soaked up spilled beer like a hard sponge. There were twice as many motorcycles as cars in the lot in front.

  Johns left his ride at the far end of the parking line. He walked with a drunk’s exaggerated deliberateness, like he was trying to make a choice with each step.

  The bar was stitched tight against the wall opposite the front entrance. A long cracked mirror provided an illusion of depth to the place. The crowd was a collection of long key chains and strong odors. Like streams of sun fading in a green ocean, the light from two overhead fixtures didn’t make it much past the multitude of hats on heads. A side room with three pool tables was lit better but shared the same smells as the bar.

  At eleven p.m., it was still early. People moved in and around the bar like water flowing along cracks in a slab. They gave the recent arrival some distance. Johns didn’t look like he wanted any company.

  “Fuckin’ federal government. Nothing but motherfuckers.”

  Johns demanded a beer and a chaser, then another. He scanned the bar trolls and snarled.

  “What you looking at?” he asked the bartender after he finished the second chaser.

  “Trying to figure. I ain’t seen you here before, and you ain’t paid for nothing yet.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I ain’t seen you before, that’s all.”

  “What you call me?”

  “Nothing. Just pay for yours.”

  “Another.” Johns rose up stiff. “No—give me that bottle!”

  “You don’t get the bottle. This is my place, not yours.”

  “I own you. I own all of you!”

  Johns suddenly lunged across the counter. When he missed the barkeep’s shirt, he ended hanging over the bar. The Glock in his back waistband was visible to everyone behind him.

  “He got a piece!” a woman yelled.

  The bartender grabbed his 9-mm Beretta from under the counter and stuck the muzzle in Johns’s face. The room quieted, with only a Black Sabbath song playing in the background.

  “Back up slow—”

  “You don’t know what I can do to you.”

  “You not hearing right.”

  “I’m the goddamn police!”

  “I don’t give a fuck who you are. You ain’t nothin’ in here right now but an asshole who needs to leave my bar.”

  The bartender pushed the muzzle into the man’s forehead, and Johns backed off the counter. The woman who saw the gun pulled it from Johns’s waist.

  “Empty it,” the bartender said to the woman. She turned the clip over to the bartender and handed the gun back to Johns.

  “I ain’t looking for more trouble, but—” The bartender waited for Johns to make the next move. “Get on, you’re done here.”

  Johns turned toward the front door. The crowd parted along his path. Two outsized men near the entrance followed him to his ride.

  “Adios, boys.” Johns stuck his middle finger in the air as he rode off.

  The motorcycle and its master seemed as one for a mile or two, but the cycle started resisting like a horse sensing danger. Johns didn’t downshift or lean into the curves, and he kept veering off the pavement, overcorrecting to the opposite shoulder.

  He opened up on the next straightaway, reaching 110 miles an hour, and left Lynwood behind. He blew past Dallas well before dawn and headed west. He paid cash for gas at stations along back roads and stopped for the night in Ciudad Juarez. He sobered up the next day on I-10 around Phoenix and felt the wind behind him in Kingman. By the time he arrived in Vegas, he was a federal fugitive.

  It lasted ten days. Johns slept during the day and gambled and screwed under the cover of darkness. He got arrested for a knife fight in a strip joint, and when he was booked, the jailer saw the open federal warrant. The Nevada prosecutor dismissed the local charges so the US marshals could transport him back to Lynwood to face the new federal indictment alleging conspiracy, civil rights violations, racketeering, and obstruction of justice. Detective Batiste was named as a co-defendant in the federal case.

  After his return to Lynwood, the magistrate judge determined Johns was a flight risk and a danger to the community, so he remained in custody to await trial. Because he was a former police officer, the marshals had him placed in a special administrative segregation unit on the third level of a state prison fifty miles from Lynwood. In protective custody, Johns ate his meals in his cell; he was escorted to the shower twice a week, and for recreation four times a week for an hour.

  47

  REVENGE

  Daniels patrolled the inside of his house. He started in one room, and once he’d finished walking its perimeter, he moved on to the next. He spent hours pacing about, pausing only for meals and sleep. He had lost thirty pounds in prison and now kept his hair cut close to the scalp. Put a uniform on him, and he could easily be mistaken for an injured vet home from war.

  He had been released from prison four weeks before, but his house felt like the cage he had been in for a year. His eyes darted about whenever the house creaked or the wind rattled the windows. For the first few days after his return to the house, Daniels’s wife kept her distance, but the house was small and he couldn’t sit still.

  At first, Daniels had been certain his release would be a cause for celebration within the Klavern. He had crowed on the courthouse steps that his cause was holy and it was time to get more justice. Yet when he contacted his once-obedient soldiers, no one would talk to him, much less meet. He’d beaten the oppressors but lost his legion. He couldn’t understand or accept that he was no longer the leader.

  “Frank, it’s in the past now,” his wife pleaded.

  “They’re all liars,” Daniels said. “The whole government’s corrupt.”

  “Of course they are.”

  “A year in hell, that’s what they did to me.”

  “You ended up winning.”

  Daniels grimaced. “What they done to me. They targeted me for being white,” he said. He was too ashamed to tell her everything that happened. “They done it until I got protected.”

  “You’re out now.”

  “Out to what?” Daniels’s face was red. “The Klan’s all scattered and scared.”

  “Forget the Klan. Just forget about it.”

  “I’m not forgettin’ nothin’,” Daniels said. “They done attacked me, and I’m gonna get them.”

  “Who?”

  “The fucker who put me in prison.”

  “How you plan to do t
hat?”

  “With a bullet.”

  “Frank, you’re bein’ goddamn stupid. Why you want to keep this up?”

  “You don’t understand nothin’.”

  “I understand all right, but you best remember you got family to tend to. The government stopped your disability while you was in prison. We got close to losing this place.”

  “That’s why I gotta do somethin’ now. If I don’t, the war’s over.”

  “What war? You put some crosses on lawns. That’s not a war,” she said. “That’s spitting into a tornado. Let someone else do it from here.”

  “Nobody else gonna do it. Bullock could, but he’s in prison. Son of a bitch. He shouldn’t have gone for his wife like that.”

  “He knows more than the others.”

  “He’ll get more time if he done talked ’bout it,” Daniels responded, reprising his role as a jailhouse lawyer. “He’ll keep quiet—”

  “I don’t care one damn about him.”

  “Woman, let me finish!”

  “My concern is this family,” she continued.

  “I still got purpose.”

  “You got obligations is what you got.”

  “One takes care of the other.”

  “So far it ain’t.”

  “It will. The problem is you got no confidence ’bout me.”

  “Frank, we been through a lot,” his wife said, shifting to a softer tone. “They did you wrong with the accident and them layoffs. You got a mark from prison. It weren’t easy, but we done got through it. We’ll do the same now.”

  “It ain’t about us no more,” Daniels declared. “I’m gonna get Rush, the traitor who caused this all.”

  He started to walk again, but now in tight circles.

  48

  CASUALTY OF TRUTH

  McClure and Mercer called Rush two months after Daniels’s release, when Lynwood’s collective indignation still was the talk of the town, although more commentary than accusation.

  “Come back,” they said in unison as they hovered over the speakerphone.