Jackpot

by Jason Ryan

  Julian “Doc” Pernell, who had already pleaded guilty with Barry “Ice Cream” Toombs to drug charges in Virginia, later commented on Uncle Sam’s appraisal abilities.

  “The government has a funny way of evaluating things. When they value pot, they value street value. When they evaluate [our] assets, they estimated at liquidation costs,” said Pernell. “In other words, I had a $10 million project in Hilton Head, South Carolina, which they sold for $3.6 million. I had a $5 million industrial complex they value at $80,000. The government had a funny way of evaluating.”

  The Jackpot case fell into the judicial lap of the famously eventempered and uniquely named Falcon Black Hawkins Jr., who had been appointed to the federal bench four years earlier following a nomination from his former law partner, U.S. Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina. Although his temperament and Democratic leanings boded well for the defendants, his background was vastly different from many of the men he’d soon judge. The gentlemen smugglers had muddled through an extended youth, smoking pot aboard luxury sailboats and making vast amounts of money. Hawkins had joined the military at age seventeen and served in World War II, sending paychecks home to his widowed mother and four younger siblings. When he returned home, he attended the Citadel while working nights in the Charleston Naval shipyard to support his own wife and family.

  Born in 1927, he was the son of a millworker and housemaker in North Charleston, South Carolina, and described his childhood during the Great Depression as unremarkable. Known as FB for much of his youth, Hawkins enjoyed hunting excursions to Hellhole Swamp and Four Holes Swamp in nearby Berkeley County, becoming a crack shot. In 1944 he joined the Merchant Marines, then the Army, which paid for him to briefly attend the University of Mississippi before calling him into service as the war intensified. He sent his military paychecks home to supplement Social Security benefits his mother received following his father’s premature death.

  After the war Hawkins received one of the first electronics apprenticeships offered by the Navy, learning about radios, radar, and sonar at the Charleston Naval Shipyard. He worked at the shipyard for twelve years, earned his degree from the Citadel, married, and started his own family. He’d be forever grateful to the federal government for the opportunities and assistance it provided his family, making him a lifelong Democrat and supportive of social programs.

  Hawkins was more than thirty years old when he began law school at the University of South Carolina, moving his wife and three children to Columbia. He took courses over the summers to finish six months early, graduating in 1963. He enjoyed his time at South Carolina’s only law school, forging strong relationships with the faculty and fellow students while excelling academically. Not only did he love law, but he was “crazy about it, to tell you the truth.”

  Hawkins’s passion was rewarded soon after graduation. Before he passed the South Carolina bar, he was asked by Hollings to join his Charleston firm. Hollings had just finished a term as governor and was smarting from a loss to Olin D. Johnston, whom he had challenged for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. Before offering a job to Hawkins, Hollings had consulted with the dean of the law school, seeking a candidate who made good grades, but who was not at the top of the class. Hollings wanted a workhorse, not someone bookish, and he was impressed at how Hawkins, a military veteran, had put himself through school while working to feed his siblings and own family.

  “He was one of the smartest fellows, most realistic, long on common sense, good judgment,” says Hollings, who ribbed his new hire about the way he appeared in law school pictures. “I saw his picture, and he looked like he needed a lawyer. He looked like someone the FBI wanted.”

  Despite the jab, and having to constantly endure Hollings’s stubborn personality, Hawkins didn’t forget who courted whom.

  “I don’t say this in any kind of bragging sort of way, but he sent for me,” Hawkins once remarked. “I didn’t send for him.”

  Hollings and Hawkins, operating from their office on Broad Street in downtown Charleston, were not shy about handling a variety of high-profile criminal, antitrust, and business cases. The men also took on lucrative work helping developers create some of Charleston’s first subdivisions and representing South Carolina’s Piggly Wiggly grocery chain. The men put in long hours and required the same of their longtime secretary, Patty Kasell, who ultimately followed Hawkins to the bench.

  “[Hollings] kind of believed in working about sixteen hours a day, so that’s about what we worked,” said Hawkins. “That was a little bit of a shocker for my wife when I started practicing, that you aren’t ever home, all you did was practice.”

  When Hollings won election to the U.S. Senate in 1966, Hawkins assumed more of the cases and slowly grew the firm. When an opening on the federal bench came along during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, he pounced on it, knowing the support of Hollings was critical to secure the position. He quickly earned a reputation as the South Carolina judge with the best judicial temperament, topping legal surveys conducted each year. Hawkins said he preferred letting lawyers try their cases without his interference, and Kasell remembers him banging his gavel only once. Hawkins was not unaware of his unusually serene disposition. “I don’t get upset or excited hardly over anything. Every now and then. But it’s got to be something pretty bad to cause me to get off my even plane,” he said. “My philosophy … is be as fair as you can with the circumstance, and hope for the best. That’s about the way I’ve labored.”

  Hawkins, though, was as sensitive as he was composed. Those tried before him recall him gazing out courtroom windows during testimony, but with an ear cocked toward the stand, paying close attention. He approached the sentencing of convicted defendants with the greatest reluctance, but feeling bound to punish as a duty that he accepted by oath. Such decisions weighed heavily on the judge’s heart.

  “Usually, if it was a bad one, I’d say, ‘Let’s leave him alone for a few minutes,’ ” says Kasell. “He’d settle down.”

  Since Hawkins ascended to the bench at a time when marijuana smuggling was particularly popular and brazen in South Carolina, he handled a number of drug cases during his early years on the bench. In his comments during sentencing hearings, Hawkins repeatedly struggled to understand why so many educated men from seemingly upstanding families embarked on journeys explicitly designed to break the law. He expressed a certain amount of disbelief that fun and money would ever be sought, and repeatedly achieved, at the expense of abiding the laws of the United States.

  There was a disconnect between Hawkins and the drug defendants who came before him, as the smugglers rebelled against the assorted institutions the judge revered. Hawkins worked nights to pay his way through college, while the smugglers, by and large, dropped out of school, forfeiting the tuition paid by doting parents. Hawkins served in World War II, a conflict the country entered with a strong moral and retaliatory imperative. Many smugglers avoided Vietnam, and those who did serve were shaken by the war. Its purposeless chaos and killing contributed to personal undoing and steered its discharged soldiers into danger and drugs back home. Government, politics, and the American legal system were similarly embraced and opposed. For Hawkins such things were at the core of his life. The smugglers wanted to be left alone by the rules and theater that saturated those institutions.

  When it came to marijuana, its pleasures were no doubt alien to Hawkins, but its potential to pervert the American dream was plain, evidenced by the apologies, regret, and pleas for mercy he so often heard in his courtroom from convicted drug defendants. Marijuana did not spur hard work and create strong families and communities, but instead seemed to go hand in hand with the increasing amounts of self-absorption and lust for wealth that President Carter, a fellow southern Democrat, outlined in his speech pinpointing American malaise.

  Eight months before being assigned the Jackpot cases, in October 1982, in the midst of the operation’s initial wave of property seizures, Hawkins sentenced six men on drug smug
gling charges, all of them from out of state and disassociated from South Carolina’s gentlemen smugglers. Hawkins seemed fatigued having to handle another drug case, saying he’d lost track of how many defendants had come before him on similar charges.

  “There’s really nothing much to say. I ought to just go ahead and sentence you. But my nature won’t let me do that in the hope that somebody out there hears about it and repeats it and prevents some other person from doing harm to their family, their country, what you fellas are doing … [I]f you bring drugs into this district and get caught, there will be a period of incarceration.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Since the colonial era in Charleston, anyone with sense—and money—changed households come summertime. At the close of the eighteenth century, some wealthy South Carolinians left to tour Europe or moved from coastal plantation houses to grand downtown mansions when the temperature rose, leaving their slave labor behind for the season. In the city, planters and their families enjoyed summer breezes off the harbor and minimized their risk of catching malaria or yellow fever, which festered in the mosquito-filled marshes and swamps on their estates. But the breeze only helped so much. Downtown living was a hot and humid affair, with city streets and pedestrians alike baked by the sun. To step outside was to be bathed in sweat.

  In the nineteenth century, Charleston’s well-to-do dodged the heat by heading inland to the Blue Ridge Mountains in western North Carolina. There, rushing rivers, tall forests, and a higher elevation made for pleasant summers. Flat Rock, North Carolina, became so popular with the Low-Country elite that its seasonal residents knew it as the “Little Charleston of the Mountains.” Christopher Memminger, a Charleston lawyer and politician who served as secretary of the treasury for the Confederacy, kept a summer home in Flat Rock. Wade Hampton III, a fabulously wealthy planter, Confederate officer, South Carolina governor, and U.S. senator, kept a hunting retreat and plantation in nearby Cashiers, North Carolina.

  Many of the twentieth century’s gentlemen smugglers had similar means to escape the summer heat, but in August 1983 ten men were obligated to stay in Charleston as defendants in the first Operation Jackpot trial, all alleged members of a smuggling ring headed by Barry “Flash” Foy and his sidekick, Tom “Rolex” Rhoad. On the first of the month, the defendants, their lawyers, and a slew of government agents, prosecutors, and witnesses reluctantly donned suits in the ninetydegree weather and headed to the tenth floor of the Summerall Building, which overlooked the Ashley River. Because the federal courthouse on Broad Street was being renovated, temporary courtrooms had been created on the top floor of the tall building, and space was tight. Among the defendants crammed into a courtroom were Skip Sanders, whose family owned West Bank plantation on Edisto Island; Kenny Gunn, friend and frequent sailing partner of Christy Campbell; and Kenny Thomas, the captain of the shrimp boat Gulf Princess II, which, three years earlier, had been stopped by the Coast Guard after an offload and found with a mere seventeen grams of pot aboard—pot that the smuggler steadfastly maintains was planted by law enforcement agents after he and his crew had scrubbed the boat clean.

  The first Jackpot trial was only the latest legal hassle for Thomas. Since his arrest on the shrimp boat, Thomas had been put behind bars twice. His first stint was a year in jail after refusing to testify in front of a grand jury regarding the Gulf Princess II, which had successfully unloaded eighteen thousand pounds of pot to Foy in August 1980. The second time was after being convicted for his role on that smuggling boat and receiving a ten-year sentence. Now he faced fresh non–Gulf Princess charges in the Jackpot trial. As before, he refused to plead guilty or cut a deal with the government.

  Notably absent from the makeshift courtroom were Foy and Rhoad, the two alleged kingpins. Eleven other men were missing, as well, regarded by the government as fugitives. Defense lawyers wasted little time mentioning to the jury that half the men indicted by the government, including those with the most substantial charges, were on the loose. The government had gathered, they argued, a group of inconsequential, if not completely innocent, men. Beaufort lawyer Jim Moss marveled at how the government could accuse his two clients of participating in a nearly decade-long global conspiracy by allegedly helping to smuggle for one day. In the forty-one-page indictment, Moss said, some defendants were mentioned only in a single sentence or single paragraph. Orlando-based lawyer Meredith Cohen and other attorneys complained, too, about how their clients were being associated with those on the lam.

  “I call this case the tip of the iceberg,” said Cohen, who represented Beaufort resident Larry McCall. “These people that have not been caught are the rest of the iceberg.”

  The government disagreed.

  “These aren’t the little men,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Bart Daniel. “These are not just nickel-and-dime drug hustlers. Little men haven’t made hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

  For Daniel and his fellow prosecutors, perhaps more trying than the shortage of high-profile defendants was the lack of physical evidence tying the defendants to their alleged crimes. The Operation Jackpot task force had excelled at making a case using financial data and informants’ grand jury testimony, but that information was compelling only to a point. No drugs had been seized as part of Operation Jackpot, and no smugglers had been caught red-handed. Prosecutors were being forced to try a major drug case involving an alleged 160,000 pounds of marijuana and 30,000 pounds of hashish, but could present the jury with no drugs. As Cohen pointed out: “They don’t have ten thousand pounds, they don’t have a pound, they don’t have one gram.”

  To compensate for these weaknesses in their case, the government called twenty-six witnesses, including Virginia kingpin Julian “Doc” Pernell. In significant detail Pernell told the jury how he and his partner, Barry “Ice Cream” Toombs, had successfully completed forty-five of fifty-two attempted smuggling ventures, unloading many marijuana shipments on the South Carolina coast. He explained how he considered himself the president of a corporation and how he had separate lieutenants in charge of purchasing boats, finding isolated off-load spots, and operating stash houses. He detailed how he laundered money, how he paid off a corrupt prosecutor in Key West, and how he fled to Costa Rica. Though he spoke often of his work with Foy, at no point did Pernell mention working with any of the defendants in the courtroom, nor could he identify them. Through cross-examination, defense lawyers made sure this was clear to the jury.

  After Pernell, prosecutors called Toombs, who shared stories of a shrimp boat that sank in a storm off Florida with twenty-five thousand pounds of pot and how its crew was rescued by a passing oil tanker. He mentioned how German bank robbers piloted one potladen ship, and how he once sold a briefcase with a hidden compartment to Rhoad for $1,500. It could hide a kilo of cocaine, he said, or $100,000. Defense attorneys pounced on the issue of relevancy.

  “Your Honor, I again note my objection,” said Moss. “This hasn’t anything to do with this case.”

  If Pernell and Toombs did not personally know the men on trial, it was no matter. They were damn good tour guides of America’s marijuana underworld, the prosecutors’ logic went, and their unfamiliarity with defendants could be seen as an indication of just how sprawling a network of smugglers existed and the severity of South Carolina’s drug problem. In short order the jury was introduced to the brazen escapades, startling amounts of money, and utter disregard for law that were standard components of the drug smuggling trade. Surely, the prosecutors figured, such a world would be sufficiently shocking to the students, teachers, nurse, welfare worker, and others that comprised the twelve-person jury, two-thirds of which was female.

  Following the testimony of Pernell and Toombs, prosecutors called witnesses from South Carolina, many of whom were targets of Operation Jackpot who had agreed to plead guilty to assorted charges and testify in exchange for lesser punishment. These eyewitnesses, who claimed to have worked side-by-side with many of the defendants, posed their own challenges for
the prosecutors, and the defense attorneys sought to throw doubt on their testimony every way they could. Like Toombs and Pernell, these witnesses were selfadmitted criminals, the defense attorneys said, with suspicious motivations and compromised credibility. They were willing to spout a government-friendly version of events, the defense lawyers added, in order to shave time off their sentences. Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel could only shrug his shoulders and plead to the jury that “there weren’t any nuns or preachers at those off-load sites late at night.”

  That the government’s witnesses were mere pawns or puppets, eager to recite memories conducive to the government’s case, as the defense claimed, was misleading. To the government’s frustration, many of the witnesses in the first Jackpot trial were particularly unreliable, either unwilling or unable to identify their alleged coconspirators who sat in the courtroom. Some witnesses had been offered money not to make an identification. Others tried to walk a fine line when testifying, upholding their commitment to the government by taking the stand, but preserving loyalty to their fellow smugglers and friends by feigning an inability to recognize defendants. And some witnesses, no matter how earnest, could legitimately not identify a defendant, at least not with 100 percent certainty. Oftentimes they had met a defendant only briefly, among a group of strangers who gathered at night on marsh banks, their faces obscured by darkness. In the years since their meeting, the defendant could lose or gain weight, change his facial hair and hairstyle, age, and likely be dressed much differently.