From Midnight to Guntown

by Hailman, John

  Not knowing what to expect, I was led into a small but well-furnished office with one big blonde guy built like a tight end sitting behind the desk. In a real Yankee brogue, he started off, “I like your case, I really do, but you’ve got a lot to learn about RICO.” To my surprise, he sat right down with pen and paper and over the next six hours, not even stopping for lunch, he radically changed and improved my indictment. When he finished it was like a combination jury argument and press release and made Hamilton and his cronies sound like the return of Al Capone. When his secretary finished retyping it, he stamped it and signed it approved, writing his name as large as John Hancock on the Declaration of Independence. I was to hear his name many times in later years. It was none other than John Dowd, the prosecutor of Pete Rose and many other famous cases.12

  I had never had better or more intense mentoring. What a great experience this was getting to be. The first RICO case in the history of the state of Mississippi. I flew back to Oxford elated. We brought Fran and Debbie to the grand jury the day before the other witnesses who were subpoenaed, so they would, we hoped, remain unnoticed. It didn’t work. The press was there with flashbulbs popping. Wayne also told me something else he had just learned. Fran Jenkins had been addicted to heroin for years, but since the investigation started was trying to kick her habit, largely without success. When she showed up, she looked years older and shook visibly. But she got through her testimony fine, her memory was excellent, and she refused all Wayne’s offers to have agents guard her house for the next few weeks, saying, “Harvey’s all mouth. He’d never hurt me. I know men and I know his kind.” Unfortunately, it was not Harvey she had to worry about, as we learned too late.

  The next morning, as I presented witness after witness to the grand jury, I got a call from Wayne: “Fran is dead. Shot with her own gun. The coroner has ruled it a suicide, but I don’t believe it.” I didn’t either, yet somehow I also didn’t feel in my gut that Hamilton would do it. We subpoenaed anyone and everyone who might have had a grudge against Fran or might know who did. We got nowhere. One surprise was a call we got from Bob Gilder, the jolly, high-living DeSoto County lawyer who had represented both Harvey Hamilton and Fran Jenkins in the past. His office abutted the Camelot, and he had once shown an agent a peephole behind a framed law certificate where he could watch proceedings in one of Fran’s rooms, with her permission of course. He considered Fran a good but unfortunate woman, and he was furious with us: “You got Fran Jenkins killed over nothing. You had no right to take advantage of her.” He was especially mad at Wayne, whom he accused of “using Fran, using her all the way to her death.”

  We were impressed with Bob’s sincerity but curious about what he seemed to know that we didn’t. Then one day I realized why. Bob knew everything that happened in DeSoto County and Memphis. One afternoon, while I was leaning pretty hard on some witnesses about Fran’s death, Wayne Tichenor stepped into my office. “Your next interview is here. He’s probably the most important. It’s Danny Owens. Last night they played me the tape from Fran’s answering machine. The last voice on it was Danny Owens. He said he had to meet with Fran urgently the night she died.”

  When Owens stepped into my office, the look in his eyes gave me a physical chill, unusual for me. He was maybe the scariest guy I’d ever encountered. The coldness in his eyes and voice were unlike anything I’d seen outside a movie. I lost my macho. No way could I intimidate this guy. I started differently: “Fran Jenkins was your friend?” His reply fit his demeanor: “No, just a business partner.” I asked him who could have wanted her dead. Did she owe money? Have any stalkers? “I don’t know anything,” was his only answer. Feeling stupid and helpless, I tried to sound tough but failed. “We’ll be in touch.” He walked out without saying another word.

  Then I got one of those hunches and called Bob Gilder. “Bob, you know I’m sick about this. You know all the players. Is there any chance Danny Owens was Fran’s heroin supplier and thought she might have testified to all she knew, not just Hamilton?” Bob pleased me by his reply: “John, you and I are going to be friends. I know you are hurting over what happened to Fran. This is between counsel and you can never use it, but I’ve been thinking just what you’re thinking. It may have all been a tragic mistake, but we’ll probably never know.”

  But we all knew that it was not a suicide. Fran Jenkins was left-handed and had one of those writing bumps on the inside of her left middle finger. The gun she was shot through the mouth with was found in her right hand. Someone had obviously planted it there. Suddenly the rest of our big-time case seemed trivial. Our desire to make a big legal kill had resulted in the real killing of a real person, a good person if a sad one. Wayne Tichenor was devastated, but resilient as always. “We’ve got to win this one for Fran.”

  With Fran gone, our only real witness on the massage parlor payoffs was Debbie. With the photographs of Hamilton meeting the girls, one of which actually showed his hand taking a wad of bills from Fran’s hand while sitting in his patrol car with his SO-1 tag on the back, we had some evidence. Better yet, Debbie had talked personally with Jack Briggs and could identify his voice along with Fran’s on the tape recordings of the payoffs, with all their incriminating details. Then there were the bills Debbie had marked that were found in Hamilton’s wallet, house, and wife’s purse. Debbie was now our crucial witness. Obviously other people knew that too. One night Wayne got a call from Debbie, who lived on an upper floor in a Memphis high-rise. She was half-hysterical: “Wayne, when I got home, the babysitter said my daughter had been crying because she couldn’t find her tricycle. I went out on the balcony where we kept it. I looked over the railing, and the tricycle was lying on the concrete walk, all mangled up, several stories down. I wondered how a five-year-old could have done it, but she said she didn’t, and I believe her. A few minutes ago a man with a deep voice I didn’t know called and said, ‘Next time it won’t be the tricycle. It will be your daughter splattered on the concrete.’” Wayne was calling me from a pay phone on his way to Memphis. “What do you know about the Witness Protection Program?” I told him not much, but on our office chart I was the “witness security” officer. I called the DOJ Operations Center emergency number and told the duty officer I had a critical threat to the life of a witness in a RICO case. “I’ll patch you through,” he said. It was then around 11:30 P.M. A raspy voice answered within seconds: “This is Gerry Shur. What’s happened?”

  Gerald Shur was one of the unsung heroes of Main Justice. An old mob prosecutor with a thick New York brogue, he had almost single-handedly created the Witness Protection Program and ran it in a personal, hands-on way. Against overwhelming opposition, he got it going and kept it going, using a specially trained squad of U.S. Marshals to physically move and guard the endangered witnesses while his tiny staff handled the difficult task of creating whole new identities for witnesses and their families. My fear was that, like most big-time DOJ programs, this one would take months, and we would lose Debbie while we waited. I outlined our problems: the murder of Fran, the tricycle, Danny Owens, the web of local law enforcement corruption. I even dropped John Dowd’s name as a supporter to give the case credibility.

  Gerry did not mince words: “Sounds like a righteous case. We’ll take it on.” Still worried, I asked when Debbie might be accepted in the program and what kind of paperwork he would need. His reply astonished me: “She’s in the program now, by my authority. Have your agent call the local U.S. Marshal to pick her up right away and we’ll take it from there. Tomorrow you can start filling out the forms. They’re all in the U.S. Attorney’s Manual (which I rarely opened). Here’s my private number. Call me personally, at any hour, if you have any problem of any kind.”

  Never in my life had I felt more proud of my own U.S. government. How decisive, how clear, how sensible this guy Gerry Shur was. I felt more than relieved; I felt grateful. Fortunately, I was later able to pay him back by representing him twice in civil cases when disgruntled criminals and oth
ers sued the Witness Protection Program and Gerry personally. I tell these stories in detail in chapters 4 and 5.

  With Debbie protected, we slung out more subpoenas and persuaded nearly every victim of Hamilton’s extortion to testify. One of the most interesting was a Delta Chinese guy who ran a beer joint and was known locally as a famous high school football player named B. B. Tong. At his interview, he refused to answer any questions at all: “I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ about nothin’. I got to live here. You can go back to Oxford.” On the day that he was scheduled to appear before the grand jury, I was putting on witnesses like there was no tomorrow. The witness rooms overflowed all the way down the hall with gamblers, prostitutes, and honky-tonk angels. But B. B. stood out even among the crowd. He stood about 6’, 4” and probably weighed 260, really big in the pre-steroid era. I called his name and motioned him toward the grand jury door. I considered challenging him to “man up” as they say now, but that didn’t seem quite right. Besides, I was scared of him just looking at him. He had small beady eyes in a big round face. He actually looked more Choctaw than Chinese. After debating how to approach him, I finally just said “Mr. Tong, a lot of people in DeSoto County look up to you as a football hero. You see all these poor, scrawny little people who are not afraid to testify. Are you going to let them down?” He never said a word, but I thought I saw something in his eye. He walked in, sat down, and gave some of the most devastatingly believable testimony I’d ever heard. He was even better at trial. Seeing a man of his size and strength cry, because he felt so helpless before the corrupt Sheriff Hamilton and his DeSoto County law-enforcement people, was a uniquely moving experience. “When you can’t go to the police, who do you turn to?” he asked.

  With a powerful RICO indictment in hand, we began answering boxes of frivolous defense motions. Judge Orma “Hack” Smith, a former Ole Miss football star also known for his dancing skills and charm with the ladies, was the presiding judge. There was intense media interest. The story was front-page news every day in both Memphis papers and led the TV news on all stations every night. Never had I seen so many reporters cover a trial. They rarely needed to ask us for quotes. There were so many colorful witnesses and human-interest stories that they had more than they could ever have space to write anyway. Everything was pro-prosecution. We were on offense and stayed that way the whole time. Hamilton’s first defense was that the whole thing was “politics,” but since no one had announced to run against him, that story rang wildly false.

  One final thing that made the trial uniquely enjoyable was the colorful cast of defendants and their attorneys. My wife gets nervous when she gets near a courtroom, and never once had she seen me try a case or argue an appeal. But she did agree, at my insistence, to come for the jury selection in Hamilton, just to see the lineup of defendants and attorneys I had described to her. From the side they resembled a row of Alfred Hitchcock or W. C. Fields look-alikes, with their bulging bellies and prominent noses. The first thing she later said was “They all have such big noses. Big bellies I expected, but those noses are special.” Of course not all fit that profile. Bob Gilder, who represented both Harter and Hamilton, was the smallest and also most colorful. His appearance was like the anti-FBI. His white shirt had ruffles at the collar and cuffs. Court rules required him to wear a tie, but he refused to knot it and wore it simply flipped over once so it constantly bounced as he moved. I wondered if he really projected the kind of image a law-and-order sheriff needed before a jury, but it wasn’t my problem.

  Next most-colorful counsel was the Rumpole-like Murray Williams, a brilliant advocate whom jurors always loved. He often appeared unprepared and hung over with bandages covering wounds he’d suffered in late-night drinking bouts during trial. His Mondays were the worst. An even odder couple was the slim, handsome former U.S. Attorney from Memphis, Warner Hodges, and his client. Hodges would have made a perfect representative for Hamilton. Instead, Hodges represented Bill Chaney, Hamilton’s fat bagman who had already been convicted of two major felonies and was the main face most of the black honky-tonk owners had dealt with. After one of Warner’s smooth, sneering cross-examinations of one of my terrified black witnesses, which I felt was racially tinged, I did something I have never done in court before or since. As Warner swaggered confidently behind our counsel table, I eased my chair around as if to talk to my secretary and deliberately tripped Warner, sending him sprawling in a full-length pratfall in front of the jury. Jurors chuckled. I was glad I did it at the time and was completely at ease apologizing to the judge and the jury for the “accident.” I swear Judge Smith gave me a little wink.

  Representing the obese Jack Briggs was local attorney Mel Davis, an old friend with little federal trial experience. He mainly deferred to the other lawyers, but he did have one bad moment cross-examining Houston Morris, the Louisiana contractor/bagman. To avoid having the defense bring it up first, I had made Morris tell the jury that he had once been the leader of a Ku Klux Klan klavern in Denham Springs, Louisiana, where he had held the titles of Kleagle and Grand Cyclops, positions of importance in such circles. On cross Mel Davis asked Morris if he could prove where he was on the day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. We objected vociferously at this slur, there being four blacks on the jury. Back in chambers Judge Smith asked Mel, “Mr. Davis, do you have any factual basis for making such an inflammatory insinuation?” Mel had to admit that he didn’t. Judge Smith went right back on the bench, chewed out Davis in front of the jury, and told them to “rub this remark out of your minds entirely.” Unbelievably, our Klansman had come off as a victim.

  The most intriguing of the defense attorneys was a tall, expensively tailored New Orleans attorney named Cecil Burglass. I hated to think how much his handmade English shoes cost. He represented the Harbins, father and son, but they clearly could not have afforded him, and we all knew the Bally gambling machine company was footing their bill. Cecil took the bull right by the horns in his voir dire during jury selection. “Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t want you to hear this from someone else as a rumor. I represent, and have for many years, a New Orleans resident named Carlos Marcello, an immigrant from Italy who has been rather successful in business. Some have unfairly accused him of ties to organized crime, even calling him the ‘Godfather.’ But he has never been convicted of anything in his life other than not paying enough taxes, and we can all identify with that.”

  Cecil’s bold, unorthodox approach worried me. In courtrooms where small-town Mississippi lawyers compete to convince jurors who is the most countrified, I had personally seen the big-city lawyer approach work. Some jurors seem to think that’s what lawyers are supposed to be like. Cecil’s office in New Orleans, which I later visited, was as colorful as he was. Located in the old neighborhood called Faubourg Marigny just below Esplanade, his was the only white law office at that time in a virtually all-black neighborhood of middle-class families. Cecil had style to go with his money. Rather than staying in a motel, he rented a beautiful furnished house from a professor on sabbatical, and he partied every night of the trial.

  Cecil’s most memorable day came during the sixth and final week of the trial. By that time it was clear that our case was overwhelming, and the defense attorneys knew it. Even their cross-examinations were becoming perfunctory. Bored, Cecil invited Judge Smith’s attractive courtroom clerk to lunch, unusual but no real ethical violation. Margaret, a vivacious divorced blonde with a keen sense of humor, went along. As tired of the trial as the rest of us, Judge Smith gave us an unusually long two-hour lunch “hour” that day.

  As their lunch was ending, Cecil asked Margaret if they shouldn’t cap off their meal with a fine brandy. She demurred, then said, “Oh, what the hell.” Margaret stuck to her one snifter, but Cecil ordered another and then another. Margaret later told me she thought of leaving him there, but that would have been rude. Besides, by then he probably could not have found the courthouse alone, so she walked him back after his fifth brandy. Cecil had figured t
hat since he was last in line of eight to cross-examine my next witness, he’d be sober by the time his turn came. But for some reason, perhaps fatigue, my witness only took about ten minutes. The other defense attorneys took almost no time cross-examining him. Judge Smith turned to Cecil, who was giving off a brandy smell noticeable all over the courtroom, and said with a little smile, “Mr. Burglass, you may cross-examine.”

  Visibly startled, Cecil got shakily to his feet, obviously staggering drunk. Judge Smith kindly said, “I know things have moved pretty quickly here, Mr. Burglass. Would you like a brief recess to go over your plans for cross-examination?” Cecil slurred right back, “Thank you most kindly, Your Honor, but I’m fully prepared.”

  Steadying himself on the podium, open-handed and without a note, Cecil began to cross-examine. Judge Smith and every lawyer in the courtroom looked on in fear. We all dreaded a mistrial more than anything. If Cecil committed some error, a mistrial could be declared, and all our weeks of trial work would be lost. The judge was in the same position. Where would he find six free weeks in his loaded docket to retry the case? Even worse off were the defense attorneys. None of their clients had any more money. Everything they possessed had gone to pay their lawyers for this trial. If it had to be retried, by the rules the judge would appoint them all to retry the case for a pittance, seriously damaging their practices since several were solo practitioners. Everything was riding on a drunken Cecil not doing anything crazy.