From Midnight to Guntown

by Hailman, John

  Two weeks later I got another call from Tichenor. “You’ll never believe it. George House, the serial bank robber, got out on parole and immediately robbed a couple of banks in the Delta and is hiding out in a swamp. Parchman has men on horseback and dogs out there tracking him, but we need a lawyer on the scene to answer legal questions about some things we’re thinking of doing. Can you come?” Could I come? For George House, our district’s most notorious bank robber and fugitive? “Why not?” I asked. “Well,” Wayne replied, “the officer in charge of the case, because it’s in his county and it was one of his banks that was robbed, is none other than Sheriff Jack Harrison.” I went right over, we worked together fine, and we all later laughed about the whole thing.

  Burning Crosses in the Night4

  Over the next few years I prosecuted many more civil rights cases. With experience they became a kind of specialty. We began to handle them jointly with attorneys from the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ, often young, ambitious attorneys from Ivy League schools determined to change the world and make a name for themselves on their way to lucrative private practices. Most cases involved officers using excessive force on inmates or arrestees. Several, however, involved cross-burnings, an old-fashioned nineteenth-century offense outlawed by the Ku Klux Klan Act of the 1870s. It was in one of those cases that I first met Haley Barbour, soon to be head of the Republican National Committee and later governor of Mississippi. It was the only criminal case I ever remember him handling.

  We met by phone late one evening when my wife, Regan, said, “There’s a lawyer on the phone with the thickest Mississippi accent I’ve ever heard.” Being from Rolling Fork in the deep Delta herself, she is an expert on Delta accents, so I was impressed. Haley Barbour had, as Oxford writer Jim Dees would say, “A mouth full of Mississippi.” Haley said he represented six silly late-teen rednecks from Sunflower County who got drunk one night and burned a cross—for no particular reason—in a black neighborhood but not near any particular residence. No motive was apparent beyond general racism and drunkenness. I recall Barbour made a pretty good job of softening the racial impact of the incident by getting some prominent black citizens to give good character references on the white boys and say they thought the best thing for all concerned would be for them to be put on supervised probation so the incident would go away quietly. With Civil Rights Division approval, that’s what happened. I should probably have been more impressed with Barbour’s political skills, persuading the mighty Civil Rights Division to agree to probation in a cross-burning case, but he was so smooth in how he did it I hardly noticed at the time.

  The most pathetic and slapstick cross-burning case I recall happened in DeSoto County, the fastest-growing, most urbanized county in the Northern District. Often thought of as mainly a bedroom community for Memphis, it still had some remote, old-time communities near the river, made famous by renowned legal-thriller writer John Grisham, who practiced law in DeSoto County and represented the county in the state legislature for several years.

  One year a black woman and her two children moved into one of those all-white rural enclaves near Lake Cormorant, in the western part of the county. The first week she found a crude racial epithet spray-painted on the blacktop road in front of her house. The FBI sent agents to investigate it as a Fair Housing Act violation. Their investigation identified likely suspects in the area, mostly teenagers who had conflicts with the lady’s children. The following month when the lady went to her mail box, she saw a burned patch in her yard. Examining it, she saw a pair of long two-by-fours, partially burned, with “KKK” painted on one. She called the FBI again. “I hate to bother you, but these people are stupid enough to be scary. The thing in my yard looks like a T, but I think it was meant to be a cross.”

  The FBI opened a case and started interviewing suspects, many of them minors. Piecing together information, we got a search warrant for a house down the street and found some Klan literature but no hard evidence. A few days later, a lady called me and said, “My son and I need to come talk with you while my husband’s at work. It’s about that cross.” I told her to come on. Fortunately a young woman from the Civil Rights Division was already in Oxford working with us. She was originally from Alabama and understood the nuances of the local culture. When the lady arrived from DeSoto County, she asked to speak to me alone. “This FBI agent fellow named ‘Doc’ Tichenor said you were a good man to deal with. So here we are. My boy has something he needs to tell you. I may be doing the wrong thing bringing him here, but I didn’t raise him to do things like this.”

  The lady left and came back with her son, a strapping eighteen-year-old built like a tight end. He had long hair and wore rumpled work clothes. I noticed a big bandage on one of his hands. The woman from the Civil Rights Division joined me and the mother left. The boy said, “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I need to be at work.” To get him talking, I asked about his work. “I used to think I was a pretty good shade tree mechanic till a car slipped off its blocks and fell on my head last year. Now I just do body work for this other guy.” He wouldn’t look me in the eye and seemed nervous around the young woman. “I didn’t know she would be here. You mean she came all the way from Washington, D.C., over this?”

  The word this triggered something in my head. I called the boy by his name and talked to him like I was his football coach: “Now, you look me in the eye. Your mama brought you down here to tell me something important, and I can tell by how you’re acting that you are ready to tell me. Look me in the eye and tell me just what you did.” For a moment I thought how angry the FBI supervisors would probably be about two mere lawyers getting a confession without an FBI agent present. I’d already called Wayne but he was out of town and told me to go ahead without him. I knew that could get him in hot water with the brass but figured we’d seen worse things happen. It was typical to have to worry about bureaucratic rules at such critical points in cases, but that was just part of the federal law enforcement game.

  “Do I have to look at you while I tell it?” the boy asked. “Look anywhere you like, just get it over with.” He got right to it. “Me and this other guy and his girlfriend got to drinking. After lots of beers, he said we didn’t need no niggers on our street. They’d be stealing stuff and playing that god-awful music of theirs and making trouble and stuff. My dad can’t stand niggers. I don’t really mind them myself. I don’t know why I went along, but I did.” The boy said his friend got the bright idea of burning a cross in the black people’s yard, thinking they would move away. They went out to the friend’s garage where they found a gas can and a couple of long two-by-fours. They never thought about the fact that the KKK they wrote on one two-by-four would probably be burned up with the cross, but put it on there anyway. They walked down the road carrying the two-by-fours, a small can of gasoline, and a hammer and nails.

  Not wanting to be seen carrying the cross, they didn’t put it together until they got to the trailer. Hiding in a nearby thicket, they tried to make the cross. The boy told just how it happened: “Somehow, when we got there, we only had one nail left. I nailed the two-by-fours together while the girl stood lookout. When we held the cross up, the cross piece kept slipping sideways. It looked stupid, and the hammering was way too loud. Finally I just nailed one two-by-four real solid on top of the other like a T so it would stop wobbling.”

  I could not look at the woman from Civil Rights, afraid we’d both start laughing. The boy continued: “We took a hatchet we brought along and sharpened the bottom of one two-by-four and drove it in the ground. I poured gasoline on the two-by-fours, and the guy set it alight. But he rushed it. I started running, still holding the gas can, but the fire chased me and burned my hand pretty bad. We ran all the way to my friend’s house and hid out.” When his mother saw his hand burned, he told her how it all happened. She and his father argued about it for days until she took over while the father was at work and told her son he needed to “do the right thing.”

  I
thanked the boy for doing the right thing and walked him out to the waiting room and left him with his mother. I told her he was a good young man who just needed to get better friends and stop drinking. She thanked me. I told her I’d talk to the woman from Washington and do all I could for her son. When I got back to my private office, I expected to have a good laugh with the woman. Instead, I found her crying. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen,” she said. Then we both started laughing. She called her supervisors in Washington and with her agreement we whipped up a plea agreement, got the magistrate to appoint the boy an attorney, and arranged for him to get probation for a misdemeanor so he would not have a felony record. The victim was well-satisfied and continued to live in the neighborhood. To my knowledge, the defendant has never been in trouble again.5

  Stopping the Arsons of Black Churches6

  Joey Hall, a former college football player from Alabama, was always one of my favorite investigators. Like most of us, his four-year B.A. degree had given him some knowledge of books and people, but when he graduated, he had no real idea how to make a living. Like many college athletes, he turned to law enforcement, where you had to be both physically fit and accustomed to competition and confrontation. As an ATF agent, Joey had worked with me on several bombing and firearm cases, plus an occasional arson or two. He was a natural good ole boy who dipped snuff and carried a little white Styrofoam spit cup, which helped him fit in with the good ole boys he was investigating. With his linebacker’s build and Alabama accent, he had done several undercover jobs and fit in smoothly in honky-tonks where local criminals bought and sold their Saturday night specials and an occasional illegal machine gun. The worst weapon I ever saw was a modern steel version of the old English crossbow, which local Gangster Disciples used to employ to terrify their rivals by shooting big deadly metal arrows in the front doors and out the back of their rivals’ clubhouses.

  By nature calm and by appearance menacing, Joey could pose as just about anything he wanted to, his education and keen mind hidden under an “aw shucks” demeanor. Joey loved motorcycles and could ride with anyone. If you had seen him at home with his beautiful wife and happy children, you would have thought him an unlikely candidate for a member of an outlaw motorcycle gang, but the higher-ups at ATF were apparently good judges of character. The group known as the Bandidos were getting out of hand on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. They allegedly had a small affiliate clubhouse in Lafayette County, right under our noses, about fifteen miles from Oxford in a run-down hamlet called Tula. A century earlier, Tula was a thriving town with its own business college and several prominent families who were models for characters in Faulkner. Situated high on a hill where my wife and I used to go for drives on weekends to watch eagles fly, it was named for a province often mentioned in nineteenth-century Russian literature.

  I once prosecuted the elderly postmistress of Tula for stealing mail. She usually sealed the mail back up and sent it on after reading it, without stealing anything. At her plea she admitted she’d done it for years. At sentencing the judge asked her why she did it. “Bored,” she said. “Stone bored.” That was modern Tula.

  Seizing the chance for a little adventure, Joey joined a “class” for new Bandidos, a kind of trainee group on the Gulf Coast. When I heard what he’d done, I went to talk with him. “Joey, what are you doing? If you’ve got to play undercover, do another group. There is a nest related to these guys near Oxford. Some of them probably know you. If they find out, you know what they’ll do to you. Informers die.” Joey appreciated my concern but gave me a typical Joey answer. “John, it’s my job. Besides, it’s going great, I’m almost in. The coast is a six-hour drive from here, and those guys at Tula are not really affiliated.” He turned out to be right.

  For months we went our separate ways and I didn’t see Joey. Law enforcement rumors began to float back though. Other agents said the bikers liked Joey too much. If he would agree to become a full member, they would make him an officer. Of course Joey couldn’t, because to be a full member you had to commit certain crimes, some involving drugs, others violence. You also had to participate in group orgies with the dirty women who ran with the bikers. Joey was already pretending to smoke weed (like Bill Clinton, without inhaling), but they wanted him to do harder drugs. But he did not want to pull out quite yet. The Bandidos were beginning to tell him their secrets about drug suppliers and wanted him as muscle on drug deals. He knew it was almost time to get out but begged his superiors to let him stay undercover just a little longer until he could get all the evidence they needed. He said he still felt perfectly safe.

  More sinister rumors came back to me. Joey’s wife was really worried about him. He had begun to like the biker life and sometimes referred to bikers as “friends.” The agents were worried, too. Finally, fate intervened. The Oxford ATF office was understaffed by almost 50 percent. The agency, despite its agents’ love of firearms and the gun culture, was under attack in Washington by lobbyists for the National Rifle Association (NRA) who wanted the agency abolished, or at least so reduced that it would no longer be perceived as a threat.

  Then a new phenomenon occurred. Someone began torching rural black churches across the South. One day we woke up to find nearly forty had been burned from Kentucky to Georgia. The method was always the same: from tire tracks it appeared a car would pull in behind a small isolated church out of sight of the road and toss gasoline through a rear window and ignite it. The small wooden structures were quickly engulfed in flames, and by the time local volunteer fire departments could get there, they were burned beyond saving. The matter was becoming a national issue. Jesse Jackson began visiting burned churches, demanding justice. Church groups from Rhode Island and Massachusetts began sending buses of parishioners and truckloads of supplies to help black churches in the South rebuild.

  Then the problem came home to us. One night a similar fire destroyed a church thirty minutes from Oxford at Como, home of bluesman Fred McDowell. This church was a little different, being a large solid brick structure near Interstate Highway 55 and of recent construction, but still hidden from view. We were devastated. Who would do this? Mississippi is said to be the most religious of all states and every year easily tops the list of all U.S. states for charitable giving, especially to churches. I knew from personal experience that members of small rural black churches in our district were most unlikely targets for white racists. Even they respected the conservative, nonconfrontational members of those tiny rural churches, bastions of religious conservatism of their own.

  In the early days of civil rights, the large urban black churches had been centers of militancy, voting rights drives, marches, and demonstrations. But times had changed. The schools were now integrated. Marches and boycotts had largely ended. The Ku Klux Klan and Citizens Council were basically defunct. Although racism and prejudice were still strong, perhaps even predominant, these fires did not add up to me as southern. For one thing, not a single one of the burned churches had ever been involved in any civil rights activity. Most were tiny, with congregations of fewer than a hundred, often with most members belonging to one extended family. These were hardworking, God-fearing folk, the last people even the most prejudiced whites would think of harming. It was a time when people were seeking peace and ways to get along.

  Another striking thing about the fires was that no one ever took credit for them. Hate groups would have boasted to the media or at least among themselves about what they did. Was there some crazy serial arsonist who did it for the thrill? Could it be teenage thieves and dope heads who stole gold crosses, sound systems, or whatever they could carry away? Likely not, since in every case the church members always said nothing was missing. A few blabbermouths on what I’ve always called “hate radio” began to suggest it was a conspiracy by black leaders to cause hatred of whites and reinvigorate the civil rights movement. But the facts did not fit that theory, despite the presence of the incendiary Jesse Jackson, and most whites I knew dismissed those idea
s as wacko propaganda.

  Then the problem came home. In the span of thirty minutes, two black churches burned in rural Alcorn County, previously known mostly for the Civil War battle at nearby Shiloh and for its famous sheriff, Buford Pusser, of the movie Walking Tall. The nice little town of Kossuth, named for the Polish patriot, was a peaceful place with no history of racial trouble, and Kossuth was about the least likely place ever to imagine a church arson, let alone two. The fires, captured in full color at the height of their burning, made national news, from USA Today to all the evening news shows. Something had to be done.7

  Since arson investigations fall under ATF jurisdiction and civil rights cases fall under the FBI, we immediately formed a joint task force. Alcorn County gave us full use of their ample airport conference center and several interview rooms were made available to us full time. Top brass of both agencies flew in from Washington to staff a command center. Agents with arson experience were flown in from Detroit and L.A. on ninety-day tours. We met with the local black clergy. Touchingly, one of their leaders, whom I’d known for years, said this: “We know local white people would never do this, not the worst of them. We appreciate your sympathy, but we’ve got to catch these people and stop this nightmare—soon.” It was one of the sorriest crimes I’d ever seen.

  It was also the best cooperation I had ever witnessed between the FBI and ATF. The agents in charge bent over backward to give each other credit rather than taking it themselves. There were no squabbles over jurisdiction. Every interview was conducted jointly with one investigator from each agency. The big-city experts even deferred to the practical knowledge of the local deputy sheriffs and police officers. We scoured the area, shook down every informant. Some injustices were necessarily committed. Some people unfairly concluded that the amateur photographer who shot pictures of both fires somehow got from one church fire to the other too quickly. How could he know about one of them so quickly, let alone both? He had a good answer. He heard about both of them on his police scanner, and if you knew the back roads as well as he did, they were only minutes apart. He easily passed a polygraph on all questions.