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381 Acknowledgments A project as ambitious as this book, with its multitude of stories and characters, could only be completed with the generous help of an army of friends. It began several weeks before I retired from the U.S. Attorney’s Office with Anita McGehee, secretary to the U.S. Attorney, and Joan Allen, administrative officer, who led this computer-illiterate dinosaur to the basement where I copied unindexed drawers of large-format docket sheets which held the key facts of my hundreds of old cases. Once I was retired and decided which cases were worth retelling, I turned to district court clerk and former U.S. Marshal David Crews, whose excellent staff, led by Sherryln “Judge” Adams and his secretary Connie Armstrong and several intelligent and diligent deputy clerks, helped me over several months lift dozens of old leather-bound docket books and xerox their oversized pages. What a task it was. With those records in hand, I turned to chief probation officer Danny McKittrick to retrieve more detailed records. Danny, himself a notorious teller of colorful war stories, furnished many useful insights into his more interesting clients. I turned next to the U.S. Marshal’s Office where their recently retired stalwart, the aptly named Inspector Eddie Rambo, helped me recall the details of our most memorable cases together. The marshals’ partner in running the Oxford Jail, known locally as the Buddy East Hotel, has been for the last forty years the wise and always reliable Buddy East, the only ten-term elected sheriff I know, who was an invaluable resource for details of old cops-and-robbers stories. In addition to those sources, I added thirty-five bankers boxes of my own files, memos, briefs, affidavits, indictments, and other documents I’d squirreled away, and finally began writing the book. I was ably assisted by the energetic Dawn Jeter, director of operations at the Overby Center 382 Acknowledgments at Ole Miss, where I was a writing Fellow. Dawn and her staff did the hard work of typing my first drafts, hand-written on traditional yellow legal pads, which seemed fitting for such old cases. Joining Dawn were my most dedicated helpers of all, the Ole Miss law students who brainstormed , critiqued, and typed multiple drafts. Spencer Ritchie, Stephen Smith, Caleb Ballew, Doug Maines, and Taylor McNeel racked up hours of creative work as researchers, sounding-boards, and fact-checkers. To complete the book, I had the brilliant and wonderfully enthusiastic Caroline Eley, Joanna Frederick, Drew Tominello, and Laci Bonner. These wonderful students made a pleasure of the grueling work of finishing this volume. The personal relationships with these law students, whose only reward for their work was one hour per semester of law school directed study credit, were easily the best part of writing the books. Their attitudes have strongly reinforced my opinion that this new American generation will be one of our finest ever. My gratitude to them is total, as is my gratitude to University Press editor-in-chief Craig Gill, director Leila Salisbury, cover designer Todd Lape, marketing manager and idea man Steve Yates, keen-eyed production editor Shane Gong Stewart, and all my other comrades at the Press, one of America’s finest publishers. ...

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