From Midnight to Guntown

by Hailman, John

  On February 27, Gray met with Woodson and Jones. Gray was nervous because he’d heard about the scanner picking up a conversation between Jones and Woodson somehow. He frisked Woodson but failed to find his recorder. Reassured, Gray proposed that whenever he or Jones arrested another drug dealer, they would give the seized dope to Woodson to resell and split the profits. Jones thought Lt. Gray’s idea was too risky, so they never pursued it.

  On March 4, Byers accepted another $150 at his residence and promised to protect Woodson from the police when he brought in two “keys” (kilograms) that Friday night. Jones met Woodson and told him Chief Marion was “ready to do business.” Later that day, Marion met Woodson at a baseball field. In his squad car with Woodson standing outside, the chief agreed not to interfere with his drug operation “as long as we don’t get too many complaints.” Marion refused cash, however, saying ambiguously that he could not do that “now.”

  On March 16, Gray told Woodson he knew he had met with Chief Marion. Gray said he personally did not trust the chief, but “if you want to do business with him, I don’t care.” Gray warned Woodson about his pager, which might make some younger police officers, who were “straight,” suspect Woodson was “fucking with dope.” That same day, in an unexpected, unrecorded meeting on the road, Marion flagged Woodson down and told him he’d “had a dream” that Woodson was sent to help Marion with his financial problems.

  On March 24, Lt. Gray took $150 and told Woodson that $7,000 would buy a quarter kilo of high-grade cocaine like “Peruvian flake,” which Woodson could cut to make more money. That same day, Woodson decided to do a little freelance undercover work without contacting agent Barker. He called Marion, posing as a banker in Memphis and told Marion that Woodson had just deposited $94,000 in cash at the First Tennessee Bank. The “banker” said he was checking whether a bank might have been robbed. Taken in by Woodson’s ruse and convinced that Woodson was a bigger drug dealer than he had thought, Marion met with Woodson later that day and accepted his first payoff, this time on tape, of $500. Marion warned Woodson about the call from the Memphis banker and the $94,000, saying Memphis was too close and that he should use a “Swiss bank account.” Marion agreed to keep his officers away from a particular street so Woodson could “service” a customer there with a quarter kilo of crack that night.

  On April 9, Lt. Gray followed up on the Marion conversation, telling Woodson, “Don’t never put over $10,000 in the bank at one time. The IRS watches it. Get a safety deposit box in somebody else’s name.” The same day, Deputy Byers told Woodson he also knew about Woodson’s money in the bank because “Willie Frank” had told him about it, thus completing the conspiracy between the officers about Woodson’s unauthorized but successful ruse about the $94,000: The information had gone from Marion to Gray to Jones to Byers, demonstrating each had clear connections with the others.

  On April 13, Jones took $150, noting, “You pleasing me.” On April 15 and again six days later, Chief Marion took $500 from Woodson, promising, “If I hear some tips, you’ll be the first to know,” and “If you get fucked up, it won’t be because of Anthony Marion, cause I do my part.” Marion also confided that he had put in a good word for Woodson with Woodson’s federal probation officer, Rusty Rasberry, which was true.

  Having witnessed the success of Woodson’s unauthorized pretext call, the FBI decided to make a pretext call of its own to show Marion would keep his promise to protect Woodson. Corbett Hart, chief of narcotics for the Shelby County Sheriff in Memphis, made the call. Hart, a twenty-two-year veteran of the FBI before he retired to take the sheriff’s job, had served for a decade as head of the federal-state drug task force in Memphis. Tall and lean, Hart always wore a Stetson hat and strongly resembled a Texas Ranger. He was always one of our favorite officers. On May 3, Hart called Marion and told him there had been a drug raid in Memphis in which officers found the name “Stanley Woodson” in the dealer’s address book with telephone and pager numbers, the same ones Woodson had given to Marion. Hart asked Marion if Woodson was a doper. Marion said, “Yes.” Hart told Marion that if Woodson showed up in Memphis, Hart’s men would arrest Woodson and asked Marion to let him know if Marion heard anything about Woodson. Marion agreed. At no time did Marion ever call Hart, nor did Marion tell him that Woodson was paying Marion $500 a week. Instead, that same day, Marion met with Woodson and warned him not to go to Memphis and to find a drug source elsewhere.

  By June 7, the FBI had assembled agents to arrest all the drug dealers and corrupt police officers caught in the sting. They also made plans to catch Chief Marion in actual possession of payoff money. Woodson met Marion that day and paid him $500 in cash inside Woodson’s vehicle, counting out on tape twenty-five twenties. Marion stuffed the money in the front of his pants and walked to his house, encountering his wife on the way, then got in his car. After his wife drove away, Marion was pulled over by task force agents. Officers seized $420 in $20 bills hidden inside Marion’s pants. The serial numbers of the seized bills matched those given to Woodson for the payoff moments earlier.

  FBI agent Mark Denham, leader of the arrest team, advised Marion of his rights. Marion first claimed he was investigating Woodson, but when Denham asked Marion where were any documents to prove it, Marion dropped that story and began claiming he was trying to develop Woodson as an informant. When Denham told him all his talks with Woodson were on tape, Marion dropped that claim as well. On the ride from Holly Springs to the Marshal’s office in Oxford, Marion told Denham he wanted to tell “the full story.” He admitted accepting cash from Woodson, saying he knew it was wrong. Marion signed a statement admitting he had accepted cash four or five times, not counting the money on the day of his arrest. Marion never mentioned the call from Chief Hart of Memphis, nor the call from the “banker” about the $94,000 deposit.

  At trial, all four defendants rested without testifying. Their attorney was veteran criminal defense counsel Joey Langston of Booneville. Langston tried to establish defenses entirely by vigorous cross-examinations, but utterly failed to shake Woodson, whose explanations flustered Langston. When asked if the case did not rest solely on the word of a convicted felon, Woodson replied, “It’s not my word against they word. The tapes are the primary evidence.” Listening to the judge’s instructions, Woodson had become a lawyer overnight. Woodson noted that federal agents wearing badges could never, working alone, catch corrupt officers like these defendants who would only deal with someone with a shady reputation, saying: “If you want to shoot craps, you ain’t going down to the church to find a game, are you?” When Langston questioned Woodson’s unilateral decision to pose as a banker, Woodson explained, “Mr. Barker was an FBI federal agent, but Mr. Barker knowed nothing about the streets. I been out in the streets all my life. I been a pool hustler. I been around plenty of people selling drugs. I ain’t no Johnny Lunchmeat/Sam Sausagehead son of a gun, you know. I didn’t fall off no pumpkin wagon.”

  With a witness like Stanley Woodson you of course expect some problems. Even after reserving a separate room for him in a motel with FBI agents staying in rooms on each side of him for protection, he still insisted on driving to trial on his own. Little did we suspect he would travel not in his truck, but on a motorcycle. It poured down rain all day on the Sunday before the first trial began in Aberdeen on a Monday. Stanley was to arrive about 4:00 P.M. to go over his testimony. As we worried and tried unsuccessfully to call his family, he finally roared up at 8:00 P.M., soaking wet but happy. “That was a good ride. Settled my nerves. Now I’m ready to testify.”

  As we expected, Stanley Woodson made an outstanding witness. He was on the stand all day the first day. Joey Langston had hardly begun his cross-examination when the judge recessed for the day. Under court rules we were not allowed to talk to Woodson out of court while he was under cross-examination. We told him to just stay in his room and chill out. He said he was tired from all that thinking and remembering and was grateful for a chance to rest. He promised to stay
in and be good.

  In the morning, Barker awakened me early, knocking on my door. “Stanley’s not in his room.” Always the optimist, I said, “Maybe he went for a ride or an early breakfast.” By the time I’d showered, Mike was back. “We found Stanley. He’s in the local jail.” I immediately jumped to the conclusion that the defendant officers had got some buddies to cook up a bogus arrest to ruin our case. Mike disabused me. “No way. He’s in jail for attempted murder. We’ll need a writ of habeas corpus to get him out.” I got the judge’s courtroom clerk to type the writ, and the sheriff brought Stanley to court in an orange jail jumpsuit just in time for court at 9:00 A.M. I had no time to speak to Stanley at all. He waved to me in the courthouse hallway and gave me a big, gold-toothed grin and a V sign.

  I stopped by the judge’s chambers and told his law clerk briefly what little I knew of what had happened and asked permission to re-call Woodson as our witness just to explain why he was in orange jail attire. I had no idea what his explanation would be, and our case was clearly on the line, but I somehow had an odd confidence that Stanley would pull it out. My first question was, “Mr. Woodson, you and I have not seen each other since court ended yesterday, have we?” He was deadly serious. “No, Sir,” he said. “So you haven’t told me why you’re in custody, have you?” Again he said, “No, Sir.” Turning to the jury I said, with a hint of frustration, “Then please inform the judge and the jury and me why you are wearing an orange jumpsuit from the jail.” Woodson, just as the best-trained expert witness would have done, pivoted in the witness chair and faced the jury directly. “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Hailman told me last night to stay in my room where I’d be safe and get a good night’s sleep. I tried to, but that attorney with all his questions had done made me so nervous I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to go for a ride on my motorcycle. I came upon some old boys shooting dice in a little club. When I kept winning, they thought I was cheating. There was a loud argument, and being a stranger I was the one who ended up getting arrested. That’s about it.” With trepidation I submitted Stanley Woodson to Joey Langston for cross.

  Joey jumped in with both feet: “Mr. Woodson, you forgot to tell the jury what you were arrested for, didn’t you?” Stanley nodded. “Yes, Sir.” Joey smiled at the jury and said, “It was for attempted murder, wasn’t it?” Stanley shook his head and asked, “Can I explain?” Joey said smugly, “Please do.” Stanley faced the jury. “Well, Sir, when they got to accusing me of cheating, I got mad. Words was exchanged. A knife was involved.” Joey couldn’t wait and broke in, “You tried to kill a man with that knife, didn’t you?”

  Stanley answered the question with a question: “Sir, you ever shoot marbles?” Hearing no answer, he pressed on: “Well, Sir, before the argument, we was playing another little game like boys do, like in Boy Scouts. It’s a game where you throw a knife and stick it from different angles like over your back or between your legs and such. We’d been playing that game long before the argument. One time I stuck the knife in the wall behind the bar with a pretty neat throw over my shoulder. I hadn’t seen the bartender coming up and it almost hit him. I felt real bad. He didn’t mind at the time, but later when the fight broke out, he brought it back up to the sheriff’s people.”

  Langston couldn’t resist: “So you threw a knife at the bartender and nearly killed him, didn’t you?” Stanley shook his head vigorously. “No, Sir, no, Sir. It was just a little game of mumblety-peg that got out of hand.” When several men on the jury started smiling, I knew we were o.k. They had played the old boy scout game of mumblety-peg, throwing and sticking a knife, just like I had. All old scouts know mumblety-peg. Stanley’s explanation made sense. The trial resumed.

  Langston pointed out to Woodson how he had sometimes been wrong about the exact times and places of payoffs, which he admitted. “You were not telling the truth about those payoffs, were you?” Irked by the challenge to his memory and his veracity, which were remarkably good considering the large number of conversations, Woodson explained how difficult it is for an uneducated man to avoid being tripped up by a clever lawyer: “Sir, it’s hard to tell the truth when there’s so much truth to tell.” Langston later joked that we had put those words in Woodson’s mouth but had to agree that the remark was way too original for anyone but Woodson himself to have come up with. At least Stanley didn’t do to Joey what another of Tom Dawson’s cooperating defendants once did to another defense attorney. When asked on cross if he was not selling out a friend, the witness replied: “Sir, he is not my friend. Jesus is my friend. He is just an associate.”

  When both sides had rested and the jury went out, Tom Dawson, Joey Langston, and I sat around and joked about what a character Stanley Woodson was. Tom and I felt the case was in the bag, but Joey seemed suspiciously confident. Sure enough, after several hours, the jury announced it was hopelessly deadlocked eleven to one for conviction. One woman flatly refused to discuss the case at all. The judge declared a mistrial. A few months later, we tried it again with the same result. Another woman had refused to deliberate. We told Joey we’d retry the four officers and convict them if it took us fifty trials.

  The third trial went better. During voir dire, two ladies asked to speak to the judge privately. When he interviewed them, each told the same story. Defendant Billy Ray Gray had contacted them directly and tried to get them to find him not guilty. They had of course refused but were afraid to report the contacts until they got to court and were under oath. The judge excused the jurors and told us to have the FBI interview them before they left the courthouse. The trial went just as it had the first two times. This time, however, after being out less than an hour, the jury returned unanimous guilty verdicts on all defendants on all counts.

  We got an indictment for jury tampering on Billy Ray Gray, who pled guilty to it, but claimed he acted on his own and refused to implicate anyone else. He got two years added to his sentence. At sentencing, I felt sorry for defendant Willie Frank Jones. We’d gotten friendly at recesses during all the trials, and to Tom and me, he was just a black version of a good ole boy. He was playing by the rules he’d learned while growing up in Marshall County. I felt even worse about Chief Anthony Marion. He came from an excellent family. His father was a respected preacher and local role model. Because of their good records, we’d offered them plea agreements with three years to serve, a tough sentence for police officers, who are always subject to abuse in prison by other prisoners. But Marion had listened to Langston and gambled and lost. As Tom Dawson had warned Marion, if he got convicted, under the mandatory sentencing guidelines, he would still be in prison when his small children were grown and would not be around to see them graduate from high school. Tom’s prophecy came true.

  The case had one final twist. After the second trial, our excellent FBI case agent Mike Barker got to missing his family so much that he resigned from the FBI and moved back to North Carolina. His replacement as case agent was Alan Tatum, who was himself, as explained elsewhere, later twice convicted of corruption for perjury and theft of evidence and went to prison. All in all, it was a case we’d never forget.

  A Delta Lawyer23

  When lawyers lose a case, their clients tend not to pay them, especially in divorce and criminal cases. The lawyers may then have to sue the client to recover their fee. Criminal clients often file bar complaints against their lawyers when they’re convicted. Many file post-conviction complaints claiming their lawyer was incompetent. As the main expert witnesses to their competence, we prosecutors end up, in effect, defending the defense lawyers. That situation, ironically, has often helped relations between prosecutors and defense attorneys in our district to remain highly amicable. We may start as adversaries, but we know that in the end we may well be allies.

  Prosecuting fellow lawyers is a touchy subject. For a variety of reasons, sometimes financial problems, sometimes alcohol or a midlife crisis of skirt-chasing, lawyers end up stealing from their clients to fund their bad habits. Some of my own law school
classmates ended up this way. The most tempting trap for needy lawyers is client money. While representing clients, lawyers often end up as guardians of client funds, which are placed in what is called a trust account. Interest on the accounts, by some legal legerdemain of the state bar, goes to another trust fund used to pay for legal services for the poor, which is good. Unfortunately, some lawyers cannot be trusted with a trust and purloin the money. When lawyers are caught, the matter is usually handled by the state bar, and the guilty lawyer is disbarred for a period, but rarely prosecuted criminally.

  In one memorable case from the Delta, a postal inspector brought us a client-fund embezzlement case to prosecute, probably because of the large amount of money involved. I don’t single out Delta lawyers here. We’ve prosecuted lawyers from all corners of our district, most often for income tax fraud, but also for drug offenses and worse. But to lawyers from the Hills, Delta lawyers have always seemed to be a tad more flamboyant in their misconduct. Lawyers in the hills even say Dick Scruggs would never have been convicted if he’d stayed on the Gulf Coast instead of moving to Oxford, where morals are said to be more strict, but I wouldn’t know about that.

  One particular Delta lawyer needed money to finance a hot middle-aged romance. He found plenty of it in his trust fund belonging to a rich client of long standing who rarely needed the funds or checked on them. When caught, the lawyer hired some of the best lawyers in the state to defend him. In an unusual strategy, the lawyers asked us to allow the accused lawyer to testify in his own defense before the federal grand jury. That strategy is usually considered suicide by defense lawyers and prosecutors alike. Federal law prohibits defense attorneys from being in the grand jury room, so testifying defendants are pretty much at the mercy of prosecutors. But in this case, the attorney believed, rightly, that to save his reputation he had to testify and try to avoid indictment. He even persuaded the victim, an old friend as well as a client, to testify on his behalf in the grand jury as a defense witness to say that if the lawyer had just asked him, he would gladly have lent him all the money he needed without interest for as long as he needed it.