Without Mercy: The Stunning True Story of Race, Crime, and Corruption in the Deep South

by David Beasley

  On the night of December 18, 1939, with Georgia’s sterilization program in full effect, a fire broke out in a wooden dormitory at Gracewood, the Georgia Training School for Mentally Defective Children. Flames leaped toward the dark sky and five “inmates” died, ranging in age from twelve to twenty-two. Their names were Durward Creech, Floyd Lyttle, Hoyt Cook, William Youmans, and Curtis Sargent. The remains of one of the victims, Curtis Sargent, were never found, not even when rescue workers sifted through the ashes. The blaze was so hot, it “entirely consumed” the young man, authorities said.35

  The dormitory, an old converted barn, had been described by a Georgia legislative committee earlier that year as a “firetrap.” Less than three hundred yards away sat three empty concrete dormitory buildings constructed in 1937 with the help of funds from the New Deal. All the new dormitory buildings needed was a well for water and they could have been used, replacing the wooden “firetrap” where the five Gracewood patients died that December night.

  In a statement from Atlanta, Rivers said, “I have been telling the people of this state all along that we have been running a race with just such a catastrophe as this.”38 But Rivers had allowed the new buildings at Gracewood to sit empty for two years, lacking nothing but a simple well for water. Rivers could not manage in two years to build a well for Gracewood, but on the day of the fire, the governor declared martial law and used National Guardsmen to prevent the highway board chairman, Lint Miller, from entering his office at the state capitol so that Miller couldn’t interfere with the lucrative state asphalt contracts awarded to Hiram Wesley Evans, the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

  12

  The Price of Freedom

  During the four years Rivers served as governor, fifty-five men died in Georgia’s electric chair. Forty-eight who died were black; only seven were white. The mass execution on December 9, 1938, was an extreme example. Six black men died in eighty-one minutes, while Tom Dickerson, the white man who had killed his daughter’s baby boy, a child he had fathered, was spared by Rivers. But a similar pattern occurred throughout the Rivers administration. The disparity between those who lived and those who died, who went free and who stayed in prison, seemed to steadily increase under Ed Rivers. For black defendants who killed whites, it was often death in the electric chair in less than two months. For white killers, it could be one reprieve after the other.

  The disparity was caused by many factors, including the fact that many of the black defendants did not receive even a single appeal. Also, Rivers often seemed to go out of his way to find a way to commute death sentences for white defendants.

  Odie Fluker was a white upholstery worker convicted of killing Eddie Guyol, the Atlanta gangster who was an operator in the ubiquitous illegal lottery game, known as “the bug.” Fluker gunned Guyol down in the driveway of his fashionable Atlanta home, firing over the head of Guyol’s wife.

  After losing his appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court, Fluker was scheduled to die in the electric chair at Tattnall Prison on March 4, 1938. Rivers granted Fluker a thirty-day stay of execution, and when that expired he issued a second stay. A new date was set for July 8, and Fluker challenged that unsuccessfully in Fulton County Superior Court. The stays and the court hearings would continue for another year, and five different execution dates would be set for Fluker, before Rivers on August 10, 1939, commuted Fluker’s death sentence to life, agreeing with the prison commission that there was insufficient evidence for a death sentence.1 It was clear by then that the Atlanta underworld, bug operators in particular, had privileged treatment under Rivers. The governor pardoned gangsters left and right, and grassroots criticism began to bubble up from prosecutors, judges, and grand juries.

  Claude Porter, a judge in Rome, Georgia, called Rivers “Public Enemy Number One in Georgia” for his massive pardoning of criminals. Rivers was “doing more to break down the law contrary to his oath to uphold it than any hundred enemies of the law,” the judge said.2

  In August 1939, the same month Fluker’s sentence was commuted from death to life, the foreman of a Fulton County grand jury noted that “more than 50 percent of those whom we are asked to indict are out of prison or gang camps because of clemency of some kind.”3

  It would get worse, and it was frustrating for law-abiding prosecutors like Roy Leathers who were trying to rid their communities of organized crime. When Leathers took office as a prosecutor of the Stone Mountain Circuit, he found his circuit “infested with road houses, liquor stores, dance halls, [and] beer joints” operated by racketeers, he wrote. There were “open gambling houses” where liquor was sold on Sunday and to minors, and there was “immorality and debauchery.” Leathers spent his own money to prosecute the gangsters, only to have them released by Rivers.

  He wrote Rivers on April 15, 1940, about a man named Tom Bradley, whom Leathers described as a notorious lottery racketeer. Leathers successfully prosecuted Bradley, who was sentenced to serve six months in jail and twelve months on the chain gang. But “before he began the service of this sentence and while his motion for a new trial was pending, and without any knowledge on my part, he somehow obtained a pardon and parole,” Leathers wrote Rivers. The prosecutor would have objected to the pardon, but he never knew it was coming. “I notice by this week’s papers that this same defendant has been arrested in Fulton County charged with operating another lottery,” Leathers wrote.4

  Bradley had been busted in Clayton County along with Myrtle Guyol, the widow of Eddie Guyol, the lottery kingpin Fluker killed. The widow, who testified at Fluker’s trial that she did not know anything about her husband’s lottery business, set up shop on her own after her husband died and was raking in $10,000 a day, police said.

  Leathers later wrote the governor on November 5, 1940, as the number of pardons began to increase exponentially. “The best way to enforce the law, governor, is to enforce the law.”5

  Rivers, however, had already developed a habit of pardoning gangsters while their cases were still pending. A bootlegger named Otis Cravey pleaded guilty in November 1937 to illegally selling liquor and was sentenced to twelve months on the chain gang and a fine of $250. He was allowed to serve his time on probation but was then found with liquor and stolen goods at his business. At Cravey’s probation revocation hearing, his lawyer asked for a recess in order to track down a witness. When the hearing resumed, Cravey produced a pardon from Rivers that stated in part, “He is the sole support of his aged mother and father.”6

  There were increasing suspicions that Rivers was selling pardons.

  The governor’s black chauffeur, Albert Chandler, was accused of taking a book of a thousand signed pardons into prison work camps. He “asked to see prisoners whom he did not know and who did not know him.” One inmate, a man named Henry Wilburn who was serving a life sentence for murder, told Chandler that “the warden had $50 of his and he would be glad to pay that much. This was acceptable to Chandler.”

  Wilburn was freed “at a cost of $50.”7

  In December 1940, Spence Grayson, an attorney for Walter Cutcliffe, the partner of slain bug operator Eddie Guyol, wrote Rivers’s executive secretary, Marvin Griffin. Grayson wanted to know about the full pardon that was promised to Cutcliffe. “Please see the Governor and ask him to handle this for me as per our agreement nearly two years ago,” the attorney wrote Griffin. “If something is not done, it will be very embarrassing for me.”8

  Rivers granted Cutcliffe a full pardon on January 1, 1941.

  Rivers pardoned lottery operators by the dozen, even though most were serving sentences of less than a year. Still, the bug trade was so lucrative that every day spent in jail was thousands of dollars lost, and the longer a lottery operator was behind bars, the more likely a competitor was to steal his turf.

  As Rivers’s time as governor drew to a close in late 1940, he pardoned a batch of inmates so that they could be home in time for Christmas. Rivers believed that these men would “emulate the tenets of the Great Savior of Me
n, rededicating their lives to Him who extended forgiveness to all men penitent of their sins.” There was one condition on the pardons, however. The inmates had to immediately report to their local health departments to get treatment for their venereal disease. Apparently, Rivers had not made good on the state’s promise to treat prisoners for venereal disease inside the prisons before they were released.

  Rivers pardoned Annie L. Moore, who had been convicted on two lottery charges. In later sworn court testimony, Moore said her attorney, Pat Avery, told her he could obtain a pardon from Rivers for between $500 and $600. She could afford only $400 but the pardon came through on December 12, Moore testified.

  At the same time, the governor began granting pardons to more serious criminals: convicted murderers. In December 1940, Rivers pardoned a killer named Lummy Screws, who had served less than two years of a life sentence. Screws was one of several killers to serve only a few years before the governor released them without so much as a criminal record.

  One person Rivers steadfastly refused to pardon, however, was Robert Burns, author of the book I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!, which had so ridiculed Georgia for its archaic chain gang system but at the same time helped to prompt change.9

  Burns had escaped for the second time and was now living in New Jersey, where governors refused to extradite him back to Georgia, but he was still technically a fugitive, and could have been forced back to Georgia had he left New Jersey for a less hospitable state. However, other states were also refusing to extradite prisoners back to Georgia, so deeply ingrained was the image of the chain gang system Burns had so vividly described in his book.

  In July 1937, the governor of Massachusetts, Charles F. Hurley, refused to extradite a black man named James Cunningham who had escaped from the Georgia chain gang thirteen years earlier. In a letter to Rivers, Hurley noted that Cunningham had received a sentence of thirty-five to seventy years. The crime: receiving stolen property.

  Rivers took what he believed was revenge against Hurley. He pardoned a black bug operator in Georgia named Fleming “Sing” Willis on the condition that he spend the last nine months of his sentence in Massachusetts.10 Willis had no money, not even for cigarettes, and he hitchhiked to Boston, where the local NAACP branch promised him food and shelter and help finding a job.

  Rivers joked that there were signs at the chain gang camps saying, “Spend Your Parole at Cape Cod.” As other black inmates began to request a “Massachusetts parole,” Rivers said Hurley “may have solved our prison problem for us.” Rivers said there would be an annual holiday in honor of the governor of Massachusetts. “Hurley Day will be observed annually in serving all State prisoners codfish cakes and Boston baked beans,” Rivers said.

  If Rivers thought he would get a reaction out of Hurley, he was mistaken. The Massachusetts governor was at the bedside of his seriously ill eight-year-old daughter. Again, Rivers had proved that he was not a skilled demagogue. His antics always seemed to go wrong, and he had to apologize for his attacks. “Having a daughter and granddaughter of my own … I can sympathize with you,” Rivers wired Hurley. “May the spirit of the all-wise Creator comfort you in your trouble.”11

  Still, while Rivers would not even consider a pardon for Burns, he did personally preside over a clemency hearing for Henry Cawthon, the muscular red-haired member of the East Point Ku Klux Klan chapter, who had been convicted of flogging a white textile union organizer, P. S. Toney. It was a direct and violent attack on unions, and for Rivers to hold a clemency hearing for Cawthon was just another sign of the true distance between the governor and the very pro-union New Deal.12

  Many citizens were outraged that Rivers would even consider pardoning Cawthon, an auto mechanic who dropped out of school at age twelve and went on to become leader of the East Point Klan’s “wrecking crew.” After all, Cawthon had received a light sentence of only eighteen months behind bars. “For the sake of a Christian Georgia, let the law take its course,” Bernard Borah, Southeast director of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America union, wrote Rivers.13 Atlanta Constitution columnist Ralph McGill called the flogger’s clemency petition “an appeal for mercy from those who never showed it.”

  Rivers seemed not to express any similar moral outrage when he met with Cawthon face-to-face in the governor’s office. He merely deferred a pardon because Cawthon still faced trial on a charge of kidnapping Toney from the textile mill in nearby Scottdale before taking him to the East Point city dump for a beating. With the kidnapping charge still pending, Rivers sidestepped the now contentious issue, saying that he did not have “the whole picture before him.”

  With Rivers’s term ending, pardon requests for two high-profile murderers were still pending. They were the “thrill killers” George Harsh and Richard Gallogly. Rivers waited until the very end of his term to make a decision, but by then prosecutors, judges, grand juries, and the press were in an uproar over the increasing number of criminals Rivers had been pardoning.

  In late 1940, the Georgia Prison Commission, which also had the power to release prisoners, granted Harsh a pardon, effective Thanksgiving Day. He was required to stay in Fulton County for at least twelve months. The parole commission noted that Harsh and his family had paid more than $50,000 in damages to the relatives of the two men he killed.

  For Rivers, releasing Harsh was one matter. He was the out-of-towner, the Yankee boy. He didn’t count. Gallogly was a different matter altogether. The Atlanta Journal, formerly owned by Gallogly’s family, had been dutifully reporting on the pardon scandals and all the other controversies of the Rivers administration, pulling no punches, despite the fact that Rivers held the keys to Gallogly’s freedom.

  And the prospects for Gallogly would not be any better after Rivers left office. Eugene Talmadge would succeed Rivers as governor. Talmadge had already made it clear that he was no fan of Gallogly or the Atlanta Journal.

  After being pampered for most of his incarceration and escaping to Texas, Gallogly was now in Tattnall Prison, where he awaited his fate as Rivers prepared to leave office.

  The governor announced that he would consider a pardon for Gallogly but only under the condition that the Atlanta Journal would first publish affidavits from Gallogly’s family members stating that no money had been paid for the pardons. They must swear that Rivers was not a crook.14

  The Journal, now owned by former Ohio governor and 1920 Democratic presidential nominee James Cox, begrudgingly complied, listing only $1,800 in legal expenses paid in behalf of Gallogly. The newspaper also published a scathing front-page editorial by Cox, headlined “Do Your Duty, Governor,” in which he compared Rivers to Hitler.15

  If Rivers was so corrupt, so ruthless, why would the Journal respond to his demand for affidavit? Cox said it was prompted by “chivalry toward a heart-broken mother who asks that her son be given his constitutional rights to a hearing.” He also characterized the Gallogly case as a “disaster that may have come to many homes in this day of overindulged children of wealthy parents.”

  Rivers held a hearing for Gallogly on January 13, 1941, the day before he would leave office as governor. Gallogly’s family members, including his mother and his wife, crowded the governor’s office. Gallogly blamed the escape to Texas on a high fever of 102.5 degrees. “You do things at a time like that you wouldn’t otherwise,” said Gallogly.16

  Rivers made it clear that he would issue the pardon, but first he lectured Gallogly. “You are having the mantle of sweet charity thrown over you,” the governor said. “You have an obligation to throw that mantle over others.”17

  Before granting the pardon to Gallogly, Rivers issued a scathing response to the editorial by James M. Cox. He attacked Cox, who lived in Dayton, Ohio, as “an absentee owner,” and added, “Georgia has suffered too much absentee ownership of its farm lands, its industries and other enterprises.”

  After Gallogly’s hearing on the afternoon of January 13, the Rivers pardon machine went into overdrive. The lights in his
office were glowing through the night. On his last day in office, Rivers issued seventy-two pardons, twenty-two of them to murderers, six to lottery operators.18

  He pardoned Gallogly, and he also granted a full pardon to George Harsh, replacing the conditional pardon that had required him to stay in Fulton County for a year.

  Rivers pardoned the Reverend J. M. Williams, the Methodist minister who had lured his son home from the Navy for a visit, then shot him to death, all to collect on his son’s $2,500 life insurance policy. When word reached Augusta that the former preacher was about to be pardoned by Rivers, Roy Harris of Augusta, Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, began to hear from his outraged constituents, and Harris tried unsuccessfully to intervene. “I couldn’t block it to save my neck,” Harris would later recall.19

  Rivers pardoned Jimmy Rosenfeld, a New York racketeer who in a jealous rage in 1935 killed Lester Stone, mistakenly believing Stone was the husband of a woman Rosenfeld had befriended.20

  The governor pardoned Verna May Fowler, a white waitress from Waycross who shot a twelve-year-old boy to death in 1938 for $936 in life insurance.

  Rivers pardoned Henry Wilburn, the murderer who had paid the governor’s chauffeur $50 for his freedom.

  The Augusta Chronicle described the governor’s late-night pardon factory as “an orgy.” Rivers, the newspaper said, had released “an army of criminals into the society of honest men.”21

  In four years as governor, Rivers pardoned nearly two thousand criminals. Shortly after Rivers left office in early 1941, a Fulton County grand jury warned that with so many criminals back on the streets, citizens had “no alternative” but to protect themselves, the government having failed to do so, justice having all but vanished. “We call attention to the fact that it is not unlawful to have weapons of defense in the home or place of business,” the grand jury wrote. “See that they are in good working order ready for an emergency.”22