A most unusual defendant in Dirty Pool was Sherrie Miller Daly, former wife of colorful professional golfer John Daly.10 Sherrie Daly had never been one of our suspects until, as one agent who liked to fish expressed it, “She just jumped in our boat.” It all happened quickly. Part of the undercover operation involved flying drug suspects to South Florida on an undercover FBI plane to wow them with what big crooks the agents were. When the regular FBI plane broke down, they had to rent one on short notice. The rental plane’s pilot, who knew nothing of the undercover, was dating Sherrie Daly at the time, after she was divorced from John. When she heard of the trip, Sherrie volunteered to come along for the ride to Miami. When she heard the suspects’ conversations with the FBI agents posing as Colombian drug dealers, she volunteered to launder their money for them, just as she had laundered money for her father through his trucking company. She was caught on tape so red-handed that she had to plead guilty. Because of her former husband, the news quickly went viral worldwide. One of my daughters was Googling my name right after that and said, “Pop, your case on Sherrie Daly is all over the Internet. It’s in Japanese and Chinese and Russian.”
It was typical irony that my name should be associated with that case, since I did not handle it. The only real work I did other than supervising it as criminal chief was to write the press release as our press officer. Unfortunately, my name appeared on the release as our contact person. Despite all our efforts to protect John Daly’s reputation by repeatedly mentioning in the release and in open court that John Daly knew nothing about what his ex-wife did, he still trashed us in the press anyway, perhaps just out of chivalry to his ex-wife. She did not return the favor, publishing in 2011 an outspoken exposé on the life of a golf-wife called Teed Off. Not surprisingly, she did not mention her little brush with federal law.
Federal versus State Prosecution
Perhaps it would be useful to explain at this point how some cases come to be federal crimes, while others are state crimes. Not only lay persons but many lawyers have no idea how the system works. Many crimes can be prosecuted in either state or federal court. A bank robbery in Mississippi is an armed robbery in state court, just like the robbery of a convenience store. Bank robbery is also a federal crime if the victim bank is FDIC-insured, as most banks now are. Drug cases are similar. Nearly every sale of drugs that violates state law is also a federal crime. It is basically up to state and federal prosecutors whether such cases go to federal or state court. Since there are plenty of cases to go around, whichever prosecutor wants the case can usually have it. Practicality usually prevails.
If a drug dealer operates in multiple counties, it is easier to handle him in federal court, since state DAs have to try their cases county by county, while federal prosecutors can try them in any county where the dealer made one of his sales. If a case crosses state lines, as many do, federal prosecutors usually handle it due to their nationwide subpoena powers, whereas state DA subpoena powers stop at the state line.
Other considerations can come into play as to who will prosecute when crimes violate both federal and state law. The cost to one county government can be too high; single-county juries are easier to influence by media or defendants compared to federal court, where members can come from several counties—all thirty-seven counties in the case of our federal district. Politics can also play a role. Mississippi DAs and judges are elected and are more subject to pressures of public opinion, while federal judges and prosecutors are appointed by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. For that reason many sensitive cases investigated by local sheriffs and police are brought to us by them with the agreement of local DAs. On occasion, state DAs up for reelection ask us to let them handle “hot” cases, when they need voters to see them doing the big cases rather than “giving everything to the feds,” as their opponents would charge.
Most violent crimes like murder, rape, and burglary are exclusively state crimes. In fact, over 90 percent of all crimes in the U.S. involve state law only. Such cases become federal crimes only if they cross a state line or when a federal facility such as the U.S. mail is involved. Uniquely federal crimes are rare, limited to things like treason, the counterfeiting of U.S. currency, or crimes committed on federal lands like national parks. Mississippi has a large number of such parks.
Our system of shared prosecutions sounds complicated, but in my experience it works surprisingly well, as stories throughout this book will show. Our biggest problems have come when Congress and some federal judges have tried to limit federal jurisdiction in political corruption cases, as discussed here.
Some of the falls from grace recounted here involve judges—mainly Justice Court judges—and of course lawyers, the most flamboyant of them Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, the only billionaire we have prosecuted. As a class, however, no group of public officials can compare to Mississippi’s powerful county supervisors, of whom we convicted five dozen statewide in cooperation with our southern district counterparts in a case featured by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes as Operation Pretense. In a separate case, we quietly convicted the unfortunate, financially strapped father of our world-famed crime novelist John Grisham, which some observers say altered the nature of his novels from local to national and gave him a certain hostility toward the power used by the FBI and some federal prosecutors portrayed in his fiction.
Harvey Hamilton: The Old Peg-Legged Sheriff Meets RICO11
One of the pleasures of being a trial lawyer, especially a prosecutor, is that you never know when the best case of your life may suddenly fall in your lap. For me it happened early, in 1976. I’d had fun putting away bank robbers, car thieves, convicted felons caught with firearms, and even an honest-to-God Ku Klux Klan leader. My investigators had mostly been experienced veterans, always older than me and certainly wiser. I’d never had a corruption case, and my general impression was that North Mississippi had pretty straight public officials, especially its law enforcement officers. I’d yet to meet a bogus one. But when I finally did, he was a doozy.
In those days, all of us Feds had our offices in the same building, the federal courthouse in Oxford, a block west of the Square and its stately antebellum courthouse, hub of William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapataw-pha County. The ATF was on the first floor, the marshals and judges on the third, and we were on the second floor with the FBI and the probation officers. We were not only close physically but also partners psychically. The FBI agents were then all hard-core Hooverized, with white shirts, narrow ties, and short haircuts. They were the real thing: grown-up Boy Scouts.
One day the straightest arrow of them all, resident agent in charge Kenneth P. Hughes, knocked loudly on the door of my private office. Hughes did not know how to knock softly and was not eager to learn. He had a deep, commanding Boston brogue and a cold stare. Hughes could intimidate defendants into confessing just by the menacing way he read them their rights.
That day, Ken had his game face on and was all business. Following in his wake was a skinny, wide-eyed rookie with gold-rimmed glasses. Ken, who called me “John” when we drank beer together on Friday nights after work, was in full Hoover mode that day: “Mr. Hailman, I’d like you to meet our newest special agent, fresh from the academy. His name is Wayne Tichenor, and he is a Marine.” Not was a Marine but is, as in forever. The “academy” is of course the FBI Training Academy at Quantico, Virginia, about forty miles south of Washington, D.C. The academy is surrounded on all sides by a Marine Corps base. I later taught there several times. It is a stern place but rich in camaraderie.
“Agent Tichenor, being low man on our Bureau totem pole, has been assigned by me to handle DeSoto County, which in case you hadn’t noticed, has started to attract all the worst thugs from Memphis. But since he is just back from a combat tour in Vietnam with the Marine Corps, I’m sure he can handle them. I know you will treat Agent Tichenor right and show him the ropes. He already has his first case for you.”
Before Wayne or I could say a word, Hughes was o
ut the door. I invited Wayne to sit, and we began to chat and swap sports stories. It was as if we’d played ball together or double-dated together for years. He had gone to Memphis State and knew both the dark and funny sides of that big country town. He’d just gotten a call out of the blue from a man named David Baker, who said he needed help with a little legal problem, mentioning up front that he was a professional gambler. “Gosh, I hope the FBI’s not harassing you,” Tichenor told him sarcastically. Baker appreciated the approach. “I’m glad you’re not one of those tight-assed Hoover guys,” Baker said. “I’m pretty loose, but I can’t lend you any seed money if that’s what you want,” Tichenor replied. Baker asked to meet someplace they would not be seen together. “Why don’t I just come to your joint,” Tichenor said, wanting to get a free look at his gambling den. Baker agreed. “It’s called the Matador Lounge.”
Baker came right to the point: “The new DeSoto sheriff, that fellow Hamilton who ran as Mr. Clean, the guy who was going to clean up corruption, is already shaking us down for payoffs.” Tichenor found it amusing: “And you want us, the FBI, to protect your illegal operation against the sheriff?” Baker persisted. “Look, I understand. But don’t you think a crooked cop is worse than a little gambling? After all, we’re just giving people what they want. But gambling is not all of it.”
Baker offered to introduce Tichenor to his partners. “I figured I might as well get to know as many of my local criminals as I could,” Tichenor told me. Baker’s first partner arrived in five minutes. “He was a big, handsome business-looking guy built like a linebacker with blond hair and blue eyes and wearing an expensive blue blazer with brass buttons. His name was Danny Owens, and he was not at all what I had expected. There was something cold and crazy in his eyes. They had no feeling.” As a native Memphian, Tichenor knew all too well who Danny Owens was. He ran a chain of drug-infested high-end “gentlemen’s” strip clubs notorious for drugs and violence. Owens had recently been acquitted in state court on a murder charge. During a hand-to-hand battle with pool cues, a motorcycle gang leader had bled to death from a deep stomach wound allegedly inflicted by Owens. No knife or other weapon was ever found. Owens’s able defense attorney was Bob Gilder, another colorful character who later became a good friend. Bob had persuaded jurors that the gang leader died from falling through a plate glass front door during the fight, earning Gilder the nickname “Door” because in his closing argument in the case, he had argued, “The door did it.”
I asked Wayne if he had any other criminals I could call to the witness stand to corroborate the testimony of these distinguished criminals against the newly elected reform sheriff. “Oh, yeah, there’s my star witness. Her name is Fran Jenkins. She’s Baker and Owens’s partner in the Matador Lounge, but her real business is a massage parlor called the Camelot. Classy name, huh?” At that point, with most agents I would have just made up an excuse, another meeting or something, and ended the matter by telling him to submit me a full, written report detailing the laws violated and the evidence we would use to prove our case. But there was something different about Wayne Tichenor, so I asked him to tell me more about Fran Jenkins.
“Well, she’s a redhead from Kentucky in her thirties, very funny and charming. She’s got a lot of miles on her, but if she had taken a couple of different turns, she could have been a good wife for a banker or maybe even a U.S. senator.” Only Wayne Tichenor could have said that with a straight face. “So now we’re helping not just the gamblers but also the prostitutes, right?” Tichenor ducked my question. “We’ve got to start somewhere. These guys are just informants. I don’t see them as our main witnesses, but we can get our suspects on tape. From what I know, most of the DeSoto County government is crooked, law enforcement included, and I think we should take them on.”
There was something about this skinny young agent’s mixture of passion and calm that hooked me. “Where do we start?” I asked. “Well, Ken Hughes has already agreed to let me meet with the guys running the Organized Crime Task Force in Memphis. They’re working corruption cases that bleed over into DeSoto County, and they’re trying to break up Danny Owens’s sex and drug businesses, but can’t do it because it’s protected by too many corrupt officers. They have a small, separate unit totally detached from the others, and they’d like us to work with them.” It was all going too fast for me. “So we’re going to work with our victims and then we can bust them later?” I liked Tichenor’s answer: “That’s about it. We don’t owe them a damn thing. Who do they think they are, anyway, asking us to clean up law enforcement so they can commit their crimes in an honest environment?”
My memo to the file about our conversation was the strangest I’d ever dictated. My secretary asked, “Who is this guy Tichenor? I like him.” I told her I guessed we’d find out as we went along. It was a couple of weeks before I heard back from Wayne. He had not been idle. By some act of FBI legerdemain, Wayne and Ken had persuaded their boss in Jackson to open a Level I undercover operation against the sheriff. They’d already recruited a veteran Memphis police undercover agent to play the role of an organized crime foot soldier who was testing the waters for a national syndicate to take over gambling, prostitution, and drugs in DeSoto County.
It was always my rule (based on some bad early experiences) never to allow any UCs to operate in our district without first meeting them face-to-face and making sure I was comfortable with them. Too many were either cop-groupie cowboys or criminals themselves. But most bureaucrats who supervise federal investigators have always discouraged this. They insist that prosecutors never interact with informants. Their unhealthy mantra is “We investigate. You prosecute.” When you read in the paper about some blown trial, this self-defeating theory is often behind it. To me, prosecutors and investigators are natural partners, not competitors. At their very best, they are brothers, and that is how things developed with Wayne Tichenor and me. Best of all, it was Wayne who first suggested that I meet his UCs before we began.
Baker was about what I figured, a seedy gambler type. I was to meet Fran Jenkins next, but she had the flu and sent her bookkeeper Debbie in her place. Since Debbie would handle the tape recordings of the sheriff and his bagmen, I figured she’d be just as good and probably a better witness. A divorced blonde bank teller with a little girl to support, Debbie told me her story. A good-looking classmate of hers from high school had told her at a school reunion that she was working at a “spa,” the euphemism for a massage parlor, which was the euphemism for a whorehouse. Debbie, who had been doing bookkeeping at a bank for a decent salary, was shocked yet intrigued at her friend’s career choice. “Do you really give them massages?” she asked. “Well, we massage parts of them,” she was told. “Why don’t you come and visit?” After a Saturday night hanging in the lobby, Fran Jenkins told Debbie she needed a helper, a strictly legal one, one night a week. No sex, just bookkeeping. Business was brisk, and Fran and the other girls had no time to keep up with paperwork. Debbie agreed to try it. To her surprise, within a week she was servicing occasional clients as well as keeping books. She soon found she could make more in one night having sex with acceptable strangers than she could make on her bank job in a month. Fran let her pick her customers, telling undesirables she was “just a bookkeeper.”
I tried not to ask Debbie, “How did a nice girl like you end up . . . etc.” She put me at ease. “It was safe. It was easy. I liked it. Most of the guys were more scared than I was, just fumbling country boys. Fran ran a tight ship: no drunks, no drugs, no danger. For some reason I just took to the job. Before I knew it, Fran put me in charge of “special services.” Before I could embarrass myself by asking what that was, Debbie explained, “Some guys can only get off if it’s kinky. They wanted me to paddle them, wear black leather, and verbally abuse them. It never turned me on, but it was easy to do and they tipped like crazy. I ended up with whips and the whole nine yards. Everything was great till one night the new sheriff, Hamilton, sent a guy by who said we’d have to start
paying him $500 a week or he’d shut us down.”
Fran and Debbie quickly decided that they had to pay off the sheriff to survive. Then one day they got a visit from another sheriff’s man saying that the first guy had been stealing from the sheriff and they needed to pay the new man instead. Not knowing who to believe, Fran went to Baker and Owens for advice, and they decided to go to the FBI, a curious choice under the circumstances, but you never know why people do what they do. Before Wayne Tichenor could even ask, Fran volunteered to carry a hidden tape recorder in her purse and record the payoffs and conversations. Debbie would write down in advance the serial numbers of the bills Fran used for the payoffs and hand the tapes and the lists to Wayne Tichenor at anonymous shopping malls right after they occurred. Soon a third bagman appeared, a suave businessman from south Louisiana named Houston Morris. He was polite and funny and treated the girls with so much respect that a couple of them offered him a “freebie.” He politely declined, saying he had a beautiful young wife and a new baby and didn’t need the risk no matter how tempting the offer was.
In the meantime, Sheriff Hamilton was getting his countywide corruption machine cranked up. Working with his campaign manager and “right arm,” auto parts salesman John Harter, Hamilton began tapping the many sources of illegal income accessible to a sheriff. Mississippi sheriffs held vast discretionary powers. They are still referred to by old-timers as the “high sheriffs,” as in old Mississippi blues songs. The sheriff, not a judge, would usually decide whether someone arrested would be allowed to make bond and how much it would be. They often helped pick the grand jurors. If a sheriff wanted you indicted, you got indicted. Local district attorneys, who are also elected, cross sheriffs at their peril. A hostile sheriff could put a DA back in private practice at the next election.
From Midnight to Guntown Page 11