The guilty attorney made a splendid witness in his own defense. He basically confessed to what he did and tearfully begged forgiveness. Several jurors, men included, were openly weeping about what would happen to his children if he were convicted and lost his law license and income. Having the victim’s support was also highly sympathetic. The prosecutor was Al Moreton, a fair-minded advocate who was visibly moved by the defendant’s predicament and never tried to persuade the jury with cutting cross-examination or closing remarks; he just calmly presented the evidence as I watched. When we left the grand jury room for them to vote, Al and I guessed they would not indict. Through the door, down the hall where we waited, we could hear raised voices.
After nearly two hours, the foreman came out bearing the vote slip. How each federal grand juror personally votes is forever secret. No court reporter is present for their deliberations, unlike the testimony portion, which is typed up verbatim and filed under seal with the clerk. The foreman handed Al the vote slip, which is handwritten and reflects only the number of grand jurors voting to indict. By law a federal grand jury consists of not less than sixteen nor more than twenty-three persons selected at random by computer from voter registration rolls. Twelve votes are required for an indictment, or “true bill,” to be returned. In this case there were exactly twelve votes to indict, meaning that as many as eleven people could have voted not to indict.
By the time the case went to trial several months later, much debate had occurred among lawyers about the wisdom (or folly) of letting the lawyer testify unprotected in the grand jury. At trial, the victim again testified for the defendant. This time it seemed to me he created more sympathy for his own loyalty to his lawyer friend than he did for the friend himself. The trial jurors glowered at the lawyer-defendant. His attorneys, not knowing the grand jury vote, reasonably presumed that the grand jurors had not liked his testimony since they indicted him. The accused attorney probably felt the same, despite the grand jurors’ tears. Faced with those facts, the defense made the decision not to put him on the stand. The trial jury convicted him in record time, and the judge sent him off to prison. He will never know how close he came to getting off.
A Little Bitta Justice24
My old Millsaps friend Lawson “Twinkie” Lawhon was the daughter of the former sheriff of Tupelo and used to regale us with her dad’s law enforcement tales. He had special names for law enforcement officials. He called the highway patrol “roadmen.” For those who were thorns in his side he had special names. Constables, who serve as process servers for Justice Court judges, he called “a little bitta law.” The justices themselves he referred to as “a little bitta justice.” Justice Court judges in Mississippi have evolved greatly since then, when we called them Justices of the Peace, as they still do in England. They once had virtually no educational requirements. After a long struggle in the Mississippi Legislature, a bill finally passed a few years ago requiring them to have a high school diploma.
It is a little-known fact that the first great English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer, was a Justice of the Peace for ten years. He is said to have gotten most of the characters for his famous Canterbury Tales from colorful litigants who appeared before him as a JP. But of course Chaucer was trained as a lawyer at the Inns of Court in London, and lawyers do not get elected to be JPs in Mississippi. I’ve known several who ran, but not one who ever won. It seems folks think lawyers have enough power and prefer to be judged in small cases by their peers, not some verbose barrister.
The money factor was definitely the prime mover in two of my more colorful prosecutions. In one, the highway patrol came to us with a case against JP James Mitchell Glenn of Columbus, who was said to be taking bribes to fix drunk driving tickets. The patrol already had some ideas about how to catch the guy but wanted our advice and input before they tried any investigative techniques that might not lead to evidence admissible in federal court. They feared they could not get a conviction in state court because JPs are, after all, elected in their local counties. Who knew but what a crooked JP had done a favor for a potential juror or their relatives? We’d already had the same problem with local jurors and county supervisors, who had graveled many a driveway and installed many a culvert pipe for constituents. They said the local DA shared their concerns and asked us to handle the case.
The patrol’s investigative plan was to have an undercover agent pose as a drunk driver and have a cooperating patrolman pretend to arrest him, issue a DUI citation, and take him before Glenn. Luckily for us, none of the other local JPs and none of the MHP officers were suspected, nor were any local police or sheriff’s deputies. The patrol brought with them the proposed undercover agent and the patrolman who was to “arrest” him. The UC was an unusual character named Albert Sidney Johnston IV. To any civil war buff, the question that immediately comes to mind is: You don’t suppose he’s a direct descendent of the Confederate general famed for his bold military tactics? He was indeed.
“Butch” Johnston, as they called him, was every bit as bold as his famous ancestor. At the time, he was working for the state auditor’s office but was bored with accounting work and asked for any assignments offering more action. His supervisor told him MHP was looking for someone young who looked like a student and was from far enough away from Columbus that the suspect would not recognize him as a law officer. Butch fit the profile. In my life as a prosecutor, if I ever met anyone as gung-ho as our own ex-Marine AUSA Charlie Spillers, it was Butch Johnston. We discussed how drunk drivers act so he could play the role effectively, just in case other drivers came by during the “arrest.” His supervising patrolman seemed mature and responsible, so I sent them on their undercover way.
When they got to Lowndes County, things began to go wrong. Butch decided he needed to smell of alcohol so the JP would not spot him as sober and perhaps even as a UC officer, so they poured some bourbon on his shirt. Then Butch got to thinking too much. What if an honest policeman or deputy happened to be at the jail or the JP’s office when they brought him in? What if they were suspicious that there was no liquor on his breath and wanted to do a breath test on him? I had told them not to present any false official documents to the court for its records. Federal courts had recently held that strategy improper in Chicago, so they planned for the patrolman just to tell the judge everything informally—on tape, of course.
Butch still kept worrying that someone would insist on giving him a breathalyzer to be sure they nailed him. Many officers did not like the way Judge Glenn let so many drunk drivers off. One thing led to another and soon Butch Johnston was having one drink of bourbon, then two. The officer was foolish enough to let Butch actually drive for a couple of miles after several drinks before arresting him. Butch even ran off the road a little but no harm was done. The patrolman took Butch straight to Judge Glenn, who agreed on tape to let Butch off for $500 in cash, but told him he was too drunk (he was) to drive home. While in the drunk tank, Butch threw up all over everything.
Later, after we’d arrested the judge, he seemed surprised that we’d used a real drunk driver to catch him. His attorney, my old friend Tom Royals of Jackson, was impressed: “John, you federal boys really go all out to achieve verisimilitude, I’ll grant you that.” Tom liked to use big words. After we caught Judge Glenn taking a bribe on tape, we had agents go through his records of every DUI ticket he’d dismissed in the last two years and subpoenaed every driver to the federal grand jury. Sixteen of them admitted to having paid off the judge.
After Judge Glenn pled guilty to two of the charges, we figured he’d get probation or perhaps a few months in a federal jail. Instead, Judge L. T. Senter threw the book at him, saying he’d heard for years of all the problems caused by JPs coddling drunk drivers for cash. The judge hit the judge with four long years in federal prison at Big Spring, Texas. He filed several motions to reduce his sentence but Judge Senter denied them all.
We uncovered a similar DUI bribery/extortion scam involving a lawyer in Tunica County whil
e prosecuting two sheriffs there. It involved no judges, only the crooked lawyer and a bogus deputy sheriff. The lawyer, a former county prosecutor, had a deal with the deputy to bust gamblers from out of state (making the crime federal) who were driving away from casinos intoxicated. The deputy would threaten them with loss of their driver’s licenses unless they hired the “right” defense attorney. The driver would pay a “fee” of $1,500, which the lawyer would split with the deputy. Since the JPs were honest and not involved, there were no court records for us to use as proof.
We discovered the case when we busted the deputy for another offense and he ratted out the lawyer. We subpoenaed several drivers whose names and addresses the deputy had foolishly kept, and they corroborated the deputy. The case was old when we got it, and two different AUSAs begged off because their kids were friends of the defendant lawyer’s kids. Finally, one week before the statute of limitations would have run out, I asked Curtis Ivy, our toughest plea-bargainer, to take the case. We agreed to let the attorney have probation, figuring that revoking his law license would suffice as punishment under the circumstances. He took the deal, the judge accepted it, and the lawyer was convicted by guilty plea. To our shock, his pre-sentence report revealed he had over $1 million in a savings account made mostly as closing attorney on federal Farmers Home loans. The attorney transferred his probation to Gulfport and bought a run-down Holiday Inn. He insured it heavily, and months later, when Hurricane Katrina hit, he made a legal killing on the insurance. Some guys are just lucky.25
The Mississippi Beef Plant Fiasco: Slaughterhouse for Taxpayers26
Of all the corruption cases I handled, my last one was by far the most annoying, mainly because it involved so much corruption in an unhappy marriage of fraud and incompetence. The FBI, lead agency of the federal-state task force that investigated the case, named it Cattlegate like Watergate. My own nickname for it came to me spontaneously in court one day when I blurted out that it was a “slaughterhouse” for taxpayers based partly on my visits to the plant and partly on my youthful experiences helping haul truckloads of cattle to the stockyards in Chicago, where the rats were often big as cats. The media, which were all over the case from day one, chose the name everyone now recognizes, Mississippi Beef, because that was the name of the state-financed plant that failed, costing the taxpayers over $55 million. The fiasco destroyed the jobs of several hundred hardworking Mississippians just before what is now called the Great Recession began.
The plan sounded promising at first, both economically and politically. The Farm Bureau and Mississippi Cattlemen’s Association had been complaining to the legislature that “city folks” were getting all the state-supported projects and the jobs that went with them, especially the Nissan plant near Jackson. Years earlier, following the Great Depression, state leaders had come up with a solution to the opposite problem: Mississippi was then too agricultural; all the jobs and income were on the farms; cities had very few industrial jobs. The legislature, working with the governor, passed a bill called BAWI, or Balance Agriculture with Industry, creating a state agency, the A & I Board, to restore some equality. The program was a big success and helped balance the state’s economy. Our current leaders were looking for a similar solution, but in the opposite direction, helping farmers catch up with factories.
As numerous witnesses testified, the idea for the plant came one day when two leading legislators, Billy McCoy and Steve Holland, were riding up the Natchez Trace toward home. At the time, the chicken industry in Mississippi was thriving, but Mississippi cattle farmers were not. Unlike chicken farmers, they had to haul their cattle out of state because there was no in-state processing plant. The state also seemed to offer a good market for processed beef. We Mississippians love our burgers, and the legislators figured that the state’s schools would jump at the opportunity to buy locally produced beef for burgers, meat loaf, and other school lunch staples. Even the federal government would help, since it heavily subsidized school lunch programs, especially in the economically depressed Delta region. The state thus had both ample raw materials and a ready market; all it seemed to need was a local processing plant. The next day McCoy and Holland, both honest, well-meaning men, consulted other key legislators and agency heads, including Governor Ronnie Musgrove. Everybody liked their idea.
Like most plans that sound good, this one had problems. The biggest one was time. The legislature was about to go out of session for the year, and to make this project work, it had to move it along quickly and without much study. McCoy and Holland consulted knowledgeable employees and agency heads, who began looking for someone to build and run the plant. A well-regarded businessman named Richard Hall Sr. had once run beef plants at Grenada and in DeSoto County but had since retired and moved to Tennessee. A delegation flew to Tennessee on a state plane to meet with Hall, who said he was too old and enjoying retirement too much to undertake such an ambitious project. He suggested they talk to his son, Richard Jr., who had been his no. 2 man on his other beef plant projects. With very little thought, the state delegation offered Richard Jr. the deal, including some state financial support. The details are too excruciating to recount here, but interested readers can readily access them by Googling “Mississippi Beef Plant,” usually followed by the phrase “fiasco.”
Hall began seeking financing, but no bank would lend him the money. It appears in retrospect that the banks did the homework the state failed to do. Desperate to get the project going, the legislature then did something unique in Mississippi history: It agreed to guarantee 100 percent of all loans for the project. Cheap, centrally located land was found in Yalobusha County, south of Oxford, and the project was soon shovel-ready. A well-respected local contractor, Carrothers Construction of nearby Water Valley, which had built somewhat similar plants in the past and had important national contracts with the Defense Department, was hired to build the plant.
In their rush to judgment the state team had overlooked several critical facts: First, although he’d worked for his father at other plants, Richard Hall Jr. had no business experience. His main job had been driving a truck hauling cattle. Second, there were far fewer “cull” cows available in Mississippi for slaughter than had been assumed. Cull cows are inexpensive, older cattle suitable only for hamburger, not steak. Third, the market for hamburger meat was much smaller than anyone had figured, and profit margins were slim. The fourth factor was also critical: Richard Hall Sr. had retired from the beef business because his plants in Grenada and DeSoto County were losing money. Beef plants in other nearby states were closing for similar reasons.
In hindsight, another obvious error was everyone’s failure to consult the people in Mississippi who knew the most about the financial side of the cattle-rendering business: the experts at Mississippi State University. Just a couple of years earlier, they had written a comprehensive report on the subject of beef plants that came to a clear and stark conclusion: Any beef slaughtering plant built in Mississippi was almost certain to go bankrupt. Apparently no one bothered to read the report, or else did not mention it because the project was so politically popular and had so much momentum that no one could stop it.
So the building went forward. Sean Carrothers, president of the building company, constructed an excellent facility. The problem was Richard Hall. He had no idea how to write a budget for such a mammoth project and grossly underbid the job. Like the worst Pentagon nightmare, cost overruns began immediately. To cut costs, Hall began buying used and defective equipment. The state ended up with a clean, beautiful, efficient building filled with shoddy equipment that didn’t work.
The plant opened on schedule, but when Hall could not find enough cattle to slaughter and not enough buyers to purchase what he did slaughter, the plant was broke, and within two months closed its gates and laid off all its employees except two security guards. The reaction among the public and the media was complete outrage. Over $55 million in public funds had been thrown away, and hundreds of hardworking Mississippians we
re put out of work. The media, citizens, and taxpayers were screaming for blood.
At that point, the case was dropped in our lap. The only good news was that we had one of the most outstanding white-collar investigative teams I had ever worked with. State auditor Phil Bryant had hired as his chief of investigations my old friend from MHP Jesse Bingham, the tough-looking, soft-spoken investigator who often worked undercover portraying a hired hit man. Jesse proved to be just as excellent as an administrator and organizer of agents. As chief of his auditing team, Jesse retained Earl Smith, the brilliant, dogged, recently retired head of IRS criminal investigations for Mississippi. Combined with the FBI and IRS, we had a great team. They went right to work and cooperated beautifully. That was the good news.
The bad news was that the public and the media had gone ballistic, assuming that crooked politicians were to blame and should be prosecuted—for something. That assumption proved wrong. The public servants as a group were guilty of sloppy research and negligence in failing to investigate properly such an important investment of public money, but they did nothing remotely resembling criminal wrongdoing. It bothered us from the start that our investigation was probably going to dirty up some innocent politicians, but we had no option but to pursue the case and hope the public would eventually understand.
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