Praise for John Hailman’s Thomas Jefferson on Wine
“A fascinating look at our third president
and the evolution of his lifelong love of wine.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“The book is a must for anyone interested in both
the favorite son of Virginia and the fruit of the vine.
Those who love both should read it twice.”
—The Washington Times
“Exhaustively researched and entertaining.”
—City Journal, New York
“If your idea of a good evening is sitting down to a Simon Schama
history program with a bottle of claret, then this is the book for you.”
—Decanter Magazine, London
“John Hailman brings out the most epicurean side
of the most celebrated of American Francophiles.”
—The Figaro International, Paris
“Hailman has done an exhaustive study and provided
a valuable window into who Jefferson really was.”
—The Wine Spectator
“A fascinating exploration of the early days of the modern global
wine trade as experienced by one of the most significant figures
in United States history. Hailman has produced an admirable work
portraying Jefferson in vivid complexity while also illuminating
the joys and frustration of the eighteenth-century wine-lover.”
—Gastronomica, The Journal of Wine & Culture
“Hailman really knows his wines.”
—New York Times Book Review
From MIDNIGHT to GUNTOWN
From MIDNIGHT to GUNTOWN
True Crime Stories from a Federal Prosecutor in Mississippi
John Hailman
University Press of Mississippi / Jackson
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member
of the Association of American University Presses.
All photographs courtesy of the author, unless otherwise noted
Copyright © 2013 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2013
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hailman, John.
From midnight to guntown : true crime stories from a federal
prosecutor in Mississippi / John Hailman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61703-800-6 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-61703-801-3
(ebook) 1. Crime—Mississippi—History. 2. Criminals—
Mississippi—History. I. Title.
HV6793.M7H35 2013
364.1092’2762—dc23 2012044379
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
This book is dedicated to
Wayne Tichenor
Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation
First Lieutenant, United States Marine Corps, Vietnam
The Best Investigator I Ever Met
My Partner in Over 100 Cases
Taken from Us Too Young by Lou Gehrig’s Disease
Charles Overby
Friend and Mentor
CEO of the Freedom Forum and Newseum of Washington, D.C.
And the Overby Center at Ole Miss
Without Charles, This Book Would Not Exist
To the Women in my life:
Regan McGrew Hailman, my loyal wife of 44 years; and to Our Daughters
Dr. Allison Hailman Doyle, Lt. & Sr. Medical Officer, U.S. Navy
Lydia Hailman King, French Teacher extraordinaire
And to Our Beautiful Granddaughter,
Abbey McGrew Doyle
Smart as a Whip and Quick as a Cat
Our Hope for the Future.
The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy but of a sovereignty whose obligation is to govern impartially, and is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all, and whose interest in a criminal prosecution is not that he shall win a case, but that justice shall be done
As such he is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the twofold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape nor innocence suffer. He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor; indeed, he should do so. But while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use legitimate means to bring about a just one.
—Mr. Justice Sutherland in Berger v. U.S., 295 U.S. 78 at 84 (1935)
Contents
Preface
Common Law Enforcement Abbreviations and Acronyms
Prologue: The Making of a Career Prosecutor
Courtroom Rat in Paris and London
New Orleans
Law Clerk
Life with a Federal Judge
Georgetown Law School
Senator Stennis
Washington Lawyer
1. Bank Robbers I’ve Known
My Favorite Crime
Peacelover Shabazz: The Nation of Islam Comes to Greenville
Sorry about That Bum Rap, Johnny Paul
A Running Robber: George of the Swamp
A Teller’s Life Is Saved by Robber Incompetence
No Further Questions in Mound Bayou
A Preacher in a Volvo Robs an Oxford Bank
Full-Service Bankers
At Last a Professional: Presidential Mask Bank Robber Caught in Our District
Try It Again, Frank
Thunder Eagle Ghost Dancer Launders His Loot
A Stuttering Bank Robber
Another Aberdeen Soap Opera and a Pair of Girbaud Jeans
You Busy This Weekend?
Would You Like Biscuits with That?
The Honey Bun Bandit
2. Corruption in Positions of Trust: Lawyers, Judges, Supervisors, Sheriffs
Introduction
Federal versus State Prosecution
Harvey Hamilton: The Old Peg-Legged Sheriff Meets RICO
Jury Tampering 101: A Sheriff Solicits Help from U.S. Senator James O. “Big Jim” Eastland
“Will Renfro, You Can’t Hit an FBI Man!”
John Grisham Sr. and the Wobbly Wagon
Operation Pretense: We Become “Mississippi’s Untouchables”
Courtroom Observers Attend the Trial of a Black Supervisor
Opposing Former Chief Judge J. P. Coleman before His Own Court
The Chicken House Caper
“It’s Hard to Tell the Truth When There’s So Much Truth to Tell”
A Delta Lawyer
A Little Bitta Justice
The Mississippi Beef Plant Fiasco: Slaughterhouse for Taxpayers
Dickie Scruggs: The Dark Side of Robin Hood Is Revealed When His Merry Men Sue for a Bigger Share of the Loot
3. Civil Rights and Civil Wrongs
Introduction
A High Sheriff Goes Wild
Burning Crosses in the Night
Stopping the Arsons of Black Churches
The Other Jake Gibbs
Lanny “Junior” Cummings, Mesomorph
Getting the Blues on Parchman Farm
Coldest Case of All: Reopening the Murder of Emmett Till and What We Learned
4. Killers and Wannabes
Introduction
The Shooting of Senator John Stennis
The Ku Klux Klan Tries to Murder Charles Evers, Brother of Medgar
The Lampkin Brothers: I’m Assaulted in Chambers
“Riverboat” Gai
nes
Jerry and Terry, the Hit Man Twins
Mississippian Jeff Fort Becomes the Angel of Fear, Leader of the El Rukns, Chicago’s Most Dangerous Gang since Al Capone
The Shaw Boys Contract to Have a Judge Killed
Protected Witnesses: Marion Albert “Mad Dog” Pruett
Linda Leedom and the Chinese Wall
Killing the Killer of Sheriff Harold Ray Presley
The Tohills of Beaumont
Murder by Moonlight: The Natchez Trace Sniper
5. Faraway Places with Strange-Sounding Names: The Age of Terror
Introduction
Alice El-Sarji: “Not without My Daughters,” an International Parental Kidnapping
An Honorable Terrorist: Abdel Ashqar Finances Hamas through Oxford Banks
The Oxford Anthrax Scare
CSI Oxford: A Godfather from Yemen Sets Up Shop in Our District
A Reluctant Terrorist: Adnan “Captain Joe” Awad
Notes
Bibliography of Related Readings
Acknowledgments
Index
Preface
The idea for this book came from a good source: singer/songwriter Willie Nelson. Several years ago, I was attending a seminar in Austin, Texas, when my old friend and fellow prosecutor, James Tucker, said, “Meet me at the back door of the hotel at precisely 6:00 P.M., and don’t tell anyone where we’re going.” The second part was easy—I had no idea where we were going. At the appointed hour, James ushered me into his rental car with two other old friends: Lee Radek, chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, and Marshall Jarrett, head of the Office of Professional Responsibility, the dreaded ethics watchdog of DOJ.
Was I in trouble? Somehow I didn’t think so. James said, “We’re headed to Willie Nelson’s ranch for a barbecue. My daughter married Willie’s nephew.” It was a memorable evening. Willie and his nephew played speed chess on a lighted board while we ate barbecue under the stars and his sister and his wife and their two little boys kept things lively. One thing did worry me at first: How would Willie Nelson feel about being surrounded by Feds after his well-publicized troubles with the IRS? Turns out it was no problem. We began swapping courtroom war stories. Willie liked my stories about incompetent bank robbers like the one whose getaway car wouldn’t start and the one who wrote his demand note on the back of his personal check.
The next day, as we were leaving, Willie told James, “That fellow from Mississippi who tells those stories. Bring him back. He should write a book.” That comment got me started. I began to keep records of our more interesting cases—not only the bank robbers, but the scam artists, hit men, protected witnesses, colorful informants, defendants with funny nicknames, over-the-top investigators, and those defendants who had a certain roguish charm. Civic clubs and book clubs began to invite me to tell them war stories. By the time I retired in 2007, I had more than thirty-five boxes of files full of trial stories—some funny, some tragic, all unique in a Faulknerian way. Several of the characters have since had whole books written about them like Dickie Scruggs, Emmett Till, Chicago gang leader Jeff Fort and Paddy Mitchell, leader of the most successful bank robbery gang of the twentieth century, the guys who wore rubber masks of ex-presidents like Mitchell in the Nixon mask proclaiming during a robbery, “I am not a crook.” That part of their act was portrayed in the movie Point Break with Patrick Swayze.
I first started telling bank robber stories earlier when Bill Ferris, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at Ole Miss, asked me to give a talk on them. For a title I suggested “Bank Robbers I’ve Known.” Bill said, “Oh, no, no. It has to be academic-sounding.” He said, tongue-in-cheek, “They think we are a serious University department, you know.” The next day I proposed, “Prologomena to a Cultural Study of the Southern Bank Robber.” He liked it. Bill loves stories and is himself a great storyteller which led to his being named Director of the National Endowment for the Humanities. From that post, he gave great support to my first book, a biography of Thomas Jefferson and his love of fine wines.
The basic thesis for the Southern Culture lecture was to contrast northern and southern bank robbers, a takeoff on President Kennedy’s famous remark about Washington, D.C., being a combination of “southern efficiency and northern charm.” In my experience, the typical northern bank robber would enter a bank, rudely cut in line, curse the tellers, and threaten to kill anyone who resisted. He would then successfully escape with the loot. The typical southern bank robber, by contrast, would walk calmly into the bank; wait politely in line; say, “Please give me all your money”; thank the teller; leave quietly; and get into his old broken-down getaway car—which wouldn’t start. Variations on that theme are recounted throughout this book.
The title From Midnight to Guntown came to me in 1989 when the Justice Department assigned me the task of writing a history of our office for a volume commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of the U.S. District Attorneys. In compiling the history, I was shocked at how few records remained of the thousands of cases tried by our office. After ten years, many U.S. Attorney files are simply shredded. Similar rules apply to files of federal court clerks. Later, while reading the histories of the other ninety-three U.S. Attorney’s Offices, I was amazed at the characters, from Jesse James to John Dillinger, that U.S. Attorneys have dealt with, and decided some of our stories should be preserved. Besides, I figured when I retired the reminiscing itself would be a pleasure. My mentor, former chief judge William C. Keady, said in his own book, All Rise: Memoirs of a Mississippi Federal Judge, that retired lawyers and judges should do three things: read, write, and reminisce. I decided to do all three.
Looking over a map of our district, I saw at the southwest and northeast corners the names of two towns that captured the colorful spirit of our district: Midnight, a predominantly black town deep in the plantation country of the Mississippi Delta, and Guntown, in the last foothills of the Appalachian range just north of Tupelo, birthplace of Elvis. Together, Midnight and Guntown seemed to capture the vital elements of the region’s intertwined cultures.
The story of how Midnight got its name is typical. In the 1870s, the Delta was largely a primeval swamp of cypress groves still inhabited by native panthers and black bears and known more for yellow fever and malaria than moonlight and magnolias. After the Civil War, huge tracts of rich, virgin land were still available for settlers bold enough and desperate enough to risk death and disease on this frontier by clearing the land for cotton plantations, which often changed hands in late-night, whiskey-soaked poker games. The accepted legend on Midnight is that on one such evening, a group of planters were playing high-stakes poker using as collateral the deeds for thousands of acres of rich Delta land. As potential fortunes kept changing hands, the gamblers finally agreed on how to end the game. When the clock struck twelve, the game would be over, and whoever held the deed to the plantation they were playing for at that moment would be the owner. The happy winner, reflecting on how he gained his prize, decided right then to name his new plantation Midnight for the way he won it. Over the years, the plantation commissary and cypress cabins grew so much the place got its own post office, and the town of Midnight, Mississippi, was born.
The origin of the name Guntown is more controversial but equally colorful. The romantic version is that a beautiful Chickasaw princess who owned the land married a white man named Gunn and that the town was simply named for their family. One problem with that legend is the extra n in Gunn. The alternative story, only slightly more prosaic, is that because the town was a major railway depot during the Civil War, it became the storage place for enormous stockpiles of firearms. This story is supported by solid historical fact. Famed Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest took thousands of guns from Union forces there, and both General Grant and General Sherman considered Guntown a key strategic outpost in their march to Vicksburg. The town later became quite prosperous and even had its own newspaper, the Guntown Hot Tim
es, whose archives faithfully preserve the town’s colorful past.
For some years, the most important Civil War battle fought between Shiloh and Vicksburg was referred to by soldiers in letters home as the “Battle of Guntown.” Only later did historians select a much less poetic title for the battle, Brice’s Crossroads. A small museum there commemorates the history, complete with an audiotape narrated by Shelby Foote analyzing the intricate strategy of that battle. Of course, to us in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Guntown is better known for the colorful modern crimes committed there. My favorite involves our seizure of a fancy house, complete with indoor swimming pool, from a Chicago drug dealer. We forfeited it to the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics for use as its regional office and used to run wiretaps poolside, much more pleasant than the sweaty little cubicles normally employed for that purpose.
A Sense of Place
South Mississippi got the Gulf Coast with its beaches and hurricanes as well as the state capital at Jackson and the romantic antebellum towns of Natchez and Vicksburg. But our district in north Mississippi got most of the Delta, with its infamous Parchman prison farm, one important home of the Delta blues, and its famed Highway 61 with its unrivaled variety of colorful human characters who combine high drama with low comedy. North Mississippi spawned not only William Faulkner, Elvis Presley, and John Grisham but B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, and Fannie Lou Hamer. Its towns have names both cheerful and positive like Olive Branch and Holly Springs, and foreboding ones like Dark Corner in DeSoto County. It is also home to the darkest civil rights legend of all, the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till of Chicago after his trip to Money, Mississippi, where he allegedly whistled at or touched a white woman in a store before riding home on Dark Fear Road, a real place. As recounted here, our office, the FBI, and the local DA reopened that fifty-year-old case to resolve the false rumors that surrounded it and prosecute anyone still living who was involved. We succeeded in the first part at least.
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