From Midnight to Guntown

by Hailman, John

  When the huge guy pulled on the little guy’s necktie and twisted his head around and pulled back his fist, the big guy’s fist was bigger than the little guy’s head. If that lady hadn’t screamed, one punch in the back of the head could have killed him. I was too scared to do anything and it was all over in seconds. As soon as the big guy saw there were witnesses, he ran off.

  Now we had a case, with two strong, neutral eyewitnesses to reinforce Tichenor, the victim who couldn’t see what happened to him.

  Reporters were all over the story as soon as Renfro was arrested. Ken Hughes, supervisor of the Oxford FBI office and Tichenor’s close friend, asked the U.S. Marshals to let him make the arrest personally. They agreed. Hughes took 6’, 5” Joe Lattus, the biggest agent in the FBI office, with him. When Ken said something about hoping Renfro resisted, I told him not to provoke anything. “Our case is good, so don’t mess it up with revenge.” Ken agreed and said he was just saying he wished Renfro would resist but knew that any beating of Renfro would hurt Wayne’s case. The arrest went well. Renfro was polite and offered no resistance, talking only about harassment of his parents and that Tichenor had slipped on some sawdust on the floor from repairs being made to the courthouse. Hughes did have one problem with Renfro, however. His wrists were so huge no FBI handcuffs would go around them. U.S. Marshal rules require that arrested subjects be handcuffed for transportation. Hughes did the only thing he could under the circumstances: he put leg irons on Renfro’s wrists. They both laughed about it.

  Media coverage of the case was heavier than usual because Renfro was up for reelection. Both Renfro and the women at the courthouse gave statements to the press, and when his story about Tichenor slipping on sawdust got out, his opponents started handing out dustpans with little brooms attached encouraging voters to sweep out the courthouse and Renfro with it. They had a field day with the story, with Renfro huge and menacing beside Tichenor, the 160-pound Vietnam veteran who had somehow fended off Renfro’s attack.

  The trial was set for a Monday in Clarksdale. U.S. Attorney H. M. Ray insisted on sitting with me at counsel table at trial to add the personal weight of his office to support the FBI agent, whom he felt the defense might unfairly attack. When H. M. and I got to the motel Sunday night, someone had left the windows open and the air conditioner off. The walls of our room were so covered with mosquitoes they looked black instead of motel beige. We asked to change rooms, but there were no empty rooms in town, reporters having gotten most of them. H. M. and I splattered the walls with dead mosquitoes for ten minutes or so until Wayne Tichenor arrived with bug spray. After meeting until late in the evening at the courthouse preparing for trial, we got back to the blood-splattered motel rooms, which smelled like cotton poison, but at least they were cool and we slept through the smell with no problem.

  Our part of the trial went smoothly. Renfro had hired Oxford law partners Hal Freeland and Gerry Gafford, two good lawyers and friends of ours who we knew would not try any low tricks. Their only problem was keeping Renfro under control. The big man came to court looking even bigger than usual, foolishly wearing tight jeans and a “muscle” shirt with no sleeves, revealing his enormous upper arms. Our witnesses were excellent, and Judge Keady ruled that the defense could not question our drug dealer witness about why he was at the courthouse because his case had been dropped and such questioning would have been more prejudicial than probative. Then the defense took over.

  Having little choice, there being no eyewitnesses favorable to him, Renfro’s attorneys put the big man on the stand. His very presence, his intensity of movement and his angry expression seemed to unnerve the jury. Then they decided to do something which, ever since, I’ve always instructed my law students in trial practice never to do: They tried an obviously unrehearsed courtroom demonstration. Such scenes are highly persuasive if they work, but disastrous if they go wrong. With Renfro on the witness stand, Hal Freeland called for his partner to come forward, asking the judge for permission to act out the confrontation with Tichenor. H. M. and I were astonished. Renfro’s appearance was menacing already, and it was a godsend for us for the jury to see his body in action.

  Freeland said to his partner, “Gerry, go stand in front of the jury. How tall are you?” The answer was about the same height as Tichenor. It was evident Gafford weighed a good deal more, but we certainly had no objection. “Gerry, you lie down on your back on the floor in front of the jury in the position Mr. Tichenor said he was in when, as we contend, he slipped on the sawdust.” Gafford looked surprised, convincing us this scene was as big a surprise to him as it was to us. He lay down on his back right in front of the jury box. “Now, Will, you show the jury how you helped Agent Tichenor to his feet.” Renfro, cat-quick, walked forward and straddled Gafford with his legs. Looking right at the jurors, Renfro reached down with amazing quickness and strength, grabbed Gafford by both shoulders, and with a huge grunt like one of those modern tennis players, hauled Gafford high up in the air, with his feet dangling helplessly, then put him back down on his feet hard, glowering and scowling all the while. “That’s just how it happened,” Renfro volunteered.

  The jurors were wide-eyed and pushing themselves back up in their seats. Rather than showing how Renfro’s enormous strength allowed him to “help up” a fallen Tichenor, the image was exactly the man Tichenor had described: quick, unbelievably strong, and totally violent looking. Tossing his blonde hair and flexing his biceps, Renfro proudly returned to the witness stand. The jurors would not look at him. Several seemed plainly scared.

  I personally felt the trial was over, but the defense had promised it would put on some “good character” witnesses to establish Renfro’s reputation as a truthful man whose testimony should be believed and whose only violence had taken place on the football field. When we recessed the night after the demonstration, I asked Wayne if Renfro’s reputation was really that good. “Hell no, it isn’t. You want some people to prove it?” Wayne picked up the phone, made three phone calls, and in a couple of hours three middle-aged men appeared at our motel room. They were hard-working types still dressed in their work clothes. Each would testify that he had done work for Renfro and that he was not only angry and violent all the time but could not be trusted to be honest or tell the truth.

  I knew that somewhere in the rules there was an anti-character-witness rule, but I’d never used it before. Under the rules, usually the only way you can attack a defendant’s character for violence is if he injects it himself by his own witnesses, as Renfro had done. And the only way we could put on testimony that a defendant was not to be believed was if he took the stand. The Renfro case gave me my first chance to test the effectiveness of such testimony. It was devastating. The jurors shook their heads in disbelief at some of the deals Renfro had done, then nodded in agreement as each workman witness testified that he personally would not believe Renfro under oath. The jury went out and did not stay long, coming back with guilty verdicts on all counts.

  We went back to the RICO case and finished the investigation and got that indictment even before Renfro was sentenced on the assault case. When Judge Keady gave Renfro eighteen months for assaulting Tichenor, we were satisfied. Then Renfro changed lawyers, hiring Billy Pace, the retired former ATF agent from the Tupelo Ku Klux Klan case, who’d retired and hung out a shingle. After reviewing our evidence on the corruption case, Billy asked if we’d consider a plea agreement. By then we were well into our investigation of other DeSoto County supervisors and didn’t want to spend several more weeks trying a complex corruption trial on Renfro. We let Renfro plead to one count. Judge Keady gave him two more years of prison time in a consecutive sentence, and we moved on, convicting DeSoto supervisors Johnny Wallace and James Earl Riley.16 We thought our days with DeSoto supervisors were over, hoping the voters would be more selective next time and elect some honest replacements. But there was still one DeSoto County case left. It was not the most important, but it was certainly one of the most unusual.

&n
bsp; John Grisham Sr. and the Wobbly Wagon17

  One of my oddest cases began, not surprisingly, in an odd way. One morning U.S. Attorney Bob Whitwell called me into his office to meet with state auditor Pete Johnson. Bob got right to the point. “John, Pete here just flew up on the state plane on an important matter. Pete, tell John the deal.” Pete proceeded to explain that his office had just closed an extremely sensitive investigation on the father of John Grisham, whose first novel, A Time to Kill, I had just read and much admired. Little did I suspect at the time just how famous or how rich John would become—nor how modest and natural he would remain despite his wealth and fame.

  Pete said he had heard that the case agent for his office was angry that John Sr. had been allowed to pay back some money he’d taken from DeSoto County and that there would be no state prosecution of him. According to the auditor’s staff, the agent had delivered a copy of the case report to our office the previous day. As criminal chief, the file would have been given to me for assignment. If it involved corruption, I probably would have assigned it to myself. I told Bob I’d never heard of such a case but would of course tell him immediately if I heard anything about it. I was too busy the rest of the day to think about it, but when I skimmed my in-box before going home, halfway down the pile I saw a thick manila envelope with a note from Pat Williams, the secretary who sat outside my door. Dated the previous day, the note said, “Mr. Hail-man, a gentleman left this and said to give it to you and asked you to call him after you read it.” It was the Grisham file.

  The first page said that John Grisham Sr., a DeSoto County supervisor who also owned a heavy equipment business, was in financial difficulty and had taken advantage of his situation as supervisor to sell the county some worthless equipment and charged them over $20,000 for it. Without reading it thoroughly, I took it straight to Bob. Always an emotional guy, Bob said, “John, this is horrible. John Grisham was my law clerk in private practice. He’s a great guy. His father has lots of political enemies, but to me he’s probably the most honest guy on the board. But I’m a Republican, and he and John are both big Democrats. If we pursue this case, it will not only look political but I could lose John’s friendship, and I cherish that. I’m going to recuse myself from this case entirely. You study it and work with Al Moreton, and y’all do whatever you think is right.” It was classic Bob Whitwell, sensitive both to what was personal and what was legal and how it would look to the public. I took the file home with me.

  Reading the file would have been funny if it had not been about my friend John Grisham’s father. Although we’d never gone to trial against each other, he’d defended a couple of my cases at the investigative stage, and I admired both his skill and his character. In one case, he represented a fellow member of the legislature suspected of burning his own business for the insurance money. When I asked him, John agreed to submit his client to a polygraph by my favorite examiner, Bob Campbell of the FBI. We promised John and his client we would show them all the questions in advance so there would be no misunderstandings that could skew the results. They agreed. We often used the polygraph to clear people and reduce the number of suspects, rather than hope the suspect would flunk the test and confess. Most agencies select agents to be trained on the polygraph from among their best interrogators. One of the most important uses of the polygraph is not only to clear the innocent but to take advantage of the critical moments just after a suspect fails the poly to use his fear against him and obtain damaging admissions or even confessions. In the case of John’s client, my instinct was that he would flunk the test flat and might well confess. He was a nervous guy anyway, and all the circumstantial evidence pointed to him. The fire could have been an accident, of course, but no one else had a motive to burn his business.

  The morning John and his client arrived, I felt we were in luck. The guy was sweating profusely. When Bob Campbell began to explain the polygraph process to him, the guy began to shake as well as sweat. Bob read the signs right away. “You took some sort of drug to try and beat my machine, didn’t you?” The guy began to nod. “What did you take?” The guy shook some more and said, “Beta blockers.” Bob asked if he was taking them under a doctor’s supervision. “No—they’re my wife’s.” When the guy told him how many he’d taken, Bob’s eyes widened and he turned to John. “Mr. Grisham, I can’t polygraph your client in this condition. There’s no telling how he’d react, but he’d certainly flutter my needles and appear deceptive even if he told the truth. I strongly recommend you take him straight to his doctor on the way home. The way he’s looking he may well overdose.”

  John asked to be excused and took his client into the office next door. I swear we heard a heavy thud, like a body hitting the wall. Bob and I thought his client had either fallen out against the wall or John had slammed him up against it. I always favored the latter theory, but never asked John what happened. He then knocked quietly and stuck his head in the door. “We’re leaving. I won’t be representing him anymore, but I’ll see that he gets medical treatment if he needs it.” It was the last time we would see John on that case.

  The Grisham Sr. case being from DeSoto County, it went to Wayne Tichenor, who covered that county. After investigating and convicting Harvey Hamilton and Will Renfro and other supervisors from there, Wayne was loaded with sources. I gave him the auditor’s report and told him its history. We met with the investigating auditor himself, a nervous guy who seemed depressed. A few weeks later, he committed suicide. In addition to that downer, Wayne felt just as I did about the case: “I really liked Grisham’s book. It was very true to life in DeSoto County as I know it and pretty pro-law-enforcement for a defense attorney. I wish the case against his father wasn’t so strong.”

  Wayne had already gone much deeper than the state auditor. All over DeSoto County people were laughing about the case. Mr. Grisham had apparently called on an old friend in Michigan named Richard Selander for a little favor. He obtained for Selander a license to sell equipment to the county and called him on the phone and told him of two pieces of junked equipment he had that they could pretend Selander owned and was selling to the county. Mr. Grisham assured Selander that the equipment was good and the county needed it, but it belonged to Grisham’s company and under conflict-of-interest rules, he could not sell it to the county himself. Selander was to be a harmless straw man who would fly to Memphis, drive down to DeSoto County, pick up the equipment off-site and deliver it on a rented trailer to the supervisor’s lot as if he had driven it all the way from Michigan.

  Right away the plan went seriously wrong. Several county employees recognized the old junked equipment as local, not from Michigan. Worse, Selander rented a trailer that was too light, which wobbled the couple of miles to the county barn and nearly collapsed under the weight of the heavy diesel engine it was hauling. The matter was too notorious to ignore. We had no choice but to prosecute, whatever our personal feelings. We confronted Selander. He confessed, pled guilty, and with his testimony, we got an indictment against John Grisham Sr.

  At arraignment, the father was harsh and rude to his son, who was representing him. We heard him say things like naive and do-gooder and “If I’d just denied it like I wanted to, we wouldn’t be here.” I made up my mind to tell John he needed to hire his dad another lawyer. Before I could, however, attorney Grady Tollison of Oxford called and said he would be defending the elder Mr. Grisham. We gave Grady our discovery documents, and when we met to discuss the case, he didn’t waste time. A fervent Democrat, Grady said, “John, we need to plead this case, but are y’all out for blood? John seems to think this is some sort of political vendetta pushed by Whitwell and the Republicans.” I assured Grady it was not political. I also asked him personally to try and persuade John to understand how bad Bob felt about it, but John remained convinced that Bob was behind it. For some reason, he never held it against me though, maybe because I’m politically neutral and possibly because of the plea agreement Grady and I worked out. The father would plead
guilty to making an interstate phone call in support of a fraud on the county. No federal restitution was required, since he’d already paid the county back in full under the agreement with the state auditor. All that was left was how much time he’d have to serve. We had to insist on some prison time, not probation, as we did in all corruption cases, but Grady persuaded us that being gone from his business doing time would bankrupt his client and he would lose his business and his life savings.

  I don’t recall whose idea it was, but from somewhere we came up with a compromise. The defendant would serve his time, eight months, at night in the federal jail in Memphis, not exactly an easy place for a man in his sixties. Every day from 8:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M., he would work at his business, which was located less than an hour from the jail. For once a deal worked as planned. The father resigned as supervisor, turned his business around, had no more legal problems, and successfully retired several years later to a quiet home in the Ozarks. His son, however, has held a lifetime grudge against Bob Whitwell, offering to finance his opponents if Bob went into politics, which he did, running for Congress after eight successful years as U.S. Attorney. Despite his deserved notoriety as a crime-fighter, Bob lost the election to former state senator Roger Wicker, who is now a United States Senator for Mississippi.

  Many of John Grisham’s best-selling legal thrillers have featured FBI agents and U.S. Attorneys as ambitious, heartless villains. As noted earlier, he never seemed to hold it against me personally, even agreeing to speak to my law and literature class at the Ole Miss Law School, patiently autographing the stacks of his books my students brought to him. Later his son Ty took my federal trial practice class and easily won the award as top student in the class. Only one thing remains to be said about this case. Rumors flew at the time that a Republican politician or politicians came to Bob Whitwell and urged him to pursue the case. That was false. Two politicians did come, but both were Democrats, and Bob turned them away.