Anyway, I wrote out a little message for the AUSA from Hawaii to put on a postcard and send to Washam in federal prison in Atlanta. The postcard, which had a color picture of beautiful Hawaiian girls dancing the hula in grass skirts, said simply,
Dear Johnny Paul,
Having a wonderful time. Sorry about that bum rap you took.”
Sincerely, Harvey & Ray
At first, I didn’t tell Al what I’d done. When I finally did tell him, he worried for a couple of years that Washam would use the card as proof that Ray Blackwell and Harvey Crowell really existed. Even if I admitted what I’d done, Washam would claim prosecutorial harassment. For whatever reason, Washam never complained. Maybe the postcard never arrived. Maybe some lonely inmate clerk stole the picture and kept it for himself. Maybe Washam enjoyed the joke. Maybe he was too embarrassed to admit he’d been had. Who knows what happens in federal prisons?
A Running Robber: George of the Swamp3
If I had to name my favorite homegrown North Mississippi bank robber, it might be George House Jr. A stocky man of low intellect but much experience, House robbed many banks. I first learned of him from retired Greenville police captain Buddy Wilkinson, the bodyguard, or “court crier,” for Judge Keady. In theory, a court crier’s duty is to open court by heralding the judge’s entrance with the loud, time-honored cry: “Hear Ye, Hear Ye, United States District Court is now open according to law. Chief Judge Keady presiding. God save the United States and this honorable court.” A marshal at the U.S. Supreme Court, miffed by the Court’s liberal, prodefendant rulings under former Chief Justice Earl Warren, once rephrased the cry to “God save the United States from this honorable court.”
Federal courts are big on ritual. The judge enters in his black robe, ascends the bench, and invariably states, “Be seated, please.” Another ritual takes place just before “Hear Ye” when the crier suddenly yells out, “All rise!” and the spectators are required to stand. After some of the heated trials I’ve seen, this intimidating ritual is a pretty good way for judges to enforce order before things get disputatious. The phrase is memorable enough that Judge Keady titled his book of memoirs All Rise.
Buddy often told me how he chased George House on foot through the streets of Greenville after one of his bank robberies. When Buddy crawled up under a shotgun house after him, House emptied an entire handgun at him but missed, and Buddy got his man. Before I arrived as a prosecutor, AUSA Al Moreton had already tried House for robbing the branch bank at Stoneville, a sleepy town near Greenville. Having no car, House paid a guy to drive him there. The driver later testified he figured House planned to rob the bank—there was not much else to do in Stoneville except work at the agricultural experiment station, where they studied boll weevils, and House had little interest in them. The driver said he was too scared of House to say no, but after he dropped House off and promised to pick him up in five minutes, the driver headed straight back to Greenville. He testified that although he was too scared to refuse to take House, he was even more scared of getting caught in a gun battle during the getaway and figured George would be caught and in prison and unable to retaliate.
It was a hot, quiet morning in the Delta when House entered the bank. He approached the one teller cage, which was empty. He yelled for service. No answer. He went back outside and saw a man tending rose bushes in front of the bank. “Can I get some service here?” House asked. “Alright,” said the man, reluctantly laying down his hoe, putting on his jacket, and adjusting his tie. When the teller assumed his position behind the cage, House produced a pistol and announced it was a holdup. The teller calmly gave him the money and House rushed out to find he had no getaway driver. Being a practical man and an extremely healthy one, House started running the five or six miles back to Greenville. As he reached the city limits, a sheriff’s car pulled up and arrested the breathless House without incident.
The first time I saw House was in the federal courtroom in Oxford, where I was to try him for robbing another federally insured bank. Al Moreton had told me to consult the state DA at Greenville, Frank Carlton, about what to ask House on cross-examination if he took the stand. Frank regaled me with George House stories. One was about his training regimen. While in the pen, House always kept in shape, running wind sprints in the prison yard. On one occasion, when confined behind a fence as punishment, he got a heavy cane pole and began practicing pole-vaulting over fences, which was otherwise unnecessary at Parchman, a plantation prison farm so remote that there were no other fences, just open land with swamps so impenetrable it was said that almost no one had ever escaped from there, though many had tried. One exception, a trusty, took advantage of the privileges he received and fled to Massachusetts. When asked if the prison was getting too lax, gaffe-prone Governor Ross Barnett explained, “If you can’t trust a trusty, who can you trust?”
As in the prison in the movie Cool Hand Luke, which to me closely resembles Parchman, officers on horseback using bloodhounds could easily catch fleeing inmates before they ever got off the vast plantation. Frank Carlton’s favorite story about House involved one of his more successful escape attempts. Somehow avoiding a head count, House made it through the swamps overnight all the way to Ruleville (home of civil rights pioneer Fannie Lou Hamer) some eight miles south, where he went straight to the town’s only drive-in. Hunkering down on the ground beneath the drive-through ledge, House ordered five cheeseburgers, five fries, and five milkshakes. The waitress, seeing he was alone and on foot and covered with mud and that his face was swollen with mosquito bites, figured he was an escaped inmate. To keep him from leaving, she gave him his order and called the sheriff. By the time the sheriff got there, House had finished most of the meal and was too tired to run. “We got you now, George,” a deputy said. Bold as ever, House said through a mouthful of cheeseburger, “You boys didn’t catch me. You rescued me.”
My own experience with George House was much tamer. Released once again, he robbed a bank in the Delta and fled into a swamp known as the Bogue Phalia [pronounced fuh-lie-uh] near Marks, where the famous Poor People’s March on Washington began in 1968. FBI agent Wayne Tichenor called me at home to tell me that the famous bank robber was on the run and asked if I wanted to go along for the chase. DOJ rules discourage prosecutors from being on crime scenes for fear they will end up being witnesses and disqualified from trying the cases. But this case was special. Parchman was sending its best tracking dogs—bloodhounds to track on the ground and German shepherds to “wind” or sniff him out in the air above the swamp. The search leader was to be none other than Quitman County sheriff Jack Harrison, whom Wayne and I had just unsuccessfully prosecuted for beating up an inmate, a story told in detail in the chapter on Civil Rights (see chapter 3).
The search was exciting, with horses and dogs running everywhere. A mosquito-bitten and exhausted House meekly surrendered around noon the next day. The trial was pretty quiet except for the moment when I learned that the inmate dog trainer, who had been paroled and had absconded, was not available to testify. Harrison sarcastically asked me if I planned to call the dog to the stand. I refrained from saying the dog had a better criminal record than he did. We were, after all, brothers in law enforcement.
The main drama in the trial was the last day. Throughout the trial, House had worn heavy boots. On the last day, House persuaded the marshals to let him wear prison-issue tennis shoes. As Frank Carlton had warned me, tennis shoes were the sign George was going to make a run for it. In those more naive days, tenderness for the rights of defendants required that all defendants, however violent, had to appear in court unrestrained, lest the jury be prejudiced against them. Even back then, however, House’s reputation prevailed. The judge ordered his hands and feet shackled to a heavy chair behind a blanket over counsel table, out of sight of the jurors, who were taken in and out of the courtroom and never saw him restrained. That avenue closed, House remained in court for the verdict and was sentenced to a long term in a federal pen; I never s
aw or heard of him again.
A Teller’s Life Is Saved by Robber Incompetence4
On November 12, 1981, two men appeared on a used car lot in Helena, Arkansas, directly across the river bridge from the Mississippi Delta. One, a tall, fair-skinned black male in his late teens had freckles and a medium afro. His companion, a darker, heavier man in his mid-twenties, wore a long expensive black leather coat and a fancy homburg hat with the brim turned up, known in the area as a “go-to-hell” hat. The younger man told the salesman he wanted to test-drive a green Ford LTD and would “go by the bank to get some money.” The irony of that statement did not become apparent until later that day. With business slow, the salesman reluctantly let them take the car, which they drove away in the direction of the bridge to Mississippi. The car bore no license tag at the time. The two men never returned.
At about 9:20 A.M., in nearby Lula, Mississippi, manager Kay Powell and teller Mary Alice Arnold were the only people in the bank. They saw three men drive up in a green Ford LTD and look around in a suspicious way. Two men got out of the car, then got quickly back in and drove around the corner when another car appeared. Mrs. Powell, who had been robbed before and had attended an FBI seminar on how to handle bank robberies, went to the door and called out the car’s tag number to Mrs. Arnold, who wrote it down: Tennessee # AMA 151. How the Tennessee tag got on the car was never explained.
Shortly thereafter, a man entered the bank wearing a black homburg hat and long black leather coat, but no mask. When Mrs. Powell asked if she could help him, he said, “You’re damn right. This is a stickup, and you better do what I say if you don’t want to get hurt.” The man held a black revolver in which Mrs. Powell could see the “little round chamber” with bullets in it. A second man, taller, thinner, and younger with fair skin, freckles, and an afro, entered and held another gun on the two women. The one in the black leather coat vaulted the teller’s counter, threatening to kill the two women. He slapped Mrs. Powell and told her to “Open the damn drawers.” He struck her again “real hard” when she stepped forward to put the money in a flowered pillowcase he was holding.
The first robber began grabbing money from the teller drawer, which also held the bank’s alarm, a package of bait money with recorded serial numbers, and a dye pack concealed in what appeared to be a packet of $10 bills. The first robber filled his pockets, then stuffed the security pack down the front of his pants, unwittingly triggering the silent alarm, which went off in the Coahoma Bank directly across the street. As the second robber escorted Mrs. Powell to the vault, the phone rang next to Mrs. Arnold, who asked the first robber if he wanted her to answer it. “You’re damn right I do,” he told her, adding, “If you fuck up, I’m going to kill you.” The caller was a teller from the bank across the street. The first robber placed his gun to the back of Mrs. Arnold’s head, and she heard the gun make a metallic click. The caller asked if they had set off their alarm. Mrs. Arnold said, “No,” hung up, and told the robber it was a wrong number. When the bait money was pulled, it had activated the bank’s surveillance camera facing the teller cages; the camera took a series of remarkably clear pictures of the robbers, neither of whom was masked. After obtaining $26,242, the robbers made the women lie on the floor and fled. Mrs. Powell looked out the door and saw the same green car driving away about a block down the street when a big cloud of red smoke began to pour out of the car. The first robber got out and fled on foot.
Officers called to the scene included the town marshal, county sheriff, highway patrol, and FBI. An airplane and helicopter were called in for the chase. At the place where the first robber exited the car, officers found a loaded .32 H&R revolver beside the flowered pillowcase loot bag, as well as $21,798 in cash from the bank. One officer went north toward Tennessee and found the green Ford LTD, whose visible VIN plate identified it as the one stolen from the Arkansas car dealer an hour earlier. The keys were still in the car, and the seat belt warning buzzer was still buzzing. Inside were bills stained with red dye, money wrappers marked “United Southern Bank, Lula,” and a surgical glove like the one that could be seen on the second robber’s hand in the bank surveillance photos. There were red dye stains all over the abandoned getaway car.
Neighbors told officers that the robber on foot had headed toward a wooded area near Muddy Bayou north of Lula. Chuck Johnson, the son of the town marshal, whose family farmed some ten thousand acres, heard his mother broadcast the information about the getaway route on his CB radio and went to an abandoned tenant house near Muddy Bayou and waited inside. Shortly a dark object that Johnson thought was a coyote, common in that area, moved up a cotton row from the bayou. Johnson thought about shooting it but waited. When the helicopter flew over, however, the “coyote” raised up, and Johnson saw that it was a man wearing a homburg hat and a long black leather coat. The man began to run away. Johnson fired a warning shot from his rifle and the man stopped, raised his hands, and said he was not armed. His hands and clothes were covered with red dye stains.
Sheriff Jesse Bonner arrived to arrest the man. After being advised of his rights, the man gave his name as Robert Wilson but refused to answer further questions. He did, however, ask for medical attention, pointing to his crotch, where the dye pack had exploded. He was taken back to town to the doctor, photographed, and taken by FBI agent Wayne Tichenor to the bank, where he was made to stand outside the drive-through window for viewing. Mrs. Powell immediately made a positive identification, as did Mrs. Arnold. The first robber was identified as Tony Craft of Youngstown, Ohio, who was on federal parole following two prior bank robbery convictions. His brother, Mancy “Man” Craft, was apprehended a month later in Youngstown. The driver was never identified or apprehended.
Fearing prejudice and relying mostly on legal defenses, attorney Arlen Coyle waived a jury trial and asked Judge Keady to sit as both judge and jury. We agreed. Coyle also protested that Tony Craft’s postrobbery identifications at the bank’s drive-through window were unlawfully suggestive. Judge Keady found them “suggestive, but not unduly so.”
Powell and Arnold testified that the robbery lasted about five minutes and that they had excellent opportunities to observe the robbers at close range. In open court, the two women positively identified Tony Craft as the first of the two robbers, noting his “high cheekbones” and “mean eyes.” Hosia Nixon, owner of a record shop and clothing store in nearby Tunica, positively identified Tony Craft as the man who bought the black homburg hat a few days before the bank robbery. Nixon testified that when Craft bought the hat, he was already wearing the same black leather coat in which he was later apprehended. Fay Perkins, a shy, thin young woman, testified that in late October 1981, she rode from Youngstown to Tunica with her cousin Tony Craft in his new gray Lincoln Continental to attend a funeral. Tony went back to Youngstown but returned to Tunica the week of the robbery, this time with his nineteen-year-old brother Man, who stayed with Miss Perkins and her grandparents in Tunica. The night before the bank robbery Man left the house walking and never returned. Miss Perkins looked at bank surveillance photographs and courageously and unhesitatingly identified her cousins Man and Tony as the robbers.
In a dramatic ending, we closed our case by calling an ATF firearms expert, who testified that the seized H&R .32 revolver was loaded with .32 automatic shells rather than regular .32-caliber revolver ammunition. He concluded that the thinner rim on the automatic shells had caused a misfire, since the firing pin could not properly strike the bullet’s primer and thus the primer did not ignite to fire the bullet. He testified that the firing pin mark on the unfired live shell found in the gun after the robbery was made by that gun. The metallic clicking heard by Mrs. Arnold, he testified, showed conclusively that the robber had tried unsuccessfully to shoot Mrs. Arnold in the head during the robbery and that she had survived only because the gun was loaded with the wrong ammunition. We knew this fact before trial but did not tell Mrs. Arnold, who was already scared to death about testifying. At the next recess, whe
n I told her of her brush with death during the robbery, she was cooler than I expected: “When I heard that click, I thought he had tried to shoot me. It just wasn’t my time, I guess.”
No Further Questions in Mound Bayou
One of my personal favorite bank robber stories happened while I was Judge Keady’s law clerk, long before I started at the U.S. Attorney’s office. It involved the robbery of a bank in Mound Bayou, an old, all-black town in the Delta on Highway 61. Al Moreton tried the case, but neither he nor I can recall the name of the robber nor find a file that resembles it. As the story has evolved in retelling over the years, it goes like this:
In the 1960s, a bank in Mound Bayou decided it was a good idea to station an employee at a desk by the front door to greet customers as they came in, answer their questions, and direct them to the proper teller or bank officer to transact their business—sort of like a greeter at Wal-Mart today, but with more authority. A stern retired schoolteacher was hired for the position. She relished the authority, fitting somewhat the same role as Aunt Esther on Fred Sanford.
One day a young, impolite and decidedly unsouthern “customer” walked in and strode straight up to her. “Bitch,” he said, “Give me some damn money and make it quick.” Totally unfazed, the retired teacher addressed him dismissively: “Young man, don’t take that tone with me. And by the way, if you’re such a bank robber, where’s your bag?” After a couple of menacing looks, the robber lowered his gun, snorted, and went on to the tellers, apparently concluding he’d get nowhere with the retired schoolteacher. The rest of the robbery was pretty traditional, featuring loot, cameras, eyewitnesses, and eventual apprehension.
From Midnight to Guntown Page 6