From Midnight to Guntown

by Hailman, John

  Al Moreton and I chuckled, knowing he really meant their clients had no money to pay more attorney’s fees. Judge Smith said he would not go back and re-question the fifty or so jurors he’d already questioned, but would be more specific and pointed in questioning the hundred or so he’d not yet queried. We all agreed that this was a fair compromise.

  As soon as we were out in the hall, Al and I started trying to figure out how we could smoke out any other jurors who had been illegally contacted. We decided to look most closely at the jurors who seemed the most nervous. We realized we had overlooked a key element in Harvey Hamilton’s background. Before being elected sheriff, he had served two terms as county supervisor; he had been very active in the statewide supervisor organization and had contacts everywhere. With 5 supervisors for each of the 37 counties represented on the jury panel, there were more than 150 potential jury-tampering James Reeds out there.

  Jury selection is the key to success or failure in every trial. We had asked for a district-wide jury to get jurors less likely to have private knowledge of the case and its players. The defense wanted jurors who had not read about the case in the Memphis papers or seen it on Memphis TV, but the case had received so much publicity and was so colorful that just about everyone still breathing in the district had heard something about it. Judge Smith directed us not to do any investigation as to the three ladies until our jury was selected but then asked for a thorough investigation, including personal interviews by the FBI of all jurors not selected to serve. The FBI did just as Judge Smith directed and scores of interviews were conducted.

  One thing we learned later totally amazed us. Four male jurors who did serve on the jury all lived in Attala County, Oprah Winfrey’s home—geographically as far as you could get from DeSoto County. Despite all the questioning by the judge and lawyers, however, and all the private investigations we had all done on the jurors, no one had learned the most important fact: All four of the Attala jurors had moved there from DeSoto County, and all knew Hamilton’s reputation as a crooked supervisor. With all our hours of questioning, somehow that fact never came to anyone’s knowledge until too late.

  When Hamilton’s trial ended with the conviction of all defendants, I drafted an indictment on James Reed. In an interview Hamilton’s jailer told Wayne Tichenor he had overheard some of Hamilton’s talks with Reed. The jailer claimed he knew of no other supervisors Hamilton had used, but did know of someone else Hamilton had talked to about the jury: United States Senator James O. Eastland. Wayne and I learned this in a Saturday morning interview just after Hamilton’s RICO trial ended. At the time, James “Big Jim” Eastland was one of the most powerful men in the United States. As Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he controlled the fate of nominees for all U.S. Attorney and all federal judge positions, as well as all U.S. Supreme Court nominees. How would we handle this development?

  Uncharacteristically, my first reaction was that of a timid bureaucrat: “We’ll have to get DOJ approval to interview a U.S. senator, and my guess is they won’t approve it.” Tichenor took more of a Marine Corps approach: “What the hell, the SOB lives in Doddsville. I say I just go down there and interview him.” My spine was stiffened by Wayne’s reaction, and I offered to go with him. “No, you’ll get your boss H. M. Ray in trouble. It’s better if we limit it to an FBI investigative matter. The judge told us to do it. Besides, if you’re a witness to the interview, you can’t prosecute the case.” I changed totally. “I don’t give a damn about trying the case. I can help you. I know Eastland personally. We are on good terms. I used to run messages between him and Senator Stennis.”

  To persuade Wayne to let me go with him, I told him a couple of stories. “Senator Stennis and Senator Eastland appear to be opposites and have two very different camps of supporters in Mississippi. Stennis is the dignified statesman, former judge and state DA. Senator Eastland is a wheeler and dealer and backroom guy who speaks in monosyllables through a haze of cigar smoke. Stennis lets it be believed he’s a teetotaler, although he’s not, while Eastland loves to have a glass of Chivas Regal in one hand an expensive cigar in the other when he talks to the press. Eastland has had bad press in Washington but great in Mississippi and is tremendously effective behind the scenes. Stennis has a great reputation in both places, not just because he is great, but because he’s such a good secret source for so many reporters of so many different political persuasions. They both have their own games.”

  Tichenor was curious: “So how do these guys get along?” My answer was that when Senator Stennis joined Senator Eastland in the Senate, they made a pact. Senator Stennis told me about it. Before every Senate vote, each would notify the other not only which way he would vote but the reason he would give in public for his vote. That way, even when they voted differently, each one protected the other’s back with the press and the voters back in Mississippi. Eph Cresswell, the chief of the Senator’s staff, usually handled these messages, but when he was not there, on several occasions Senator Stennis sent me to Senator Eastland’s office to tell him about a vote. Eastland trusted me for that reason and also possibly because his son Woods was a classmate and friend of mine at the Ole Miss Law School. Successful politicians check people out. But what Senator Eastland really liked, I think, was that I wrote a Washington Post column about wine and food. Senator Eastland loved good food. Every time I saw him, we’d exchange restaurant tips.

  Thinking I’d persuaded him, I told Wayne I was ready to go. “Are you going without telling H. M. Ray.?” He had me. It would get H. M. Ray in trouble with DOJ whether I told him beforehand or not. It was not a case of acting first and seeking forgiveness later. No way I would go without asking H. M. first, and if he agreed for me to go, he’d be in trouble with DOJ, and his reappointment as U.S. Attorney would be coming up soon, a decision over which “Big Jim” Eastland would have veto power. Wayne was right. I should not go with him.

  Wayne picked up the phone and called the senator’s office in Washington. A secretary said he was in Mississippi for the weekend. When Wayne told her he was a Mississippi voter, which was true, the secretary gave him the senator’s office number at his plantation in Doddsville. Wayne dialed it and the senator answered the phone himself. Wayne told him he was with the FBI and needed to talk to him right away. Agents doing background checks on judicial and other nominees no doubt talked to him all the time. “Come on down,” Eastland said. I went home and waited by the phone. It was over a two-hour drive to Doddsville one way, but Wayne took advantage of law enforcement courtesy from the Highway Patrol and less than two hours later he called me. “John, that was the interview of my life. What a sharp, quick, cagey old guy that Eastland is.” Wayne told me the senator had known right away from reading the papers why he was coming. It was not some background check on some federal judge nominee. “He volunteered it all. He started right off saying, ‘You’re here about that sheriff’ before I could ask him anything.” The senator said Hamilton had shown him a printed list of the jurors, with those from Sunflower County highlighted. “I knew them but didn’t know much about them except one, a serious lady who works in a doctor’s office. I told Hamilton he didn’t want to take her, that she’d convict her own grandmother. And would you believe it, that fool sheriff left her on the jury, and she voted to convict him just like I said she would. The talk is all over the county.”

  Wayne said he asked Senator Eastland if they’d talked about the case other than the jurors. “Well, of course Hamilton, that’s his name, said it was all politics. But he had this other fellow with him, his jailer, I believe it was, which he should never have done if we were going to talk seriously. I figured the fellow was some sort of bagman, so I turned to him and asked him how often ‘the bag’ went around, and he said, ‘Every Tuesday.’ I looked at Hamilton and told him I thought that was pretty stiff on some of those little people. Hamilton just shrugged. They left after about fifteen minutes. Didn’t pay a blind bit of attention to anything I told them.”

>   On Monday, Wayne came to our office, and we met with H. M. Ray and told him about the interview. H. M., always a team player, told Wayne he had handled it just right by going alone straight to the senator. I read that as meaning H. M. appreciated our office having deniability and that an informal shirtsleeve interview rather than a suit-and-tie FBI job made the senator feel trusted and respected and was probably the reason he was so open. Still, we hoped the case would plead guilty and we wouldn’t have any need to go through all the hoops required to get a U.S. senator to testify. Nor would we ever have to tell the defense or the press about it, especially the part about the bag going around, which tended to show Senator Eastland was no babe in the woods when it came to local corruption. It reminded me of something Senator Stennis once told me. “You know, Jim and I take different approaches, different angles. I tend to go straight at things. But when Jim could do something easily and with entire propriety, he seems to love making it look like he did it by some shady backroom process. Both ways work, of course, but I’d have a mighty hard time doing it his way.”

  As we’d hoped, after we got Hamilton indicted, both he and James Reed pled guilty. At Reed’s sentencing, I was amazed to learn that this rich Delta planter had dropped out of school in the second grade and could barely read or write. At Hamilton’s sentencing, I argued hard for the maximum sentence, which was five years. Judge Smith gave me a fatherly look, as he often did, and noted that Hamilton was over sixty and already had many years of prison time to serve, and that one more year would be a sufficient deterrent. I disagreed but remained silent, thinking to myself later how the Wall Street Journal was right.

  Several years later, given a weekend furlough to visit his family, Harvey Hamilton was arrested for getting drunk and using his artificial leg to kick in the door of a youngish girlfriend he wanted to visit. His chances for early release were extinguished. Years later, when Wayne Tichenor was dying prematurely of Lou Gehrig’s disease but continuing to work, testifying from his wheelchair in a Memphis corruption case, Wayne mailed me Harvey Hamilton’s obituary from the Memphis paper. In an accompanying note Wayne called it “The only obituary I ever read which reads like an FBI rap sheet. It’s two whole columns mostly about all the crimes he committed.”

  As FBI undercover agent/artist Les Davis noted in his classic cartoon of Hamilton nailed to a sycamore tree, Wayne and I were not exactly out there eating cake and ice cream, but we had outlasted Harvey Hamilton. To his credit we had to admit that, as Hamilton had promised, he had never “squealed” on anyone. But he did unwittingly open a door for us. The years Wayne Tichenor spent investigating Hamilton’s corruption in DeSoto County led us to our next big case: former pro football star Will Renfro and other members of the DeSoto County Board of Supervisors.

  “Will Renfro, You Can’t Hit an FBI Man!”15

  While investigating Sheriff Hamilton, FBI agent Wayne Tichenor heard from many sources that corruption was, if possible, even worse among the local board of supervisors than in the sheriff’s office. In those days, supervisors were even more powerful than they are today, being the basic unit of government for each county. Men often went into office as poorly paid road foremen and exited as wealthy landowners after just two four-year terms. Tradition allowed them extensive use of county equipment and labor for their own private purposes. Tradition also considered it normal for supervisors to build expensive taxpayer-funded barns on their private property, which they were then allowed to keep as their own property when they left office. Supervisors were little lords in their own domains, most counties having five districts with no centralized office for oversight or coordination. Each supervisor decided how to spend the money for his district, or beat, as they were called. In some states, these officials were more properly called road supervisors because that was supposed to be their primary function. In DeSoto County, easily the fastest-growing county in the state of Mississippi, road and bridge building were booming, spurred by white flight from Memphis and the lure of a quiet, suburban life.

  The fastest-growing part of the fastest growing county in Mississippi was the area just across the state line from Memphis, which had over fifty thousand people but was unincorporated and had no government except the supervisors. Opportunities for corruption were almost unlimited. The area known as “Southhaven,” was just across the state line from the Memphis neighborhood known as “Whitehaven,” which when you consider the two names together gives you a pretty good idea what was driving the growth of the area. Supervisor for Southaven was a former pro football star named Will Renfro. A 6’, 6” true athlete, Renfro weighed 260 and was known from his stints as a defensive end with the Pittsburgh Steelers, Washington Redskins, and other teams as an excellent pass-rusher, feared by quarterbacks around the NFL. A local boy who had played at nearby Northwest Community College, Renfro was both admired and feared and was well known for his violent temper and his habit of using intimidation and physical force to get his way.

  In dealing with informants and local criminals in the Hamilton case, Tichenor had gotten an earful about Renfro and his ways from around the district. People complained about Renfro’s blatant misuse of public property and personnel and of how fast he was enriching himself with land deals, fat contracts, and healthy kickbacks from companies selling to the county. In a freak development that we did not learn of until later, an IRS agent named Bill Gibson, a vigorous investigator, went alone one day to the home of Renfro’s elderly parents. Gibson asked them some really blunt questions about their son’s dealings, which greatly upset the elderly parents. Gibson, a medium-height guy with a mustache, left after a few minutes without learning much from the parents and thinking the interview was of no importance. It turned out to be of great importance to the rest of us, however, especially FBI agent Wayne Tichenor.

  Also a man of medium height with a mustache, Tichenor was checking some records the next day at the Chancery Clerk’s Office in Hernando, the county seat, later immortalized as the courthouse of “Ford” county in John Grisham’s crime novels. Tichenor, a naturally gregarious man who was popular in the county due to his genial way of dealing with witnesses and suspects alike, was walking down the hall when a very large man blocked his path. “The guy was shaped like a triangle, big and wide at the top and narrowing way down to his waist,” Tichenor told me later. “We’d actually never met, but I knew from pictures of his scowling face I’d seen in the paper it had to be Renfro,” Tichenor said. With an odd mixture of violent hostility and southern manners, Renfro said, “Are you Mister Tichenor?” As soon as Wayne said “Yes, sir,” Renfro acted.

  He sort of bull-rushed me. He came at me first with his head down, then raised it up and kind of butted me with his chest, like you might do with a quarterback. He grabbed me by my jacket and lifted me up over his head like a rag doll. I felt him turning me so my head was toward the concrete and felt sure he was going to slam me head-first into the floor. We had hand-to-hand combat training in the Marine Corps, but I’d never needed it in real life. I sort of twisted my body and he ended up throwing me flat on my back instead of my head. The look on his face was pure fury. He was twisting my head around when a lady’s voice called out, “Will Renfro, you stop that. You can’t hit an FBI man.” Boy, was I glad to hear her. The look on Renfro’s face changed suddenly when he heard her voice. He looked bewildered, as if he’d been in a trance. He said something about his parents and jerked me to my feet and walked away.

  The witness, Beverly Allen of the clerk’s office, ran up to help Tichenor, who was dizzy. “What was that all about?” she asked. “I don’t know. I’d never met the guy.” Down the hall Tichenor saw another big guy, this one with a beard, walking toward him. When it appeared that Tichenor was ok, the bearded guy sat back down on a bench just outside the courtroom.

  Later that afternoon Wayne walked into my office. “Well, I finally met Will Renfro. He knocked me down right in the courthouse up on the second floor.” I asked Wayne to tell me about it and he said it was
hard to figure. “It was like the guy just snapped, and then he snapped back out of it. After he had knocked me down, he picked me back up and was tugging at my necktie. Beverly Allen said he cocked his fist to punch me in the back of the head but her screaming stopped him. She asked me why I didn’t pull my gun. I told her it happened too fast and by the time I got my wits about me, he was gone.”

  My own first thought was that this unprovoked attack would make a good addition to our RICO indictment, which I was already drafting. Then Wayne changed my mind. “When I told the guys at the office about it, they called the SAC, and he will be calling you wanting Renfro arrested. But I don’t think that’s a good idea. This is just a sideshow and could delay us for months. I wasn’t hurt, and I’m not scared of the guy. Next time I’ll be ready. Prosecuting him would make me look like a crybaby.”

  I questioned Wayne for a good twenty minutes about what he remembered. He never saw Renfro’s fist; nothing was broken. “Was there any blood?” I asked. “Just a couple drops on my cheek where his watch-band scratched me as he was turning me.” I worked on Wayne until he was convinced that even if it made him look weak, the FBI’s honor and the safety of other agents were at stake. By the time the SAC called, we’d agreed to get a federal arrest warrant for Renfro for assaulting an FBI agent in the performance of his duties.

  The SAC was happy but I was worried. Wayne’s testimony so far was weak. Then I interviewed Mrs. Allen, who was a powerful witness. By checking court records we found out who the other witness was: a first-offender drug-dealer awaiting arraignment. I called DA Gerald Chatham and told him what had happened. Without my even asking, he dropped the charges on the young dealer so his character couldn’t be impeached at Renfro’s trial by his own conviction. The kid turned out to be a beautiful witness, lucid and with that gift of articulating small details that is so persuasive to neutral listeners like jurors. His strongest statement was: