The author as a high school basketball player. His coach, just-retired Marine Corps drill instructor, instilled a love of competition and teamwork much needed for future prosecutors.
The Oxford Anti-terrorism Task Force. Left to right: FBI agent John Lavoie, Chief of Police Steve Bramlett, Sheriff Buddy East, the author, Detective Andy Waller, and FBI resident supervisor Rich Calcagno.
The author with his daughters, Dr. Allison Doyle, left, and Lydia King, right, in front of a painting of them as little girls aged three and eight.
The author, with his wine-tasting cup, receiving an award for his nationally-syndicated column on wine, food, and travel.
“Snakeman,” a Satanist priest prosecuted by the author for kidnapping a fifteen-year-old victim in our district and forcing her into prostitution. Bank robber Paddy Mitchell tried to call the Snakeman as a defense witness in Mitchell’s trial for attempted escape from the Lafayette County jail. He failed.
Convicted bank robber and self-proclaimed Native American shaman Thunder Eagle Ghost Dancer, whose request to appear in court in “a ritual cloud of smoke” was denied, with his appointed attorneys Johnny Gough and Kent Smith.
Tony and Man Craft caught in the act of robbing the federally-insured Bank of Lula, Mississippi.
Tony Craft pulling the trigger (unsuccessfully) on a bank teller.
The attractive blonde stripper known as the “Honey Bun Bandit” robbing the Grand Casino in Tunica, presenting a box of Honey Buns to a cashier with the box disguised as a bomb.
DeSoto County Sheriff Harvey Hamilton before a jury convicted him of racketeering, the first RICO conviction ever in the state of Mississippi. (Courtesy of Memphis Commercial Appeal)
The author as portrayed after a brief courtroom scuffle in the trial of Sheriff Harvey Hamilton. Pen and ink drawing by FBI undercover agent Les Davis while posing as a mafia enforcer.
Drawing by FBI undercover agent Les Davis of Sheriff Harvey Hamilton depicting one of his colorful quotes caught on tape by Davis: “You can nail my nuts to a sycamore tree and I’ll never squeal, but any SOB who does won’t be out there eating cake and ice cream. He’ll be dead.”
A series of brilliant editorial cartoons by Mark Bolton satirizing county supervisors during “Operation Pretense,” a statewide FBI undercover investigation into corruption. (Courtesy of The Clarion-Ledger, Mark Bolton, cartoonist)
Editorial cartoon likening the self-inflicted fall of Dickie Scruggs to that of Saddam Hussein. (Courtesy of The Clarion-Ledger, Marshall Ramsey, cartoonist)
In the saddest development in the case, Zach Scruggs, son of Dickie Scruggs and a former student of the author, leaves the Oxford federal courthouse after pleading guilty to conspiracy. (The Oxford Eagle, Bruce Newman)
Dickie Scruggs in the custody of U.S. Marshals Neil Cruse and Scotty Peters after pleading guilty to bribery the second time. (The Oxford Eagle, Bruce Newman)
Former State Auditor and Democratic Party chairman Steve “Big Daddy” Patterson, aka “Kingfish,” leaves the U.S. Courthouse after being indicted for bribery in the Dickie Scruggs case. (Courtesy of The Clarion-Ledger, Ryan Moore, photographer)
Judge Henry Lackey testifying in the Scruggs case.
Truck driver Richard Hall, Jr., CEO of the ill-fated Mississippi Beef Plant.
A series of brilliant editorial cartoons by Marshall Ramsey of the Clarion-Ledger satirizing state officials during the Mississippi Beef Plant investigation.
Jay Scott Ballinger, the so-called “black-church arsonist,” and his girl friend and accomplice from California. They burned scores of rural churches across the South. As it turned out, Ballinger, a native of Indiana, did not target black churches at all, but all rural churches based allegedly on abuse he suffered during a harsh fundamentalist childhood. He is serving life without parole. (Courtesy of The Daily Corinthian)
The Ku Klux Klan in north Mississippi is greatly weakened, but not yet totally dead, as reflected in this November 2009 photo accompanying the story by Daily Journal writer Melanie Addington of a Klan meeting in a double-wide trailer near Tupelo in Robert E. Lee County. The author took a special interest in the Klan because two of his ancestors were members.
Emmett Louis Till Jr., a fourteen-year-old visitor from Chicago, was kidnapped from his grandparents’ home in Money, Mississippi, in 1955. He allegedly whistled at or touched a white woman and was murdered for doing it, igniting the civil rights revolution. Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood appointed the author a special assistant district attorney to assist D. A. Joyce Chiles of Greenville and the FBI in reopening the nation’s coldest case, which finally resolved many open questions surrounding Till’s murder trial of his killers. (Courtesy of the Tallahatchie County Visitors’ Bureau)
Prosecutor Charlie Spillers in his former life as an undercover narc for the Baton Rouge P.D. and the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics, posing very believably as a hired hitman. Charlie is now writing a colorful memoir entitled “Confessions of an Undercover Agent.”
Ronald Glen Shaw, known as the “Natchez Trace Sniper,” was convicted of using a high-powered rifle in the Christmas-night murder in 1980 of a nine-year-old boy who was riding home on the historic Natchez Trace Parkway after visiting his grandparents. Shaw will be eligible for release in the year 2024. (Courtesy The Commercial Appeal, Sabrina Long)
The infamous Jeff Fort, an Aberdeen, Mississippi, native who became the dreaded “Angel of Fear,” leader of the El Rukn and Blackstone Nation street gangs in Chicago. (U.S. Marshal’s booking photo)
Sara and Megan El-Sarji, kidnapped and held captive in Lebanon for ten years until their mother rescued them in a story eerily reminiscent of the movie Not Without My Daughter, starring Sally Field.
Dr. Abdel Ashqar, Ole Miss graduate student and international secretary of the Palestinian terrorist organization HAMAS, convicted in Chicago and sentenced to eleven years’ confinement for criminal contempt of court.
Terrorist turned protected witness Adnan “Captain Joe” Awad on a U.S. Navy ship near Athens, Greece. He sued the Federal Witness Protection Program in Mississippi and lost, but he later gained a reward and U.S. citizenship for his courageous and helpful testimony against Iraqi terrorists. He and the author became friends during the trial.
From Midnight to Guntown Page 53