Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

  Oblivious to Susie’s haphazard efforts to maintain a household like the suburban ones she saw on television sitcoms, Kenneth invited Cat and Sherri to “stay on the place, do odd jobs for your keep,” for as long as it took them to find their own place and settle down—a goal that Cat set out to finance the way he knew best.

  Cat liked to embellish his legend by discussing bank-robbing strategy to the shifting population around the Smiths’ kitchen table: when banks opened and closed, whether they were constructed of brick or clapboard, where the alarms were located, how many employees they had, when they got the cash deliveries for “check day,” when welfare checks arrived at the start of the month. A thorough appreciation of such minutiae, Cat maintained with elaborate gravity, was what separated the amateur from the professional. All summer long, Kenneth and Susie Smith listened with fascination. Susie, who thought of herself as a practical woman, was especially taken with Cat’s investment advice: “Trailers. You buy a bunch of them and sit back and collect the rent.”

  As both a car salesman and a part-time cop, Bert Hatfield made it a point to keep informed on who had spending money in the small universe of the upper Tug Valley. He suggested to Mark that Kenneth Smith, chronically broke but with expensive tastes, might be open to the kind of persuasion the FBI’s deep pockets could provide. In August, there was another small bank robbery. Mark and Dan Brennan spent several days visiting dozens of bank branch offices to warn them of the robbery spree and discuss security. Meanwhile, Bert had Kenneth come to Pikeville to see Mark.

  The meeting wasn’t promising. Kenneth had a list of demands. He would cooperate—without specifying as to exactly what that would entail—only in exchange for being removed from probation and given protective custody. He also wanted a weekly salary, with bonuses for specific information, such as the activities of Cat Eyes. Afterward, Mark contacted Kenneth’s parole officer, who said, “Forget it. The guy is totally unreliable.” Besides, for a smalltime drug dealer, Kenneth had a notoriously bad memory. His ex-wife was the one who kept track of the details.

  Bert, who had known twenty-five-year-old Susie Smith all her life, suggested to Mark that they approach her instead. He warned Mark that Susie “ran her mouth” frequently and did not have a good reputation for telling the truth. Still, with the suspected bank robber living in her house, she had the right connections, and she had secretly provided Bert with useful information in the past. Bert thought she would be worth pursuing for information on the bank robberies and the chief suspect.

  By this time, Susie had begun to weary of her houseguests anyway. She liked having people around, but Cat ate like a wolf and ran up the phone bill calling his former prison buddies long-distance. Having his girlfriend in the house created extra tension because Susie was pretty and Cat flirted with her incessantly. Besides, Cat was broke again and needed not only a place to stay with his girlfriend, but gas money for his car. Even though Susie at the time was working a common Tug Valley welfare scam and collecting monthly checks from both West Virginia and Kentucky, money didn’t go far with six people in the house—more, if you counted Tennis Daniels, a troublesome younger brother of Susie’s, and the others who drifted in and out on a regular basis. She also worried about the effect on her two young children, Miranda Lynn, five years old, and Brady, who had just turned two. By the summer, she and Kenneth were fighting openly over what Susie had come to regard as an intolerable domestic arrangement.

  First, Bert decided to introduce Mark to Tennis, whom Bert had also used as an occasional informant, paying him with pittances of fifty or a hundred dollars that the sheriff’s department reluctantly agreed to part with from time to time. On the night before they were to get together, however, Bert called Mark at home.

  “We got big problems. Tennis shot somebody.”

  The next morning, they drove directly to Susan’s house. It had been a family dispute. Tennis had fled after the shooting, but while they were there, he walked in. Mark persuaded him to give himself up, saying, “They’ll be a hell of a lot easier on you. We’ll try our damnedest.” They called the West Virginia state police barracks just a few miles up the river past Matewan. As they waited for the troopers to arrive, Susie Smith, her eyes blazing with resentment, took the occasion to unload on this self-assured young FBI agent who had barged into her house. Who was he to be looking for a new informant for the FBI? A relative of hers had once helped the FBI in a case, she told Mark sharply, and never got the money that was promised. Fair, she said, hands on her hips, was fair.

  As they drove back to Kentucky, Mark reflected on Susie. “Bert, that girl is trouble.”

  “You’re right about that,” his companion replied.

  Mark said, “Keep working on her, will you?”

  Bert nodded, but he was a little annoyed. He’d known Susie since they were both kids. He’d been working her as an informant for years.

  A few days later, Mark managed to get the bureau car and made some calls. He found Cat Eyes himself fishing in a dirty pond near a strip-mine site halfway up a mountain. He said hello, and the two young men chatted for a while. Cat, ever cordial, denied robbing banks, but added that he appreciated the courtesy of an introduction.

  Not long afterward, when another bank was robbed in a mountain town just across the river Bert called Mark and said Susie had reconsidered, “Okay, she wants to meet.”

  They drove to a small restaurant in Williamson, a gritty river town in the rocky coalfields on the West Virginia side. Susie arrived accompanied by Kenneth and Tennis, now out on bail on the manslaughter charge. They sat at a table, Kenneth dominating the conversation while Mark made eye contact with Susie, who at least gave him a smile. After a while he asked her quietly, “Listen, could I talk to you alone for a minute?”

  Kenneth stopped talking long enough to glower when his ex-wife, defiantly tossing back her brown hair, followed the FBI man out to the parking lot. Through the window, he watched them get into Bert’s car and have a conversation.

  Mark tried to size her up. She was street-smart, that was obvious. There was an edge and an attitude to her, something he liked in women. She wasn’t about to be pushed around. He didn’t think she was particularly attractive, although she was generally considered in town to be fairly pretty, with small features, a trim figure that she liked to flaunt, and a smile that was definitely engaging when she turned it on. Like most young women in the Valley, she put on makeup every morning whether she was going somewhere special or not.

  “So what do you want to talk about?” she asked, amused.

  “Listen, I want to know if you’re interested in helping me.”

  “Now, why would I want to do something like that?”

  He explained that money was available. She shook her head disdainfully. He kept at her, thinking, I am going to break this girl.

  She changed the subject.

  “I see you’re married. Tell me what your wife looks like.”

  “What does that have to do with anything? We’re talking about—”

  “Pretty?”

  “Yes, she’s pretty.”

  “She have a good body?”

  “She keeps herself in very good shape, Susie,” he said, glancing at her tanned legs, exposed in high-cut shorts. Momentarily flustered, she placed her palms unconsciously across her thighs. At five feet five and 125 pounds, she was a bit self-conscious about the ten pounds she had put on during the spring.

  “Don’t call me Susie. I hate it. It’s Susan.”

  “Okay, Susan.” He smiled at her. “Will you help?”

  She said she’d think about it, and they went back to the restaurant, where Kenneth and Tennis sat glumly waiting.

  Over the next week, Mark and Susan met twice more, privately, and as an understanding evolved, he explained the payment process: “First, you have to give me something to take back.” Taking out a notebook that she eyed nervous
ly, Mark got her talking about Cat Eyes.

  “Him? Oh, he might be involved in them bank robberies; I surely don’t know.” She crossed her arms. “He is a robber, after all.”

  She doled out information in careful increments, and he let her talk. Mark, like many naturally quiet men, was an exceptionally good listener, and it was apparent to him that this was a woman as accustomed to giving attention as getting it. From time to time, he would ask a pertinent question, and she would add a pertinent piece of information. It was a complicated negotiation of egos. Before long, they had arrived at an accommodation. Yes, she finally said, she definitely thought that Cat Eyes was planning on robbing another bank.

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s living with me and Kenneth. Him and his girlfriend.”

  She knew that Mark was well aware of that, but he played the game. “How come?”

  “He’s broke. Kenneth likes him.”

  “Do you?”

  “I suppose. I just don’t want to adopt him. I already got two kids.”

  “Doesn’t he pay you?”

  “No.”

  “I thought he was so generous.”

  She shrugged. “He is when he has it.”

  “Sounds to me like he’s taking advantage of you. Exploiting you, like he doesn’t give a shit about you.”

  That got her attention. She agreed to meet Mark the next time in Pikeville. And before long, they were meeting two and three times a week, in a pattern that would continue for the rest of her short life.

  Mark knew the basic procedures for working with informants. In sixteen weeks of training at the FBI Academy, new agents received a few lectures on what motivates informants: greed, money, revenge, or occasionally even a sense of duty. The delicate business of actually developing and maintaining relationships with informants, the backbone of the FBI’s investigative process, was passed over with a few rhetorical nostrums, the most important of which was, “Don’t get personally involved with your informants.” Yet even the dullest rookie recognized this as pure bullshit, since the only way to develop a worthwhile informant was through personal trust and loyalty—underscore the word personal.

  Money paved the way. To “open” a new informant once that person received initial approval, an agent was allotted five thousand dollars to be distributed at the agent’s discretion, and more down the road, with virtually no limit on the amount, depending on the usefulness of the information in gaining convictions. From the beginning, Susan understood that she could earn thousands of dollars for cooperating, if she could deliver. But while Mark was prudently nervous about spending the government’s money, he had determined that Susan was willing to talk, that she could provide specific information in a criminal case, and furthermore, she could probably open doors to him in future investigations. So he wrote out a requisition and sent it to his nominal supervisor, Terry Hulse, who ran the Covington branch office near Cincinnati, more than two hundred miles away. When Hulse phoned to talk about it, Mark wondered uneasily if he had done something naïve.

  At first, Hulse did not sound encouraging when he asked on the phone, “Mark are you sure about this money for this informant?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re only going to give this girl five hundred dollars?”

  “Talk to me some more.”

  “Well, I mean, she’s giving you information on this guy—you know this guy’s doing this robbery, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I’m about ninety-five percent sure he’s doing it.”

  “So keep her on board. Give her more money.”

  Mark thought about that for a moment, then said, “This girl’s holding back—we’re playing a kind of cat-and-mouse game right now. I just want to get her in the habit.”

  “Okay, I’ll buy it. I like it. But let me tell you something: The money is there. Use it. Especially in your area. Don’t feel like you’re prostituting yourself by giving these people money. They want it. You’ve got it to give.”

  “Thanks.”

  At their next meeting, when he gave Susan the five hundred dollars, she seemed a little rattled, which was the first time he had seen her so.

  “Hey, there’s more, but the information has got to back it up,” Mark said. “My boss is a real prick when it comes to this money.”

  Mark didn’t realize that to Susan, taking the money was a major step. He wouldn’t understand until it was too late that once she took money from the FBI there would be no turning back.

  Susan Smith was born in 1961 in Matewan, West Virginia, an heir to two famous legends of the Tug Valley. Her mother, Tracy, was directly descended from the McCoys of the Hatfield–McCoy feud. And her birthplace, which had the nearest hospital to Freeburn, about eight miles away on the Kentucky side of the Tug Fork, was the scene of one of the great dramas of the bitter coal-mine union organizing wars, the 1920 “Matewan Massacre,” in which nine men died in a shoot-out after a force of private detectives working for Tug Valley coal companies evicted miners and their families from company houses. The hero of that insurrection was the police chief, Sid Hatfield, who stood with the miners. Sheriff Hatfield, of course, was descended from the Hatfield side of the feud.

  The Matewan Massacre was historical fact. The Hatfield–McCoy feud is one of those curious specimens of American folklore that, like much of the popular mythology of the Wild West, owes a certain amount of its historical longevity to the invention of the high-speed rotary printing press and the coinciding imperatives of market capitalist expansionism. Which is to say that while the Hatfields and McCoys did indeed shoot and kill each other over a period of many years from their respective turf on either side of the Tug Fork, the commotion would have gone largely unnoticed if it hadn’t been exploited by outsiders looking for profit.

  The two legends are nevertheless closely related. “In American history and folklore the Hatfields and the McCoys symbolize the backwardness and family violence most Americans associate with Appalachian mountain culture,” the historian Altina L. Wailer wrote. The Hatfield–McCoy saga, the most famous of many long-running mountain feuds, is actually “a story involving competition over rich timber resources and the desire of Eastern corporations and the state government to foster economic development in the region. The feud was more a foreshadowing of the era of the bloody coal-mine wars than it was the final gasp of traditional mountain culture.”

  The Hatfields lived, by and large, on the West Virginia side of the Tug Fork and the McCoys kept to the Kentucky side, although the boundary has never been regarded seriously by the people who live there, isolated together by mountains at their backs. (The boundary was in fact drawn somewhat arbitrarily during an all-night drinking session in 1799 by members of a joint commission.)

  There were long-standing animosities between the Hatfields and McCoys, as is inevitable in places where generation after generation of rival families literally face each other, keeping track of grudges over decades. Like many neighbors, the clans sometimes fought over property. In a time just before outside industrialists would begin plundering the Appalachians for hardwood, both families made money from cutting and selling timber on their lands, and deeds were not always firmly fixed in mountain areas. But the trouble really came to a head with the theft of a pig.

  In 1878, a Hatfield boy was accused of stealing a hog from the patriarch of the less-prosperous McCoy clan, a cantankerous man known as Old Ranel McCoy. The dispute went to trial in Kentucky, but the Hatfield boy was acquitted thanks to a not-guilty vote by one of six McCoys on the jury, introducing an element of betrayal into the rancor. A few years later, acrimony escalated when Old Ranel’s daughter, Roseanna, ran off with Johnse Hatfield, a son of Devil Anse Hatfield, the ferocious but generally law-abiding patriarch of the Hatfield clan. Over Johnse’s protests, Devil Anse adamantly refused to allow his son to marry her; the girl was sent back home across the Tug, l
iterally barefoot and pregnant.

  Roseanna’s brothers set out to avenge the family honor by kidnapping the Hatfield boy, whom they intended to transport to Pikeville and charge with the only criminal violation they could prove, moonshining. But the lovesick Roseanna thwarted them by stealing off at night on horseback to warn Johnse. Meanwhile, on election day, when whiskey flowed freely and voters stumbled across the river to cast ballots on both sides, tempers flared. During a brawl between the young men of both families, Devil Anse’s brother, Ellison, was beaten and stabbed by Hatfield boys, one of whom finished him off with a shotgun. A Pike County judge, on the scene to purchase votes, ordered the arrest of the perpetrator and several other McCoy boys. But on the long horseback ride to Pikeville with the boys in custody, a posse of Hatfields, led by Devil Anse himself, overtook the party, kidnapped three of the McCoys, and shot them on the riverbank, near what is now Matewan.

  There were sporadic instances of violent retaliation between the two families, but the feud didn’t reach its full intensity until five years later. That was when Perry Cline, a Pikeville lawyer who had once fought a legal battle with Devil Anse over five thousand acres of disputed land, decided to reopen his claim, since the property’s value was rising sharply as the timber industry expanded and the railroads blasted through the hills into the Tug Valley. Cline prevailed on Kentucky authorities to press the five-year-old murder indictments against the Hatfields, who soon had lucrative bounties on their heads offered by lumber and railroad interests. Devil Anse and his men fled into the hills, pursued by hordes of private detectives and other bounty hunters. Their exploits were celebrated in newly established mass-circulation newspapers like Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, where the legend of “white savages” clinging to a primitive region “as remote as Central Africa” caught the fancy of millions of urban readers. By the time the feud died out at the turn of the century, a dozen or so Hatfields and McCoys had been killed, and one of the most enduring caricatures in American culture—the bellicose hillbilly—had been created. Significantly, according to Waller, “many Appalachians themselves had been convinced of the inadequacy of their own culture, and industrialization proceeded with little opposition.” Within decades, the largest hardwood forest on the continent—seven million mountainous acres of virgin tulip poplars towering 150 feet over walnuts and white oak, hickories and maple, buckeyes, basswoods, ash, cedar, and pine—had been reduced to less than a thousand acres.