by Ed Bethune
We rented a three-bedroom house in Jonesboro and settled in just in time for Lana to give birth on May 21, 1963, to our second child, Samuel McBride Bethune. A month later, I learned that a young lawyer in Pocahontas, Paul K. Lewis, was going to give up his job as deputy prosecuting attorney for Randolph County and close down his private practice. I cannot begin to describe the magnetism I felt when I learned of the opening. Pocahontas was my rock, my salvation place. It was a mysterious mix of memories and lessons learned. Once again, I needed what Pocahontas had to offer.
Paul was going into the Air Force to make a career as a military lawyer. He had been a few years ahead of me at Pocahontas High School, but I knew him well enough to give him a call to see if I might take over his practice and get the job as deputy prosecutor. He was delighted because, if it worked out, he hoped to sell me his law books. He called W. E. “Wid” Billingsley, the prosecuting attorney to see if Wid would be interested in giving me the deputy job. Wid said he would like to meet me, so I drove to his home in Melbourne, and after a fun interview, he told me the job was mine. It only paid $150 a month, but that would cover the rent and utilities for my private office. The deputy job would give me some exposure and that would lead to a few private legal cases. I made a deal with Paul to take over his practice. He sold me his books for a good price and gave me a couple of cases he was working on, but could not finish. I thanked Herbert McAdams for the opportunity he gave me, but told him I wanted to practice law—not be a trust officer. He understood. We moved out of the rent house we had lived in for less than four months and moved into a two-story rent house in Pocahontas.
After Lana completed her degree, she got a job teaching English at Pocahontas High School. The students loved her. We found a wonderful woman who came to our house to keep the kids. Things were looking up but we had a long way to go.
I dug into the practice of law. Wid Billingsley came to the first session of court in Randolph County after my appointment and told me we were going to try a criminal case. It was a slam-dunk larceny case, but it was my first jury trial and I did not want to screw it up. We got a conviction, but the only thing I remember is that I had a bad case of stage fright. After that first trial, I got a lot of experience prosecuting lesser offenses in Pocahontas Municipal Court. Eventually I gained confidence and began to feel like a real lawyer, but I had an important lesson to learn that would serve me well in the years to come.
My most frequent opponent was A. A. Robinson, an old lawyer who had never been to a real law school. He had a degree hanging on the wall of his office, but it was from a diploma mill in East Tennessee, and I learned later that A.A. passed the bar by reading the law under the supervision of another lawyer. That was a common way to become a lawyer in the old days. I made the mistake of thinking I was better than A.A. and that I could overwhelm him with raw intelligence and the book learning I got at the University of Arkansas Law School. He proved to be a tough customer, and it always made me mad when the judge would rule for him, which was often. “Double-A” was cleaning my clock so often that it was embarrassing. The word was getting around town. I had to do something so I asked the judge, George Steimel, an eighty-year-old man with a droopy, drippy eye, why Double-A was winning and I was losing. He said, “Eddie, you get mad and then Allen has you where he wants you. He gets your goat and you cannot think when you are mad.” I resisted this unwelcome information, but Judge Steimel pushed on with his advice and wound up with a short sentence that I have always remembered, “You cannot get a lawyer mad—because if he is mad, he is not a lawyer.” I took his advice, learned to control my emotions and started winning almost every case I had with Allen and I quit calling him Double A. He had earned my respect.
My private practice was slow to develop. It is hard for a young lawyer to get rid of the schoolboy aroma and it is particularly hard in a town where everyone best remembers you as Eddie, the high school football star. In my first year, I earned more fees for preparing income tax returns than I did for doing real legal work. The basic charge was $5 for preparing a personal tax return and $7.50 for a farm return. Of course, I charged more if the return was complicated or if I had to compile the basic records before starting the return. Many of my tax return clients would bring in two shoeboxes. One box would be marked “In” and the other “Out.” That was the extent of record keeping for a typical tax return client. They were counting on me to go through a year’s worth of receipts, pay stubs, bills, and cancelled checks so that we could complete their returns. It was hard work, but the meager fees I earned paid my overhead and left a little for me to take home.
I had an instructive experience shortly after opening up my law office. An old woman came in to see if I could prepare a deed for her. I said I could, but she was not so sure about it. She looked at me and said, “You look awfully young, are you sure you can write a deed that will be good?” It hurt my feelings, but I needed the $5 fee that was standard for preparation of a warranty deed, so I replied, “Yes Mam, I can do it.” I pointed to the diplomas hanging on the wall behind me and showed her my law license. I was sure that would do the trick, but she did not look convinced. She was about to leave when I said, “The $5 fee includes notarizing your signature.” She said, “Are you a notary public?” I said yes and she said, “Well, why didn’t you say so?” That is all she needed to know. It did not matter that I had spent three years in law school or that I had passed the bar. What resonated with her was my status as a notary public, a title any nonfelon could have gotten by buying a seal and paying a $10 license fee to the state of Arkansas. It was another good lesson for an overly proud young lawyer.
14
SPECIAL AGENT OF THE FBI
FBI agents are some of the finest people you
will find any place in the country or the world, and
I’m lucky to have the opportunity to work with them.
Robert Mueller, Director of the FBI
Bill Rapert was sheriff of Randolph County during my time as deputy prosecuting attorney. He was a first class law enforcement officer, and he took a special interest in me. He helped me get started in my private practice and in my role as deputy prosecutor. One day when we were visiting, Special Agent Milford Runnels of the Federal Bureau of Investigation came into the sheriff’s office. Bill and Milford got along well, which is not always the case with federal and local law enforcement officers. I liked Milford immediately and over the next year, we had many chances to talk about the FBI. I had heard a recruiting pitch about the Bureau when I was in law school and, of course, I had seen the Jimmy Stewart movie, The FBI Story. Milford thought I would be a good FBI agent and he brought it up every time we met. At first I had no interest, but Lana and I started to talk about it. My law practice was not developing as well as we had hoped, and we were a little restless living in Pocahontas. We knew we would have to move out of state if I joined the Bureau, but the starting salary of $9,600 per annum was attractive and I knew that I would like the work. Another factor was the similarity between the FBI and the U. S. Marine Corps. Both are tight-knit, demanding organizations with a high degree of esprit de corps. It was a natural fit for me, so in early June of 1964 I filled out an application to be a special agent of the FBI and gave it and a photograph of myself to Milford. He was pleased, but reminded me that the FBI only selects a few applicants and that I should not let my hopes get too high.
Milford called me a couple of weeks later and told me that I needed to go to Little Rock for a written test and an interview with the special agent in charge of the Little Rock Field Office of the FBI. It was a promising development and if I did well the FBI would do a full-field investigation to determine my character, associates, reputation, and loyalty to the United States of America. I had gone through such an investigation when I was in the Marine Corps because I needed a top-secret clearance for the work I was doing as an intelligence specialist. For that reason, I felt I would easily pass the background investigation. Chances were looking up that the FBI would offer me a posit
ion as a special agent.
In July of 1964, Milford came to my law office and said things were looking good. He had just received a teletype from FBI Headquarters in Washington with an important investigative lead for Special Agent Milford Runnels. The terse message concerned my application. It said, “Determine if applicant is amenable to a more conventional hairstyle.” Milford was breaking up with laughter. He said I was in, but I had to get rid of my crew cut. I told him to tell the Bureau that I was amenable to a more conventional hairstyle. Two days later, I got a personal letter from Director J. Edgar Hoover offering me a GS-10 position as a special agent of the FBI and directing me to report to Headquarters, FBI in Washington, D. C. on Monday, September 14, 1964. I would join a class of new agents, and if I satisfactorily completed the fourteen-week course of training, I would be a special agent of the FBI.
Lana and I had already discussed the need for me to go to Washington for the training period. Milford made it clear that I would not know until the last week of training where the Bureau would send me for my first office of assignment. It did not make sense for us to move the kids or for Lana to quit her teaching job. The best plan was for me to go to Washington, D.C., complete the training, and then we could move as a family to my first office of assignment.
On Friday, September 11, 1964, Lana drove me to Hoxie, Arkansas where, to save money, I caught a bus that would take me to D.C. We had never been apart for more than a day since we got married in 1959, and now we had two little children. It was a painful goodbye followed by a long, overnight bus trip, but I was excited to begin a new chapter in my life. I have always relished the burst of new energy that comes from change. I arrived in D. C. at 2:00 a.m. Sunday morning and checked into the old Harrington Hotel near FBI Headquarters. The next morning I reported to the Old Post Office Building to begin my training, most of which would be at the FBI Training Center on the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia.
The training of a new agent is intense, but it was relatively easy for me because it had been only seven years since I was on active duty in the Marine Corps. I knew how to survive in a militaristic environment, I had background as a prosecutor, I was in good physical condition, and I knew a lot about the weapons and the martial arts maneuvers we would use as FBI agents. Being on the Marine Corps base at Quantico gave me a good feeling and brought back memories of my time in the Corps. I knew I would sail through the training, and I did.
Most of my twenty-five classmates in new agents class (NAC-4) had degrees from law school or degrees with an emphasis in accounting. A few had studied other disciplines, but all of those new agents had previous experience in law enforcement or service as an officer in the military. There were no women in my class, and no blacks.
We studied criminal law and procedure and learned the latest investigative techniques. We learned how to take, read, and classify fingerprints. There were classes to explain the workings of the FBI Laboratory and the importance of collecting and preserving physical evidence. We learned the art of interviewing and reporting, with precision, what a witness or suspect said. Most importantly, we learned to shoot a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson Police Special revolver, the pistol we would carry in our everyday work, and when we shot our qualifying round I almost made a perfect score (one of my fifty shots was just a half-inch out of the best part of the target). Near the end of our training, we had a personal meeting with Director J. Edgar Hoover and spent a week in the Washington, D.C. field office working with veteran agents.
On the firing range, FBI Training
Academy, Quantico, Virginia. 1964.
Lana and I wrote letters to each other almost every day, and I would call her when I had free time and access to a pay telephone. She was busy with the kids and teaching high school English, but we longed to see one another. Midway through my training Lana flew to Washington to visit. We got a room at the run-down Willard Hotel where the rooms were not expensive. It was Lana’s first trip to Washington, D. C. and we had a great weekend. A few weeks later, my classmates and I got our credentials and graduated. We were now full-fledged special agents of the FBI. On December 18, one day before my twenty-ninth birthday, I headed home to Arkansas. A few days later, we piled Paige and Sam into our Volkswagen Beetle and hit the road for a long drive from Pocahontas to Indianapolis, Indiana, my first office of assignment.
We spent a couple of nights in a motel, and by the time our furniture and belongings arrived, we had located a small, three-bedroom rent house. We moved in around 2:00 p.m. on December 24, 1964. We shoved the furniture into place, made up the beds, and got the children settled. It was dark before we had time to think about getting a Christmas tree and presents for the children so we took turns going to nearby stores, racing up and down the aisles grabbing toys and putting them into the shopping basket. Miraculously, by 10:00 p.m. we had our tree decorated and got the kids in bed. Then Lana and I put the toys and presents under the tree and lay down to rest. The children were up early on Christmas morning and so were we. It remains one of our favorite Christmas days.
My first month on the job in Indianapolis was quite an experience. I was a rookie and the special agent in charge assigned me to a squad working criminal matters. I worked with a senior agent for a while, but soon I learned how to get a bureau car from the motor pool and go out on my own to work leads assigned to me.
On the first day that I worked on my own, the radio operator notified all cars of a bank robbery in a little town outside Indianapolis. I cannot remember the name of the town, but it had less than 5,000 people. When I arrived on the scene, the case agent assigned me to do a neighborhood investigation.
Doing a neighborhood—knocking on doors to see if anyone has seen anything—is a menial but important task given to rookie agents. I began with gusto hoping that I would turn up some valuable information that would lead to the identification of the robbers. I found nothing, but I learned an important lesson about America. Indiana, particularly its rural areas, is the heartland of this great country. When I knocked on a door in that little town, I would show my credentials to whoever came to the door and say, “FBI.” Without fail the person who opened the door would say, “Oh, how can I help? What can I do? What do you need?” In every instance, people were friendly and willing to support the FBI. I could have been in Pocahontas or any small Arkansas town where people care about their community and want to do their part.
A year later, after my assignment to Newark, New Jersey, I was working a bank robbery. I was again doing the neighborhood investigation, but this time I was in Jersey City going into brownstone walk-up apartment buildings. When I knocked on an apartment door, the occupant would open it, but only as wide as the security chains would allow. I would show my credentials to the eyeball peeping out at me and say in a loud strong voice, “FBI!” The voice of the eyeball would say, “So?” and slam the door shut.
There is a huge difference between the heartland of America and the inner cities of megalopolis, and the difference is attitude. The people in the inner cities practice anonymity to a fault. They have lost, if they ever had it, the feeling that they are part of a community and that they have a responsibility to help their neighbors. It is sad, but it is true, and it is a problem for our nation.
My first scary moment with an armed and dangerous subject came in my first days in the Indianapolis office. Our squad supervisor sent us out to arrest a man on a warrant for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution for murder. He was a little over six feet tall and well put together. By the time we cornered him, he was in an absolute rage and brandishing a knife. After some tense moments he relented, and we got the handcuffs on him. We took him back to headquarters, and he calmed down enough so that the supervisor said we could take the handcuffs off and get his fingerprints. That was a mistake. As soon as the cuffs were off his wrists, he took off. We tackled him but he fought like a tiger. It took four of us to subdue the man, but as we were wrestling him into submission, he kept trying to get his hands on our weapons, wh
ich were still in our holsters. It was a dumb mistake. We should have disarmed and posted an armed agent to cover us when we took the cuffs off the man. I never made that mistake again. If he had gotten his hands on one of our pistols, the scuffle could have turned into a nightmare.
We were not in Indianapolis long. In my second month, the Bureau transferred me to the Hammond, Indiana resident agency. Hammond is a suburb of Chicago, and the work there involved organized crime, gambling, and prostitution. We rented a small house in Schererville, Indiana, a little town ten miles south of Hammond. It was a fun community. The townspeople celebrated Oktoberfest, a new experience for us.
We also had another new experience. Lana was in our front yard talking to a neighbor and forgot that she had left a skillet full of tatertots frying in boiling oil. In her defense, she had left the house to look for our three-year-old daughter, Paige, who had gone missing. The firefighters put out the fire in record time but it took a month to get the smell of smoke out of our furniture and clothing. Thankfully, our neighbors helped us and the owner of the property had insurance that paid for the cleanup and repairs. Again, we learned the advantages of living in the heartland of America where neighbors care about neighbors.
In early November of 1965, I received orders to report to Newark, New Jersey. We celebrated Christmas, stored our furniture, and Lana, Paige, and Sam caught a train for Arkansas where they would stay with Lana’s folks until I could find suitable housing in New Jersey. I drove the VW to Newark and rented a room in an old house close to the FBI office. It was cheap and since I was an armed FBI agent, it worked as a temporary residence, but it was clear that I could not bring the family to New Jersey until I found a safer neighborhood well away from Newark.
It took a month, but I finally located a rent house in Middlebush, New Jersey. It was a crummy house but it was safe and cheap. It was also close to the Pennsylvania Railroad commuter line that I would take to and from work in Newark. My commute took an hour and five minutes each way, a new experience for a country boy from Arkansas. Lana got a job teaching English at a school in Piscataway. She needed the VW to take the kids to nursery school and get back and forth to her job. I needed a car to get to the train station, so I bought an old Ford, much like Old Black, the car we had had in law school. I paid $100 for it. It was blue and pockmarked with rust holes, some the size of golf balls. We had to park it on the street so we told the neighbors that I needed such a car in my work as an FBI agent. I am not sure they bought our story, but they never complained. One of the neighbor children used to say the holes were bullet holes, so I imagine their parents used that line to explain the presence of such an eyesore.