At sentencing, veteran U.S. district judge Neal Biggers, who had been both a state district attorney and a state circuit judge before his appointment to the federal bench, expressed astonishment at certain statements in the probation officer’s pre-sentence report: “I thought I’d seen everything, but this is the most shocking and disgusting case I’ve ever witnessed.” The father of Teresa’s children, the lover she wanted to be with so badly she would kill her husband to achieve it, was none other than her own grandfather, William Hinson. Talk about keeping it in the family.
When the case hit the local media it was first greeted by groans of “Oh no, another black eye for Mississippi,” followed quickly by questions as to which counties were most subject to inbreeding and incest (the Northeast Appalachian region won). U.S. News & World Report ran a tongue-in-cheek story about the case that led to an invitation to Teresa to appear on the Sally Jessy Raphael show in New York. We were a little surprised Jerry Springer did not have the grandfather and the husband on his show for a bout of choreographed fisticuffs.
The show was ostensibly to discuss how to prevent or stop sexual abuse of young women by family members, although public interest in the more prurient aspects no doubt played a bigger role. At the request of her attorney, Andy Howorth of Oxford (now circuit judge Andrew Howorth), Judge Biggers reluctantly allowed Teresa Hutcheson to travel to New York only so she could earn the hefty fee Ms. Raphael was paying to help with the care of her children while she and her grandfather were off serving their federal time. I suppose that was a plus. When released they moved together to another state, far away from Mississippi. Cases like that one could give incest a bad name.
Mississippian Jeff Fort Becomes the Angel of Fear, Leader of the El Rukns, Chicago’s Most Dangerous Gang since Al Capone8
Eddie “Cowboy” McNairy was a most unusual man. A tall, lean black man with a dignified manner, he made his living as a professional gambler in large games with wealthy white bankers and planters. He lived in a family compound of several houses filled with brothers and cousins and their families in the hamlet of Egypt, a few miles north of Aberdeen, the beautiful antebellum city where one of our federal courthouses was located. You first noticed Cowboy by his unique mode of dress: He always wore starched, sharply creased blue jeans with an expensive western shirt and bolo tie. He wore the best-looking, most expensive leather cowboy boots I ever saw. None of your snakeskin for Cowboy. His boots were plain dark-brown cow’s leather with no fancy stitching or metal trim. His boots looked like something you might have had made for yourself by hand in London and could have worn to a dinner party of U.S. Senators in Washington and outshone the boots of even the richest western senator. How Cowboy survived as a black gambler taking rich white men’s money was a mystery to us at first, but after we got to know him better, he explained it to us as a combination of moxie and subtle, bold-faced cheating.
One afternoon Cowboy was sitting with some friends in Aberdeen at a local service station, waiting for a big dice game that night. Across the street was the biggest black church in town. As he watched, an unusual procession pulled up at the church. Five matched maroon Lincoln Continental Mark VIs pulled up and parked, all in a row. Large black men in suits wearing Muslim-style caps got out of the first and last cars. They gathered around the middle car in a protective circle until a short, thick man emerged wearing quite a costume. On his head was a multicolored, sloped-down leather hat of the kind worn in East Africa. He had lots of rings on his fingers and below his burly neck was a full-length deep-brown mink coat, the kind only big-time drug dealers can wear and look natural. On his face was a mean, cold expression. No one that day recalled ever seeing him smile. Cowboy McNairy had one immediate thought, which he expressed to his pals: “This man means money for Cowboy.”
His pals said the man was the most important gang leader in Chicago and perhaps the entire United States. He was the kingpin of a coalition of smaller groups who controlled drug dealing and other crimes on the South Side of Chicago. The bodyguards around him were the leaders of the smaller gangs he had brought together. He called them his “generals.” His gang was first called the Blackstone Rangers and later renamed the El Rukns. His name was Jeff Fort, and he was a killer.
Cowboy’s friends told him Fort was born in Aberdeen but moved to Chicago when he was nine. A skinny kid with one of those fade hairdos that gets bigger at the top, he was a charismatic speaker who developed a following as a preacher of Black Power while still a teenager. In his twenties he was invited to Washington by the Nixon administration to lead an antigang initiative as part of the War on Poverty left over from the Johnson administration. Fort was given a large budget to get the program going. Over the first year he stole over a million dollars and used it to build up his gang. When Congress realized what had happened, they subpoenaed him to testify about how he spent the money. When Fort brazenly took the Fifth, Congress held him in criminal contempt and he went to federal prison for a year. He came out a different man, muscled up from weightlifting and with no further smile on his face. Certain blogs now say it was sexual abuse in prison that turned him from a smooth con man into a vicious killer, but whatever the reason, Fort came out with a powerful will to rule over others and no longer just by verbal persuasion.
In prison, he converted to Islam and sought to join Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, but they rejected him as an insincere opportunist. Always the entrepreneur, Fort set up his own ersatz form of pseudo-Islam, giving his followers Arabic names and a Muslim facade to support his main goal: tax-free status as a religious sect for his gang’s many businesses. To look more Islamic, Fort and his generals required their women to wear Islamic gear, from long gowns to head coverings and even a few veils. He called his restructured group the El Rukns and himself Malik, Arabic for prince or “angel.” When he changed the name of his group from the Blackstone Rangers to the El Rukns, no one was fooled: it was still Jeff Fort’s gang and he still ran it like a medieval prince.
The El Rukns that Cowboy McNairy saw were all males, all from Chicago. After learning who Fort was, Cowboy began to look for a way to become an informant and profit from the occasion. He found a cousin of Fort’s among his acquaintances and paid the cousin for Fort’s direct private phone number. When Fort returned to Chicago, Cowboy called him and got right through. Fort answered his own phone, saying in his whispery voice, “This is Angel.” Cowboy told him who he was, bantered a little, and then came to the point: It was too bad Fort had lost touch with his Mississippi roots. The law enforcement was not as tough in Mississippi, and if Fort was interested, they could make some serious money together distributing drugs in Mississippi if Fort would supply them. Fort said he was interested. Cowboy said he’d have one of his people call Fort back with specifics and asked if it was all right to use that same number. Surprisingly, Fort said O.K.
Cowboy immediately talked to a friend in law enforcement who gave him the number of the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics (MBN) in Jackson. The agent who answered the phone told Cowboy he’d check it out and see if they were interested. The agent called a Chicago narcotics officer, who said he’d never heard of Jeff “Ford,” but would check. A few minutes later Chicago gang unit officer Rich Kolovitz called back. The only agent at the MBN office at the time was Bill “Tank” Marshall, a white former Ole Miss football player. When Kolovitz heard that the Chicago guy in question answered to “Angel,” he realized the guy was Jeff “Fort” and not “Ford.” Kolovitz could not believe it. He had been working murders, welfare fraud, extortion, gun trafficking and several drug cases against Fort and the El Rukns for years and had convicted some subordinates but could never get near Fort himself. Now some white Mississippi rookie had Fort’s private line.
To break Marshall in a little, Kolovitz told him how Fort ran his marijuana operation. He would find a source, buy a few pounds at first, then hundreds of pounds. Fort would next have his men rip off the dealer, killing him if necessary. The violence had gotten so bad that F
ort’s sources for marijuana had mostly dried up. Fort was too protected at his headquarters, a fortified brick building also called “the Fort,” for retaliation by his drug suppliers, so most dealers just avoided him. His Fort was located in a desolate neighborhood of vacant lots, burned-out shells of buildings, and blocks of welfare hotels, where Fort made the tenants give his gang their government checks and other income and then doled out to them what he thought they deserved.
Kolovitz’s description of Fort’s operation gave Marshall an idea. What if he proposed to Fort that Marshall would swap him all the marijuana he needed in exchange for cocaine, which allegedly was in short supply in Mississippi? Kolovitz said he’d fly to Mississippi, but Marshall told him to let them handle it with Cowboy to start with, and they would be glad to have Kolovitz’s help later on if the case went anywhere.
Marshall touched base with his boss, Captain Charlie Spillers, who was in charge of the north half of the state for MBN. Spillers, a bold and innovative agent, said he wished he had a black undercover agent handy to make the call, but liked Marshall’s style and told him to go ahead with his plan. Marshall called Fort. To everyone’s surprise, Fort was willing to deal with a white Mississippi “drug dealer.” Speaking a kind of El Rukn code that reminded Marshall of pig latin, Fort agreed to send a couple of his generals to Tupelo, where Marshall told him people would be less wary of outsiders, but which Marshall figured had the large group of narcotics officers they would need to arrest the Chicago gangsters. Detective Bart Aguirre of the Tupelo P.D. worked closely with Spillers, Marshall, and the others. They managed to engage Fort in several taped phone calls planning the deal. Fort sent two trusted generals, Henry Timothy and Sundown Doyle, to a Tupelo motel to do the deal.
The Mississippi agents were astonished that such supposedly big-time gangsters were falling for such an old and seemingly obvious undercover ploy. When Timothy and Doyle arrived and insisted that one of their group hold their marijuana and cash in one motel room while others looked at the cocaine in another motel room, the agents were again surprised. Such rudimentary security might help protect against rip-offs by other drug dealers, but blundering into an undercover narcotic sting like this gave a whole new level of meaning to the word “amateurs.” Teams of Mississippi agents simply burst into both rooms at the same time and busted everybody.
The officers brought me the case and held the defendants in custody while we got a quick indictment before his underlings could get word to Fort that the deal had gone sour. Rich Kolovitz and his partner, Dan Brannigan, loved arresting Jeff Fort in Chicago. They used a battering ram to break the front door of his Fort, and Brannigan came to Oxford with a cast on his hand from breaking it while breaking the door, but said it was well worth it.
Unfortunately, Fort was allowed bond by a magistrate, but in those days just about everyone made bond. Preparation for trial was unlike anything we’d expected. Glen Davidson, an experienced former state district attorney, was our brand-new U.S. Attorney. His style was that the head man should try the big cases himself, which was great with me. When I asked him how he wanted to split the witnesses, he said, “50–50.” When I showed him a witness list with outlines of testimony and asked him which 50 percent he wanted to take, he said, “Just give me your sorriest ones.” I took him at his word. Davidson was great at witness prep, especially with drug dealer witnesses. He’d lean back in his big leather chair, stuff a cigar in his mouth like Senator “Big Jim” Eastland, and say, “Now let me tell you how it’s going to be.” And that was it. In the Fort case, he wanted to take Cowboy: “John, this guy is fascinating, a real piece of work. I’ve never met anyone like him before. How does he survive?”
Rich Kolovitz and Charlie Spillers felt the same way. Kolovitz insisted Fort’s defense would be to have Cowboy killed. While I did the paperwork to get him in the federal Witness Protection Program, Charlie Spillers had a team of agents live 24/7 in a motor home in front of Cowboy’s house in the McNairy family compound. His brothers and cousins were all armed and experienced. Cowboy and his wife and children became so personally close to the agents guarding them that every night she made them big dinners and brought them out to the motor home. Sometimes they ate together inside.
In the meantime I flew to Chicago to interview every witness we could find, including witnesses to all the other drug conspiracy deals he’d been in. The Chicago P.D. gang unit, which included federal ATF agents because of the El Rukns’ heavy trafficking in firearms, was terrific. They introduced me to former El Rukns and former wives of El Rukns, who explained to me the code words they used and the different aliases Fort used. Several were in a local Witness Protection Program run by the city. Two witnesses in particular stood out. One was a nurse who’d made the mistake of marrying an El Rukn general. Her eyewitness descriptions of Fort’s lifestyle, mannerisms, use of code words, and brutally violent character gave me ideas on how to cross-examine him, which Glen Davidson had offered to let me do.
Another witness who really impressed me was a retired Chicago police captain who had worked for years against Fort, who called the detective an Uncle Tom and ridiculed him until one night when Fort and his men shot and wounded the captain so badly he had to retire. While he was in the hospital, Fort sent him flowers. As soon as he was released, the captain walked, using a cane, up to the front door of the Fort compound and nailed Fort’s note and his flowers to the door. No one was going to intimidate him.
The trial was a strange one. Unlike most defendants, Fort and his associates did not stall or delay. His Chicago lawyer hired our best local attorney, Jack Dunbar, and said he was ready to go. That was unusual. There was of course considerable media attention. In the courtroom were a handful of Fort’s most presentable associates in coats and ties who kept giving each other the hand and head signals that the nurse had explained to me. Fort looked exactly like what he was—a menacing, scowling thug who communicated mostly by grunts and hand signals.
The case against his codefendants was clear-cut. They were caught red-handed with the dope in their possession. Our only concern about them was that our jurors, especially the black ones, might be threatened privately without our knowing it, and be afraid to convict the fearsome-looking Chicago gangster. The case against Fort himself was not as strong. All we had were Cowboy, the handful of cryptic tape-recorded phone calls, and Marshall, who knew little about Fort except what he’d been told, plus a series of witnesses from Chicago who would positively identify Fort’s unmistakably whispery voice from the tapes setting up the deal. Our key witness was Cowboy. Unfortunately for us, his time to testify came late one afternoon. Normally you like to get key witnesses on and off the same day, so the defense has no time to prepare their cross-examination overnight.
As Cowboy walked into the courtroom and took the oath, I watched Fort’s reaction. So did case agent Charlie Spillers, who sat at counsel table beside me. Apparently everyone else was watching Cowboy, who was a striking figure. As Cowboy approached the clerk, Fort turned to his chief lieutenant out in the crowd. He first leaned his head way back, then lowered it with his eyes closed, then turned and nodded his head three times at Cowboy. The general Fort was looking at repeated the gesture.
Glen Davidson began questioning Cowboy, but Fort’s Chicago lawyer kept objecting and making belated oral motions to suppress and exclude the tapes. At one point I became sure he was stalling for some reason. By the time 5:00 P.M. arrived, Cowboy had hardly gotten through the first taped phone call. Judge Senter turned to the jury and apologized for the trial going so slowly but that certain legal questions had come up and he was going to let them go home so they could hear the rest of this witness’s testimony in one day. When the jury was gone we went straight to the witness room and told Kolovitz and Brannigan about the signal Fort had given. They responded unanimously “That’s the El Rukn death sign. They’re going to try to kill Cowboy tonight. That is their defense.” We redoubled the protection on Cowboy, using a bulletproof van to transport him
home.
Around midnight a tragedy nearly happened. Cowboy’s daughter, a college student at Jackson State University, decided at the last minute to come home that night without calling ahead. As she drove up Highway 45 in Cowboy’s black Cadillac, just before the turnoff for Egypt, one shot from a high-powered rifle hit her windshield right in front of her face. By some miracle, or perhaps a particularly well-made windshield, the slug bounced off. The windshield shattered. Cowboy’s daughter was terrified but unharmed. When officers later found the slug nearby it was too badly damaged to identify and we didn’t have the rifle to match it with anyway.
Having put several people in the Witness Protection Program before, and having represented its director, Gerry Shur, when he was sued, I knew what to do. I called the DOJ Operations Center, and they placed me straight through to him at home. I told him who the defendant was and what had almost happened to his daughter. I asked Gerry when they could be put in the program. Like most witnesses, they did not want to relocate and move far away from family and friends, but with the El Rukns after them, they agreed they had no other choice. Gerry Shur said, as he had said in an earlier case, “Upon my authority, they are in the Witness Program this minute.” I thanked him. Then he asked, “Are there any special problems with this family?” I told him there were. Not only did Cowboy earn his living illegally, but he and his wife had nine children, one of whom, a fifteen-year-old student, was on kidney dialysis three times a week. “Okay,” Gerry said. “They’re in, but we will have a devil of a time finding a place to put them. Can your agents help the marshals guard them a little longer?” I told him we would do it. We had to do it.
From Midnight to Guntown Page 37